An Artistic Career

What’s a topic or issue about which you’ve changed your mind?

I always thought or was led to believe that being an artist wasn’t a real job. And if you did decide to be an artist full time you would live a life of the starving artist… but that’s ok because hardship and adversity is great fuel for your artistic fire.

When I was in the last couple of years of high school I remember when our career guides would come around the school and hand out these massive magazines that were career guides. You could browse through and see what qualifications and grades you would need to be; a doctor, a vet, teacher, lawyer, boilermaker an astronaut… you get the picture. However there wasn’t an Artist. You could be a graphic designer an architect or something respectable like that… but not an artist. I clearly remember looking through the complete careers guide and actually saying that there isn’t actually anything in here that I want to do. And why isn’t artist a career.

This seemed very strange to me as a young adult. Especially when we seemed to be surrounded by art, we went to the museum and art gallery, we listened to music, we watched movies. But apparently all of these creative fields were just something you did as a hobby in your spare time. And if you were lucky you’d be discovered and make it big. And if you fail in your quest to get ‘discovered’ you’ll eek out the rest of your days being a bitter and resentful artist.

These were all things that I learnt as a kid and young adult. But with the dawning of the internet the world opened up to creatives, and the gatekeepers, the people who would ‘discover’ you started to become more and more insignificant. If you were dedicated enough to embrace these new technologies your audience could discover you themselves and bypass the middleman.

And today it would appear that there are many, many artists who are making their own work. Creating the art that they want to create and making a living from it because they have found their audience, thanks to the internet. So now it seems you can have a career as an artist. It may have been helped by the internet. But essentially any creative person that boarders on the entrepreneurial side of things can flourish. They have done so since begging of time… or at least a very long time ago. Artists that have thrived through the ages have not only been good artists, they have been great entrepreneurs.

That’s probably why I didn’t find it in the careers guide. I should have been looking under E for Entrepreneurs, not A for Artist.