$0.00: Total money I’ve brought home directly from my art, prints, videos, NFTs, and blog in my lifetime.

I have a limited time to get this blog post out before it’s too late.

What is the thing I most have in common with Vincent Van Gogh? There are a few things, but topping the list is never making any money off of my art. True, he sold one painting in his lifetime, which I wrote about here – The Red Vineyard, and why Van Gogh only sold one painting in his lifetime – but I’m not dead yet so he hasn’t lost his crown.

Like Vincent, I’ve received help in the form of donations, mostly through my Patreon account. And while people have purchased some prints, I managed to sell some NFTs, my videos have earned me ad dollars, and my blog once made ad dollars, I haven’t been able to extract any of that money from the businesses that hold it and put it in my bank account. That’s why I say $0.00 is the total money I’ve brought home. In effect, I’ve made nothing at all. Zilch. Nada. A clean slate.

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Let me just go over my record here.

Prints. I’ve had some prints available for years. I haven’t put nearly enough effort into self-promo, which is kind of anathema to me, but the company I use for my prints owes me $267.00. I just can’t get it out yet. There’s a snafu with my email address because when I set up PayPal I used the one I created while teaching English in China, and a few efforts to fix the problem haven’t yet worked.

My blog. WordPress used to put ads on my blog posts, and I’d earned over $70 when my blog was “blacklisted” for ad revenue, though the ads would still appear. No reason was given, and when I read the Terms of Service, I discovered that they don’t need to give a reason, and they can also completely take down my blog without giving a reason. I ended up paying a fee that’s over $100 a year, so the ads I can’t make money off of won’t appear on my blog posts.

My physical art. This one’s a bit juicy. Virtually all of my physical art was I knew for sure of its whereabouts, stored in a friend’s home. There was quite a lot of it because I’ve been making art since I could first hold a crayon. After my friend passed away, I received an ultimatum that I needed to remove the art from the house within 2 weeks or it would be disposed of. Living in Southeast Asia, between jobs and starting over at the time, there was nothing I could possibly do to save my art. By some miracle, a complete stranger who’d discovered my art on my blog and had days before written to me about purchasing some of my early work agreed to pick it up, which he did. However, to this day, I have no idea what the man’s real name is, his address, or where my art is. Even though he was initially interested in buying my art, I never received a penny for all of it, and he once mentioned in a subsequent email that “possession is nine tenths of the law”. See examples of my early art here. There’s more to this story, but suffice it to say I was never able to determine if the man who rescued my art was a scammer or legit, and I have no idea if my physical art still exists or not. We are currently not in contact.

YouTube. It was tough to get the 1,000 followers necessary to monetize, but I finally made it. Then I couldn’t make money because there was a hitch to do with the country assigned to my address. I must have set up my YouTube while living in Cambodia because it had Cambodia attached to my permanent address in America, and the only way that would happen is if it automatically entered the country based on my internet address and I hadn’t noticed. This made me ineligible to make money. I have to create a completely new AdSense account and forfeit any earnings I’d made until then. There have been a few more snafus, and Google, AdSense, and YouTube are a pretty convoluted bunch of interlocking businesses and requirements, and I just keep getting one hurdle after another. Even though I’ve earned over $400 in ad revenue, I haven’t been able to access any of it as of yet.

You remember that two hour plus documentary I made about the Salvator Mundi painting being a sham. It has over 85,000 views, has been watched for a cumulative 32,800 hours, has 493 comments, and is 92.7% upvoted. I made zero cents so far.

That goes for my digital restoration of the most expensive painting ever sold. I have also not received one cent for it, though I am selling prints which I advertised in my video.

NFTs. I got into NFTs with a lot of trepidation because, in retrospect, I quite accurately foresaw the landscape and my likely trajectory within in it when I wrote my article: The Brutality of the NFT Art Platform, in November of 2021. Below is an except which turns out to have been spot on.

I’ve been making digital art for the better part of 2 decades, and more seriously in the last 8-9 years. People who know me, or my art, have asked if I’ve gotten into NFTs; some have urged me to do so; and some have asked if I got rich yet. No, I haven’t, and no, I haven’t. I looked into it before, and when I saw what the top selling art was, it was obvious that what sold was almost completely relative, subjective, and arbitrary, in which case I had no better chances of selling than anyone else who made digital art, even if they were rank beginners, and in fact less so because I am not well-connected, not popular on social media, not rich, and don’t like spending much time on social media platforms.

I managed to sell some NFTs at very low prices as I tried to inch my way up the social media hierarchy ladder. I kept my prices rock bottom to gain collectors, but I set my royalties at 25% so that if they have more reach and influence and could sell them, I’d eventually make something. It never panned out, and in the end I was selling 1/1 original pieces for 1 tezo, which was about $1, in a last-ditch effort to gain any traction. It didn’t work, and I haven’t minted anything in well over 6 months. The money I made in crypto was almost entirely lost in the crash after the Sam Bankman Fried corruption catastrophe used a pneumatic nail gun to seal the coffin lid of crypto and NFTs along with it. He hadn’t done this single-handedly. Both crypto and NFTs were plagued with scams, schemes, and rampant corruption. The NFT market has never recovered. So, I made next to nothing and lost almost all of it. What’s left is on par with what I originally invested, and I also have not created an account with a company that can convert crypto to dollars that I can spend.

Below, among others, I created this series of portraits specifically for the NFT space, which were fairly ambitious and distinct while also using some custom techniques, but I could never get out of the starting gate and was ultimately shut down.

Some of these works are among my best.

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This is not a lament, folks, and I ain’t whining. I think it’s a curious coincidence, or synchronicity, or what have you. The reason time is running out is that I think I’m about to change this trajectory, and the time when I’ve made nothing off of my art in my life will be over. I’m currently working with AdSense support and think I’m going to overcome the hurdles to getting paid for my videos within days or weeks. I am also confident my printing service will sort things out for me with another interaction or two. By November, I will no longer be in the same camp as Van Gogh in regards to never making squat. Once I start getting paid for my art or videos, I am likely to be more motivated to make more, though doing it for free has never stopped me.

By the way, currently my print provider is running a 15% off sale. I get about half the price of the prints since the business needs to make a cut, and that’s above and beyond the cost of production.

Finally, I greatly appreciate the kind and generous support I’ve received from my patrons and via PayPal donations over the last several years. That has made an enormous difference in my life, even when the contribution is a $1 patron. I am very pleasantly surprised whenever someone wants to invest in my content. Getting paid for making art that is only what I want to do, or writing articles or making videos that say only what I want to say, is the most rewarding occupation for me.

But at this particular juncture, when I am in my 50’s, and despite having an MFA, I can boast of competing with the legendary Vincent for at least making nothing. I’d much rather make a living. I predict the train wreck of my art career in slow motion isn’t going to end on the trajectory it’s on. I’m changing the course.

Your digital nomad artist in S.E. Asia,

Eric Wayne

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And if you like my art or criticism, please consider chipping in so I can keep working until I drop. Through Patreon, you can give $1 (or more) per month to help keep me going (y’know, so I don’t have to put art on the back-burner while I slog away at a full-time job). See how it works here.

Or go directly to my account.

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Or you can make a one time donation to help me keep on making art and blogging (and restore my faith in humanity simultaneously).