Dilemma between producing work you think will sell and painting work you brings out your creative qualities.

I like your still life works, Shaun. My only advice would be… don’t paint for others and what you think might sell, always be true to yourself. However, not long ago I sold a painting that I didn’t like at all, but it sold and the buyer loved it! So you can’t second guess anything. 

Welcome first of all as a new member of the forum; I have seen and admire your work. I don't paint to sell, because I've never worked out what IS likely to sell - and have been surprised, frequently, by what does and what doesn't.  I painted a couple of acrylics which, if I say so as shouldn't, I thought pretty good - and sellable.  I've still got  both of them, some ten years later.  I still think they're pretty good (all the usual caveats here, but I am capable of recognizing when I HAVE pulled something off; most of the time I just jog along - and sometimes, I produce a veritable stinker).   Now and then - more "then" than "now" - I'd get an offer for a piece which I put on my blog, or maybe on Facebook, which really surprised me - suppressing the response "what on earth do you want THAT for?", I have indelicately snaffled the money and run.  I have very little idea why those items sold, when others, of which I thought more highly, just hang on my walls unloved (well: I'M fond of them, if no one else is). Such an offer came for a painting incorporating a lonely donkey - an oil on Daler board, it was a fairly large landscape, some decent bits of brushwork in it (again, though I sez so as shouldn't) and rather than just grasp the outstretched hand to faciliate the bundle of notes, I asked the buyers what had drawn them to it.  It was a poem the wife had known since childhood, titled "Nicholas Nye" (may be Wordsworth, I forget).  She saw my lonely donkey, most of whose body was obscured behind hedgerow, and the poem clicked with the image.  Of how many people would that have been true?  To whom else would it have appealed?  Probably no one - I hadn't painted it with any intention of selling it, or any thought that it would sell - as I remember, it was basically an experiment to see how many natural greens I could make based on Pthalo green, which is as natural as a talking donkey on its own....   Maybe you've hit a magic formula, in short, but I never have; I don't have a clue what might sell, and I suspect that if I tried to paint a truly commercial picture, confident that it would excite the rustle of notes, the clink of coin, I'd never shift it.   The one thing I think might help is the inclusion of dopey dogs or captivating cats - but putting them into a landscape in order to invite sales is a quick route to kitsch.  Some pull it off - eg Steve Cronin's watercolours, invariably featuring a "little man and his dog".  I suspect though that the harder one tries to be commercially successful, the less likely one is to succeed.   Which is why so many of us teach, or advertise our wonderful painting courses which, in reality, are our (not my) main source of income.