Personal thoughts on how to decide if you should be a professional artist
This is not my problem. Left to my own devices I don’t think I’d get hung up on this atall but this woman keeps asking me if I want to be an artist and every time she does it spins me around for about two days.
The problem has two competing angles in my head. One is the idea that to be a professional you should make your money from the art and the opposing thought is to question “why should my art and my money intersect at all?” Being professional by making art for money is supported by our society, plus there is an additional aspect which is that the need to live will drive you to make the art AND that it will force you to make it good enough for external consumption.
The countervailing argument is that it does not make common sense to me to try to make my money from art. In terms of business, art just doesn’t pay very well and additionally by making art for someone else you are often obliged to slant it to what they want as opposed to what you want.
There is an alternative structure where I make my money from something else and I do my art as much as I can. This doesn’t work for most people because their “day jobs” end up eating up their lives. For whatever reason this hasn’t happened to me yet, so I shouldn’t have to react to it, but it such a common thing that other people take it for granted.
Another aspect of this whole issue is that my art is flexible enough to encompass most things, so there are ways for me to fold business into art by applying my creativity outside of a drawing, to selling or designing, or whatever.
