The Artist APPEALS
The Artist APPEALS, Erin Sparler distills years of insightful conversations from The Artist APPEALS podcast into a highly researched, practical guide for navigating the business of creativity. Based on interviews with a diverse array of artists, photographers, and designers, the book tackles the fundamental question: “How do you make money as an artist?”
The book is uniquely visual, featuring artwork directly from the featured creatives alongside summary pages that highlight their most impactful stories and quotes. To make the professional journey manageable, Sparler organizes these expert insights into a clear, 7-step process using the APPEALS acronym:
- Art: Create coherent collection of Art.
- Product: Turning your Art into a variety of Products.
- Presentation: Crafting the Packaging & Presentation of your Art, Design or Products.
- Educate Your Audience: Building a connection through storytelling and teaching.
- Automate with Systems: Using technology to handle the repetitive business tasks.
- Licensing: Expanding your reach and revenue through legal partnerships.
- Success Measurements: Defining and tracking what progress looks like for you.
This book serves as both an inspirational gallery and a functional roadmap for any creative looking to turn their passion into a sustainable career.
The Artist APPEALS Workbook
Accelerate Your Growth: Ready to put these strategies into action? I don’t believe in gatekeeping the tools for success, so this companion workbook is available for free download. It provides the worksheets and checklists for the 7-step APPEALS process—ranging from Brand Messaging to Success Measurement—designed to help you organize your business and focus on your creative output.
Dumping on Nature
In In Dumping on Nature, I use fine art photography to document the illegal dumping sites that I frequently encounter in the strangest, most remote areas of Pennsylvania. These images serve as a testament to the state’s wild areas and the jarring reality of human defilement. This body of work is a systematized exploration of environmental disturbances; I apply a visual awareness to objects that are typically ignored, overlooked, or “swept under the rug.”
Technique: I utilize high-resolution digital tools to ensure analytic clarity and precision in every frame, making the textures of the debris as vivid as the surrounding flora.
Color & Value: I color-correct and tune the values to create an aesthetic quality that stands in direct contrast to the ugliness of the dumped pollution.
Narrative: Each image tells a story of how we continue to defile our environment through ignorance or deliberate disregard. It also explores the feeling of helplessness shared by hikers and nature lovers who often feel they have no recourse for discouraging these acts or cleaning up these sites.
Neo-Futurism
In Neo-Futurism, Erin Sparler’s evocative multiple exposure photography meets the lyrical precision of poet Christine O’Leary Rockey to create a profound meditation on time, motion, and the human experience. This collaboration transforms static images into a “universal dynamicism,” where variations in perspective combine to evoke a sense of light, air, and space.
A Fusion of Vision and Verse
The book serves as a progression in fine art photography, drawing inspiration from the original Futurist movement to convey how we truly perceive the world—not as a single, frozen moment, but as a layering of memory and invention. Sparler’s work utilizes:
- Multiple Exposures: Layering time and motion to create depth.
- Enhanced Colors: Amplifying the emotional resonance of each scene.
- Multiplication of Form: Reflecting the complexity of modern vision.
Key Themes & Concepts
Integrating the “Neo-Futurist” philosophy, the book explores the “cross-pollination of art and technology” to reveal previously impossible forms. It moves beyond the skepticism of post-modernism toward an idealistic, aesthetic rethinking of our surroundings.
- Time & Perspective: As noted by Huges, “Art is invention, but also remembering”. The book refuses to “abolish the past,” instead using it as a foundation for futuristic exploration.
- Dynamicism: The work captures the “speed and heroism” of the original movement while grounding it in modern eco-sustainability and ethical values.
- Technological Innovation: The “machine” (the camera and digital editing) becomes an integral part of the creative process, allowing for the emergence of new artistic modes.
The Artist’s Perspective: This body of work is more than just a collection of images; it is a systematized exploration of how we claim our place on the “great timeline of history” through visual and poetic storytelling.