The Living Artist

Good grief I’ve got too many projects. I’ve even gotten to the point where I have to have a projects page on our internal wiki to keep up with them all!

I’ve gotten (I think, crossing fingers) stable enough health- and emotion-wise to start trying to build my life up again, and the best way for me to keep from being miserable is to keep busy. The hard thing is that my health is variable and unpredictable enough that I’m very wary of committing to much of anything that has to be done in an absolute timeframe.

As I set up my business again, it has to be something that will pretty much run without me once I’ve got it running (or more accurately, will run with periodic, unscheduled bursts of activity when I can manage it).

Two other projects are in the ideation stage, with no deadlines other than when we run out of money and time to continue working on them.

The disability paper, again, no deadline. When I get it done is when I submit it for publication.

I have just signed up to teach next month’s Samadhi class on Thelemic ethics – so I have to put that together and teach it on a deadline, but the physical expenditures for that are pretty low. Work on my computer through the month, then sit in my living room in front of a bunch of friends on a particular evening and talk at them. And there are others who can jump in as backup if it turns out to be a really really bad day/week/month.

And, of course, doing art and blogging. Both “do when I can” things. Parenting and keeping the house running, both of which never stop but I have my husband for backup.

The most depression-inducing thing about all this has been feeling useless – like there’s nothing I can do that Makes a Difference because of my unreliable and resource-hogging nervous system. I’m hoping to establish enough variety in my ongoing projects that if I have a brain cell to spare past drooling on the couch there will be something that I feel like working on that does more than just kill time. Finding projects like this that don’t have deadlines has been a challenge, but I think I’ve finally got a pretty full slate. Hopefully not too full, but only time will tell.

Continued from Part One here. 

So there are a number of paths to making a living as an artist.

You can be a salaried, in-house artist for some company or other, doing a lot of precise, on-spec work.

Or you can be a freelancer for hire, doing work on-spec for (usually) publishing companies.

Or you can find a gallery to represent you, if you can find one that’s a good match for your style.

Or you can go the cons and festivals route, selling your own work on the road.

Every single one of these paths* involves intense pressure from the outside to conform your work to what the customer is looking for. Whether it be because you’re doing precisely commissioned illustrations for a book, or tweaking your style to make it match a particular gallery’s profile just a little better, or trying to figure out what product you can churn out that will sell like hotcakes at the summer art fairs, that pressure will always be there.

And whether or not you decide to give in to the pressure, what it really does is one very important thing: it allows you to figure out what your real goal is.

Is it to create those images that come most naturally to you?

Is it to change the world, raising awareness of some important issue?

Or is it to make money, pure and simple?

THERE IS NO ONE RIGHT ANSWER. It depends solely on you. It is possible to accomplish combinations of these, certainly, but figuring out your priorities early on will save you a lot of heartache and self-doubt later. (Just make sure you re-evaluate every so often. People and their goals change over time, and that’s not a bad thing either.)

*I suppose there’s also the magical Hollywood dream of being discovered by the one rich investor or amazing agent who will then whisk you away to stardom. Yeah. I really don’t think that ever happens. Certainly it’s not a hope to base your career on.

“Selling Out” is a major theme in the artist world. The idea is that you can either make commercial tripe for the masses that will sell, OR you can answer a higher calling and make Real Art; and if you choose the former, you’re “selling out” and betraying not only your ideals but all Real Artists Everywhere.

This theme contains a bunch of hidden assumptions that are worth examining.

First, there is the idea that stuff that sells equals commercial tripe, plus the very strong implication that IF something sells, it must therefore BE commercial tripe; the conflation of correlation with causation.

So let us for the moment assume that yes, most of the huge selling items out there are crap; poorly made, poorly thought out, however you want to define “crap” (how we should define “bad art” is a topic for another post). What could be some of the reasons for this correlation?

• mass production -> poor quality
• the commonality of an object devalues it
• the only things that get selected for mass production are those that will appeal to the lowest common denominator

Okay, that last is getting closer to the core of the issue. Let’s deconstruct it further.

The idea of appealing to the lowest common denominator (LCD) is one that circulates widely in the analysis of popular culture. The LCD tends to mean whatever the person using the term looks down on – the stupid, the poor, the rural, the foreign – pick your prejudice!

While I have been known to sling around condemnations of the LCD (or products appealing to them) in my more cynical moments, as I look deeper into it I find I really dislike this idea. It makes the infinite diversity of humanity into a homogenous, plodding sludge, something to be avoided rather than explored. I may be a bit antisocial at times, but I still think humans are pretty darn nifty, and would rather find a way of framing this problem that doesn’t resort to stereotyping and name-calling.

How about this – each and every person out there has ideas that will appeal to them, touch them deeply and enrich their life. But in order for an object or image to resonate with hundreds, thousands, or millions of unique, distinct individuals (or at least make enough of a connection to get them to buy it), the idea behind it has to be painted with very broad strokes indeed. With those broad strokes comes the loss of detail, of explanation, of ethical basis and historical context, the devolution of your doctoral thesis into a slogan of six words or less.

Framed this way, it is less condescending, but still a real problem! If you have Something to Say with your art, you probably want as many people to get the message as possible; but in order to do that, are you then forced to water down your ideas to the point where your message is lost?

Aha, but we have another assumption here: “you probably want as many people to get the message as possible. The dilemma comes down to this: is it better to be reduced to a whisper in the ear of a thousand people, or to have a solid, connective conversation with one?

In our mass-production-centered society, it is all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking of consumers as this monolithic horde, perhaps subdivided into “markets” and “brackets” and “communities”. But in truth, it’s not about getting your work in front of more people; it’s about getting it in front of the right people, and there have got to be better ways to do that than throw it in front of a thousand people, hoping the right one will pass by.

Who are those “right” people? Well, that will vary depending on you, your art, and what you hope to accomplish with it.

What are those better ways? Well, if I knew, I wouldn’t be an unknown artist, not starving only by virtue of having another, more solid income in the family! But I’m starting to get an inkling here and there, and this blog is part of it. Where will I go from here? Stick around and see!