ASK ESA - Issue #1 Artist's Software

Greetings my administratively-challenged minion! Keeping track of where and to whom you sell your work might not seem important now -- but you need to think 40 years ahead to that fabulous day when someone from the Whitney is curating your Retrospective and needs to know who the hell actually owns the work from your "Chartreuse Period" or what you succeeded in selling on eBay upon Kostabi's advice. I advise all my artists that keeping good records can only benefit their career, protect them from iffy galleries, and help keep track of deadbeat buyers who owe them cash money.

To manage your lists, you can use standard office software like Access, Filemaker, Excel or ACT; hell, you could even use a sheet of toilet paper and pencil. However, there's now a software package designed specifically for visual artists to keep track of clients, contacts and artwork. It's called Working Artist Software (www.workingartist.com) and is available for a one-time fee of $99. I would recommend this software to any artist who's already managing large volumes of artworks and contacts, or to anyone just starting out who anticipates producing stacks of artwork, intends to be fabulously well-connected and unimaginably famous, or is smart enough to know that the gallery won't take care of everything.

The primary benefit of Working Artist Software is that it consolidates all of your art activities into one program. For example, you can enter in the details of a new piece of artwork, a scanned image of the work, a buyer's information, and then generate an invoice, a letter, a slide label and even check with a price grid to determine an un-inflated price. The program is a little pokey, a little overwhelming, and definitely not for the faint of heart. It includes features you may never need or want -- like a way to keep track of the slides you send out, supply lists, and a way to track what contests you've entered. I see they've thought of just about everything an artist could possibly need to do on a computer: there's even a "Notebook" function set up for you to write your tell-all memoirs! The program also interfaces nicely with Microsoft Word and Excel so you can edit your letters and lists on more familiar territory.

Even if you are easily frustrated by computer programs, this one is still pretty straight forward and can be used for as many or as few activities as you choose. If you are fortunate enough to have industrious studio assistants, this program will keep at least one of them very busy for many years to come.

If all you want to do is create mailing labels to send out invitations or promotional cards to pals and all the scandalously-rich people you've been introduced to, I would say Working Artist Software is still a good investment. Once you've explored all of its features, it might even teach you new ways of managing your art career. If you already have computerized records of contacts or artwork, you should be able to input your info from other programs with a little help from the manual or tech support. The company is small and friendly and provides a manual and a 1-800 number for technical support. Kathryn Townsend, the author of the software, answers questions quickly via email and has a forum on her very navigable website www.workingartist.com. You can go there and order a trial version of the software. Unfortunately, this program is only available to PC users, and there are currently no plans for a Mac version (for you Mac users out there, I'll take a close look at ArtStacks (www.artstacks.com) when their new version for artists is released). So get out that pile of business cards and those scraps of paper you've been collecting all these years...and cuddle up with your keyboard.

Esa Nickle