When you are speaking with a non-artist, it is easy to forget that they have no education or experience in art, because it took you a lifetime to get to where you are. If you are an artist, whether you get a formal education or not, eventually you will learn some artistic buzz words. And you learn it naturally. These special words, most of the time, are known only to artists. The fact that they make a dictionary of art terms should tell you that art buzz words are only known to the art world.

This concept seems pretty obvious, but sometimes the lesson is hard learned. Which is the way I learned. I was speaking to several customers, same topic, different situations, and they all had the same reaction to certain artist buzz words; “Huh?!” Buzz words like “plein air”, “acrylics”, “impressionistic”, and “there are more than one type of pencil” (this was a biggie, when I was 22, I had to take the ½ hour to explain to a customer the difference of each grade of pencil, like 2B, HB, 4H and 6B, with out having any reference. This is because I had to open my trap and say, “This drawing was created with six different grades of graphite pencil”. STUPID! Believe me when I say they do not know what ‘graphite’ is!)

When writing about plein air (outdoors), I make sure I write the meaning, due to a few incidences with customers. It is easy to forget to explain this before getting questions in a normal conversation. And believe it or not, most people don’t know the difference between an impressionistic painting, a realism painting and a surreal painting. And it is not their job to. They are the customer, remember that. When you go into an auto part store, do you know every type of belt there are? Of course not, not unless you had worked as a mechanic or as a clerk at an auto part shop (or had some terrible luck with a beater or four like me and my hubby) would you know the difference between a timing belt, an a/c belt, power steering belt and a fan belt. A pencil is a pencil, and if it’s anything but oil paint, you’d better be able to explain why your medium is grandeur. Because the point is, believe it or not, you are selling your customers a dream. Their dreams are filled with the commercial educated meme of art. This usually consists of old people with a palette, a large studio and oil paint painting still life, animals and people. (They are not even educated in the fact that paint wasn’t originally squeezed out of a metal tube, but rather, a pig’s bladder, but let’s not get into that, ick!)

All in all if this is the only sentence you read, this is the message I want you to get: “Art terms are not common terms, explain what you do in simple terms.”