THE INSPIRATION PLACE PODCAST
Miriam Schulman: Hey artists! Building a cohesive art collection has nothing to do with painting or creating the same thing over and over again. And today I’m going to show you what it actually takes to build a cohesive art collection. Because here’s something I see all the time. An artist’s Instagram looks like five different people sharing one account landscapes, portraits, abstracts, florals. Now maybe they knit something and when someone asks them, what do you create? They stumble. They give a Ted talk. It still doesn’t quite make sense. Or they say, oh, a little bit of everything, which to a collector means nothing. Collectors buy into a world, and if they don’t understand your world, if they can’t find your world, they move on. Now, here’s what happens when artists try to fix this. They think cohesive means the same same color, same subject, same size, same motif forever? No. So they either lock themselves into one image. I don’t actually see that so often, but I know some artists think that’s what it means, or they decide cohesion is too restrictive, and so they abandon the idea altogether. Either way, the work is going to suffer because cohesion doesn’t mean the same. A strong collection doesn’t need to repeat the same image. It needs to share the same DNA. And that’s what we’re talking about today. Hey there. I’m Miriam Schulman, I’m your curator of inspiration, host of The Inspiration Place, and I’ve been a working artist for over 25 years, and I’ve been coaching other artists to do the same. Now, this misunderstanding of what cohesive actually means is one of the most common frustrations I see holding artists back. Not lack of talent, not lack of consistency. A misunderstanding. And once you get this distinction, everything is going to change. Your work will get stronger, your collections will get more sophisticated, and your artist statement will be easier to write.
Miriam Schulman: And collectors will start recognizing you fast. Now, if you want the uncomfortable truth about building an art business every single week. Hit subscribe. I’m here every week telling it to you straight. Cohesion is not repetition. Let’s start with the biggest misconception. Cohesion is not repetition. And I think the word collection is part of the problem because an artist’s here collection, they think uniform matching a set, like a matching sofa and a love seat or a set of China where every plate looks identical.
Miriam Schulman: But that’s not what a collection is. A collection of art is not matching objects. It’s a body of work that comes from the same inner world. And those are very different things. When you confuse cohesion with repetition, one of two things will happen. Either you’re going to photocopy yourself, making the same type of pieces over and over again, but with minor variations, until the work feels mechanical and you feel creatively dead, or you overcorrect and paint just whatever you feel like with no through line. And collectors don’t understand your art, so both are symptoms of the same misunderstanding. Here’s what cohesion actually requires. Not a uniform, a nervous system. A collector needs invisible connective tissue running through everything, holding it together, even when the surface imagery changes. And that nervous system is your artistic DNA. And once you identify that, you’re going to stop forcing cohesion from the outside and you’ll start recognizing it from the inside. Now, I want you to drop in the comments when you think about your own art. Does it feel more like a world or more like separate experiments? I want to hear where you are right now. The subject is not always the real subject. Here’s where I want to introduce to you one of the artists I work with closely, Gregory Malphurs. Now, Greg is a painter whose work is psychologically charged, visually sophisticated, and I’ll just say it, slightly unsettling, but in the best possible way. He paints to disrupt certainty.
Miriam Schulman: And for a while he was known for his mask series. The masks were confrontational, psychological. They held tension between what we show the world and what we’re actually carrying underneath, and they were extraordinary. But then Greg started developing a new body of work, work that didn’t literally include masks anymore. And he came to me with a question a lot of artists ask at exactly this moment, because what happened was I was looking at his LinkedIn profile, which is something I do for my Inner circle clients. And I said, Greg, why aren’t you showing your masks? And he says, Miriam, I don’t want to be known as the mask guy. I don’t want to be locked into that. So what I needed to understand is the masks were never really about masks. They were about identity. However, the reason I wanted his mask series on his LinkedIn page was because it was the clearest signal that he had to explain to collectors about what his art was about. His masks were about identity, performance protection, concealment, the tension between what we reveal and what we hide. That obsession, that question, was completely alive in his new work. Yes, the subject changed, but the obsession didn’t. And that’s the thing that most artists miss, including Greg. The strongest collections are not connected by objects. They’re connected by questions. So Greg wasn’t starting over. He was doing a new series and going deeper with a different idea. That’s the very thing.
Greg Malphurs: A bigger win was the brand work that we did this week. I’ve been painting for 30 years and I just paint whatever I want. That’s kind of what I do with no real like continuity to it. I want to sell work, but I just wanted to follow my path and not be limited is kind of how I looked at it. And what consequently was happening was that my work was just scattered and there was no like through line for people to latch on to. So doing this work with you and then kind of working through that on my own and coming back to you and you saying, yep, that’s exactly what I meant. Huge win.
Miriam Schulman: Now I want you to drop into the comments. What question does your work keep asking? Do you know even if you’ve never put it into words before, take a shot at it. I’d love to see what comes up for you. Hey artists, speaking of breaking through what’s been invisible to you, I want to tell you about something happening this July. The artists I work with closely, the ones you’ve been hearing about in this episode. They don’t just do the creative work. They do the inner work too. And this July, I’m bringing in the mindset coach that Artist Incubator members rave about. Sean Roney for a live group coaching experience called the Invisible Ceiling Session. Every artist has an invisible ceiling, a belief, a fear, a story they’ve mistaken for a reality. And Sean is going to help you find yours and break through it live. If you’re already inside the Artist Incubator, you’re getting this free. No worries. We’ll remind you. We’ve got you. But if you’re not in there yet, this is your chance to taste exactly what our members can’t stop talking about. So go to Schulman Art dot com slash invisible or find the link in the show notes. And now back to the show. Look for the obsession underneath the image. So instead of asking what object keeps showing up in my work, I want you to ask a completely different question. What obsession keeps showing up? What tension keeps appearing? What emotional atmosphere do you keep creating even when you think you’re doing something completely different? Because here’s what I’ve observed working with artists over the years. Artists think they’re exploring different things when actually they’re circling the same emotional territory over and over again. And I see this constantly. An artist who paints oceans and doorways and empty rooms, then distant landscapes, and they look at it all and say, these aren’t related. But underneath, maybe the work is already about longing or solitude or thresholds, or the specific feeling of being almost somewhere, but not quite there yet.
Miriam Schulman: Take Andrea McLaughlin. Andrea paints doorways, chapels, weathered beach shacks, hillside villages, and on the surface, you might say she paints architecture or she paints travel destinations. But that’s not what Andrea paints. After doing our signal excavation work together, here’s what we uncovered for her artist statement. Even when there are no people in her art, she’s interested in the evidence of human presence. Someone built this past through, lived here and cared for this place. So the doorways and windows aren’t the subject. It’s the feeling of human presence, memory, passage. The evidence that someone was there. That’s the subject. The symbols evolve from painting to painting, but the emotional core never moves. And this is also what I see in the work of Diane Beam. Now, Diane is a painter I work with very closely because she’s inside my inner circle. When you see her work. The cohesion is immediate and unmistakable. Her Fauvist color, her pointillist mark making her main coastlines. It reads like a complete world from the very first painting. But what makes it a collection isn’t that she paints lighthouses or boats or the rocky shoreline. It’s what’s underneath all of it. Yes, Maine is the vehicle. And yes, Fauvist is her style, but the obsession underneath is what drives every single artwork. That’s what you’re looking for in your own work, not the recurring object, the recurring truth. Now I want to hear from you.
Miriam Schulman: What is the obsession in your art? What do you think it is? You don’t have to have the perfect answer, but take a shot of it right below in the comments. The five kinds of artistic DNA. Okay, let me give you a framework. You know, I love me a good framework. There are five ways a collection can share a DNA, and I want to walk you through each one with a real artist example for every single category, because this is where it gets concrete. Number one, shared question. This is when the collection keeps asking the same underlying question, even when the imagery changes completely. So the question could be what do we hide? What protects us? What does freedom look like? How do beauty and grief coexist? The question becomes the connective tissue. This is true of Gregory’s work. Gregory’s mask series asks, what are we concealing? What lives underneath the face? We show the world. And when the mask disappeared from his work. The question didn’t. It was still there. Still driving everything, still unmistakably. Greg. If you can finish the sentence, my work keeps asking. You found the shared question. Number two shared emotional atmosphere. This is when the pieces feel like they came from the same inner weather. Calm. Tension. Mystery, defiance. Nostalgia. Collectors may not consciously articulate this, but they can feel it the moment they encounter the work.
Miriam Schulman: Like with Diane’s art, when you see Diane’s paintings, you feel something specific and consistent across every single artwork. Her Fauvist color, her pointillism mark making her Maine coastlines. It’s an immediate world. The emotional atmosphere is so Distinct. Consistent that a collector could pick a Dayan Beam out of a group show without ever having seen that particular painting before, even if the other artists were all painting the Maine coastline, even if they were all working in Fauvist style. Diane’s is very distinctive. That’s the power of a shared emotional atmosphere. Number three shared visual language. Now, this is where artists tend to overfocus and also where they sometimes don’t focus enough. Yes, visual language matters. So what is visual language? Palette. Edges. Composition. Scale. Mark making negative space. But the key word is related, not identical. The work should feel like cousins, like they’re in the same family. Sisters, but not identical twins. This is Andrea, the fiber artist I worked with very closely inside the incubator. She did my accelerator consulting package and we did the signal excavation work together. Now Andrea creates large scale felted wall sculptures of birch trees. She also does water, and the cohesion in her work is visceral. You don’t just see it, you feel it. The texture, the scale, the material. Wool holding the same weathered beauty as living bark. It’s a completely consistent visual world, but no two pieces are identical. They’re cousins. Number four shared symbolic world. This is where recurring imagery lives. Masks. Birds. Windows. Water. Flowers.
Miriam Schulman: Thresholds. But there’s an important distinction. The symbol can evolve. The symbol can even disappear entirely as long as the meaning underneath remains intact. And that’s why I want to share with you. Isaiah Johnson Asia paints black women as princesses, magicians, nymphs, spellcasters, her recurring symbols, the fish, the royal figures, the fantasy archetypes are specific and recognizable, but those symbols aren’t the point. The point is reclamation, the right of black women and girls to occupy spaces of wonder, power and imagination that the world kept telling them weren’t theirs. That’s what every single artwork she does is about. The fish could disappear tomorrow. The fantasy archetype could evolve into something entirely new, and the collection would still feel completely coherent because the meaning underneath has never changed. In the middle of recording this, I realized I’m kind of talking about two different things. One is creating a cohesive collection, and the other thing is creating a signature style. And a lot of what we’ve been talking about so far in this episode is creating a signature style. So that’s why I just wanted to break in here, because I realized the language I was using was not really correct. So Monet has a very recognizable signature style, and he does have series that he works in. So we have a collection of haystacks. He has a collection of churches. He can go and paint Italy, Venice, which he has, and you can take Monet’s painting of Venice and put it next to water lilies. And you’re like, yep, that’s Monet just like that.
Miriam Schulman: Now the collection would be, here’s my collection of water lilies. But his signature style, his world remains the same. So the subject can change over time. The subjects are the collection or the questions are the collections, but his signature style stays the same. So that’s something that, like I realized when I was talking about Asia, she has a collection that would be a certain fantasy archetype. Like maybe she’s talking about the Zodiac. That could be a collection. Like she’s doing the Zodiac this time, but her signature style is going to stay the same. From collection to collection to collection, it’s still going to have the same DNA. And going back to Greg Malphurs, he has a collection that is his mask series, but his signature style, whether it’s mask series or his other figurative work, shares the same DNA. So it’s not that he’s stuck doing masks forever. Okay, so when he has a collection, this is my mask series. Okay. But what our collectors and our consultants need to see is his DNA stays the same over his bodies of work, and it could evolve, but it doesn’t evolve so abruptly that you’re switching to a different world. Same thing with all the artists we’ve talked about. So right now, when I talked about Diane Beam, everything is very, very cohesive. And it could all be part of the same collection, but she could move to France and paint a completely different collection there. But her signature style is going to stay the same.
Miriam Schulman: Her DNA will stay the same. Makes sense. Same thing with Andrea. She has her birch trees. That’s one collection. She has her water series. That is another collection, and her signature style stays the same in both. The through line is the same number five shared point of view. So this is the most advanced one. And honestly, it’s the most powerful. This is when an artist sees the world in a recognizable way. And that worldview carries through everything regardless of the subject, medium, or style. Now, this is true of Kim. So Kim is a wildlife photographer who’s been featured by the World Wildlife Fund and the Natural Habitat Adventures. And when you look at her photographs, wolves, lynx, grizzly bears, eagles. What strikes you isn’t just the beauty of her photography, it’s the ethics of how they were made. Kim doesn’t chase animals for the shot. She doesn’t crowd. She doesn’t corner. She doesn’t bait. She doesn’t force a dramatic moment. She waits. She listens. She finds a place where she’s not in the way. And she lets the moment come to her so she can create a collection around winter in Alaska. But her signature style, whether it’s winter, spring, summer or fall, whether it’s a bear, an eagle, or a lynx that stays the same. The work we did together in the signal excavation session. It’s that she uncovered that if my presence changes their behavior, I’ve gone too far. That point of view, that reverence for life, that patience over spectacle, the belief of how an image is made becomes part of what it carries in its present in every single one of her photographs.
Miriam Schulman: You can hand Kim a completely different subject tomorrow, and it would be unmistakably hers. Yeah. So we’re definitely talking about signature style rather than building a collection. Your collection always has to have the same signature style, and a signature style stays the same from collection to collection, but your signature style can evolve over time. Kim’s worldview doesn’t change. Her collections all share the same point of view. When you have a signature point of view, you can evolve radically as an artist. You can change subject matter medium style, and the collectors will still find you because your signature style, your signature voice, your perspective remains intact. Now, if this idea of building a world, not just a collection is resonating with you, give this video a thumbs up and tell me if this is the kind of conversation you want more of. And also tell me in the comments which of these five DNA types feels most like yours. So I’m going to repeat them. One shared question. Two emotional atmosphere, three visual language, four symbolic world or five point of view. And don’t worry, there’s no wrong answer. Okay, before we moved on, I promised I would talk about Picasso because Picasso has a very distinctive mark making way of creating his art that stayed relatively the same from collection to collection, even as his style evolved over time.
Miriam Schulman: And his style did continue to evolve over time. But a collection would be like, here’s my blue period, here’s my rose period, here’s my Cubist art, here’s my paintings of my mistress. Here’s my sculptures. Okay, so those are the different collections when he goes to show his art. This is where I was talking about at the very beginning when I go to an Instagram page, if I was coaching Picasso and I went to his Instagram page and I saw one painting from his Rose period, a sculpture the next day, um, blue period, the third, now a painting of his mistress, now a Cubist art. That’s when people wouldn’t understand what the heck he’s doing. So building a collection is becoming obsessed with one idea and really going deep with it. That’s what artists do. Now your collection needs to be cohesive, and your bodies of work can evolve over time, but there should be a through line going through. That doesn’t mean you’re boxed in, but it shares the same DNA. How do you know if two bodies of art belong together? So let’s get practical, because I know some of you are listening right now and thinking I have two three bodies of work that are related, but that you can’t quite articulate why, or you have work that you hope is related, but you’re not sure. Or maybe you have art that you know isn’t related and you’re kind of bummed out right now because of what I’m telling you.
Miriam Schulman: Here’s a test I want you to give it. I want you to pull 6 to 10 pieces from each body of work and put them together. You can do this in your studio physically. If you’re a digital artist, do it digitally. Do it however you need to do it and ask yourself these five questions. One. Do they feel like they came from the same mind? Not the same hand, the same mind? Because your style can shift, the medium can shift. But the sensibility underneath, the way an artist sees and responds to the world, that’s the signature voice that should feel consistent. Number two, is there a repeated emotional charge? When you look at the work together, does a feeling accumulate or does it feel like channel surfing or scrolling? If it feels like channel surfing, the emotional atmosphere hasn’t been identified yet, so that doesn’t mean that you only paint oceans. You can paint the ocean and you can have another landscape of the desert, and it should feel like it was done by the same artist. Number three are there visual echoes? Not copies. Echoes a color relationship that keeps appearing. A compositional instinct that shows up across different subjects. A way of handling edges or light or space that’s distinctly yours.
Miriam Schulman: Number four is the artist asking a similar question? Let’s get back to Greg. Underneath the imagery, there is a question that keeps driving his work. Is there a question that’s driving yours? Number five could a collector understand the bridge in one sentence? Not a d’var Torah, not a Ted talk. One sentence. This is the one that matters the most for your business. Because artists love to overcomplicate this. They write dissertations about their work. When what a collector needs is one clean through line, one sentence. For example, this body of work explores the way we hide, reveal, and protect the self. That single sentence could connect masks, figures, shadows, doorways, veils, and empty interiors without forcing the work to become repetitive. Or how about this? I photograph the ancient, intelligent feminine power that nature never stopped showing us. Now that sentence could be talking about wolves, grizzly mothers, eagles, wildflowers, and mountain light all of it without a single image being redundant. If you can write that sentence about your art, you found your DNA, you found your signal. If you can’t write it yet, that’s your work. That’s when you need to excavate your stories and find the signals throughout it.
Miriam Schulman: Okay, try right now in the comments. Write your one sentence through line. Even if it’s rough, even if it’s not perfect. The act of writing is how you might find it. Artists. Everything we talk about finding your DNA, your signature style, naming your obsession, understanding what your art is really about. That’s creative work. But a lot of artists what is actually in the way? Isn’t that clarity? It’s the invisible ceiling, the belief that says, well, you’re not really that kind of artist. The fear that says, who are you to claim this? The identity that says stay small, stay safe, stay in the cave, stay where you’ve always been. And that’s what Sean Rooney works on. She’s my Artist Incubator resident mindset coach. And this July, we’re doing a live group coaching session called The Invisible Ceiling Session. You’ll uncover the hidden beliefs, fears, and identity barriers that keep you from your next level as an artist. If you’re already in the artist incubator, it’s included. You’re already in the room. But if you’re not yet, this is exactly the kind of work that happens inside, and this is your chance to experience it firsthand. So go to Schulman Art dot com slash invisible or find the link in the show notes.
Miriam Schulman: You’re not making a collection. You’re building a world. Now, here’s the resistance I hear the most when I talk about signature style, artistic DNA building collections. Any of this stuff. Miriam, I don’t want to be put in a box. I see you guys in the comments saying that all the time that oh, that’s so boring. I get it, because when artists hear cohesion, they hear constraint. They think I’m telling them to pick one thing and stay there forever. And that’s not what I’m saying. And nobody illustrates this better than Greg. When Greg and I were working together, I looked at his LinkedIn page and told him the mask series belonged there, front and center, as the anchor of his brand, and he pushed back on me really hard, he said, but I don’t do that anymore. And I said, Greg, that’s exactly the point. The mask series isn’t a cage, it’s a door. It’s the entry point into your world and everything you make, including the work that came after. It lives in that world now. It took a moment. He was defensive, but he did eventually come around and something clicked. And here’s how he described it in his own words.
Greg Malphurs: It started innocently as LinkedIn worked. But you were asking me for things that I guess I just didn’t understand what you were asking for. And you were telling me that you’re not on the same page as what I’m asking for. I’m asking for this. And I still wasn’t getting it. So I sat down and I read it sentence by sentence. I had to think about this overnight, and then I kind of solved itself in my subconscious. And I kind of knew the path forward in the morning. I’ve been painting for 30 years and I just paint whatever I want. It’s kind of embarrassing. But after 30 years, I just didn’t understand that artists create worlds. I just looked at it as painting and being creative and, you know, being good at painting. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about selling work, but I just wanted to follow my path and not be limited. And what consequently was happening was that my work was just scattered. So doing this work with you, huge win. It has affected how all my social media is organized, how my websites are organized. I’ve been able to kind of weed out the work that doesn’t fit, not show things that don’t meet the criteria of what we establish. It’s just a really, really huge, huge thing for me. I don’t know if you realize that God just changed everything. I come into the studio with just a real clear picture of what I’m doing next, because if it doesn’t match what we set up and it doesn’t fit within it, which is, by the way, it’s not a narrow funnel by any means. It’s not limiting me at all. It’s just, does this exist in the world that I’m creating.
Miriam Schulman: 30 years and that realization that artists create worlds had never landed before. And that’s not a criticism of Greg. It’s a criticism of how we teach artists. We teach them technique, style, the craft of making. But nobody tells artists that what they’re actually building across every piece, every series, every body of work is a world. And worlds aren’t boxes. Worlds are expansive. Worlds have room to grow, evolve, and surprise. But everything in the world has to belong there. That’s the difference between constraint and cohesion. Constraint says you can only make this one thing like you’re a lighthouse painter. Cohesion says everything you make lives in the same world. Greg isn’t trapped by his mask series. Kim isn’t in bear jail. Neither is Cheryl Shanahan. She’s not in bear jail either. Greg is the creator of a world where that series was one chapter, and collectors who enter through that door will follow him wherever he goes next. Because they’re not buying a mask, they’re buying into his world. All right. I want to ask you, has this episode shifted how you see your own work or how you see creating collections in a signature style? I want to know what has landed for you. All right, so here’s what I want you to take away from this episode. Cohesion is not repetition. It’s not a uniform. It’s not handcuffs. It’s not a jail. It’s not a box. It’s a world. And every artist, every single one is already building one. The question is whether you can see it clearly enough to let it work for you. Because when your work shares a question, collectors feel the depth of it, even when they can’t articulate why. When your work shares an emotional atmosphere like Diane’s, collectors recognize you instantly. Even in a gallery they’ve never walked into before.
Miriam Schulman: When your work shares a visual language like Andrea’s, collectors don’t just see the work, they feel it in their bodies. When your work shares a symbolic world like Asia’s collectors don’t just buy an artwork. They buy a reclamation. They buy a belief system. They buy a promise. And when your work carries a shared point of view, like Kim’s, collectors will follow you anywhere because they’re not following the subject matter. They’re following you. That’s what artistic DNA does. It turns a collection of paintings into a world. It turns a transaction into a relationship. It turns a browser into a collector. And here’s the thing that maybe nobody has told you. You don’t have to manufacture your DNA. You don’t have to invent your signature style or force it or engineer it from scratch. It’s already there in the questions you keep asking and the emotional atmosphere you keep creating and the obsessions you keep circling. Your job is not to create your signature style. Your job is to uncover it, name it, and trust it enough to let it lead. Now, if you want help doing that work, the real work of excavating what your art is actually about underneath the imagery.
Miriam Schulman: That’s exactly what I do with my clients. The artists you heard about today. Greg, Diane, Andrea, Aja, Kim, they all did the signal excavation process with me, and it changed everything. Not just their artist statements, their businesses, their confidence, the way collectors talk about their art, the way they talk about their own work. And that’s available to you too. So the links to everything is in the show notes. Now, if this episode got you thinking about your art differently, next week we’re going to start talking about what happens when someone walks up to that artwork and says, I love this, and you don’t know what to say next because most artists don’t. They freeze or overexplain or say thank you and watch the conversation die. Wah wah wah. So next week I’m going to show you how to sell your art without feeling salesy, pushy, or cringey by asking one question that gets the collector talking themselves into the sale. And that’ll be next week. So I’ll see you same time, same place next week. Until then, stay inspired. Bye for now.
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