Anyone who has read the lives of artists will be familiar with the concept, a comment regarding vocational decisions, where parents have discouraged the individual to avoid art as a career choice. “Study medicine or law, go into business; art is not a good choice for the work of your lifetime.” Sometimes the remark has been made with far more emphasis, “You will not study art if I’m paying for it.” The point is that there seems to be a universal attitude that you can’t make a living as an artist. Personal happiness and fulfillment doesn’t usually appear on the list of factors when making career decisions.
The young person might be ready to list of few Americans who have done very well indeed as artists, have made piles of money, which is what it’s all about after all. No doubt the parent will be just as ready to point out, accurately, that those instances of huge success are aberrations, are so rare as to be hardly worth mentioning. A highly informed career-guide might be able to make a good case for the various ways an artist can make a living but that does not change the nature of the prevailing attitude. To give hope to the person who feels that he or she simply has to follow the call, one can only site the numerous cases of people who have defied parents, or some uninformed career-guide, and followed the path anyway. There are those who simply cannot live any other life. It is a calling that reaches one with too powerful a voice and the only choice is to follow its call.
The library shelves as well as those in the bookstores hold books that are guides to making money in the arts. How to make a living as an artist seems to be a popular subject. One way, obviously, is to write a book about how to make money as an artist. These books repeat themselves and usually don’t present any new ideas. Now that people are selling their art on the internet, that approach has been added to the recent editions and there are “How To” books for designing a web site and for using E-bay to sell, or one of the artist coops, groupings, main pages where an artist can put his/her creative work up for observation and for sale. Just one of these would be mnartists.org There are many others.
Nearly all serious artists in this country are teachers at some period of time during their productive years. The choices today are more varied than they were say twenty years ago, with workshops, community arts groups, state arts boards, granting institutions, offering various teaching opportunities to artists. Artist may be full time faculty, may work as adjunct, may teach two or three times a year, in some cases making the bulk of their income from the teaching profession or in others, supplementing the income they have from art production. A quite successful graphic artist who lives in New Mexico works in the studio, exhibits his work, sells to galleries and to individuals but does a university workshop and/or master class, three or four times a year. Another artist, a ceramist, is a full time professor at a major university but produces enough of his craft to have regular exhibitions around the Midwest and to sell large amounts of work to the public. Take note, anyone seeking an area in the arts which is highly attractive and saleable to the pubic, ceramics has traditionally been such a choice. In addition, jewelry-makers are often financially successful. In both of those areas, the art might rise above the simple classification of “craft” to “art,” depending on the skills and the imagination of the artist him or herself. It should be considered, when looking at teaching as possible career choice, that the act of teaching in itself is a creative act and saps the artist of creative energy, sometimes enveloping the artist entirely so that he or she does little actual art. Their art then, is the teaching itself. But those cases seem to be the exception rather than the rule. Many artists of truly high quality are able to balance a teaching career with art production and will have regular exhibitions of work while maintaining a full schedule of teaching. Artists, to continue with a series of generalizations, are people of high creative energy and varied skills. The ability that it takes to be a good teacher is hardly related at all to the ability to make great art.
So far, the observations listed here are related to visual arts. But the writer is presented with the same problems. The announcement of a young person that he or she is planning to devote an adult life to that of novelist might produce an equal amount of outrage on the part of parents, as would the former brash admission. The concerned adult might have a variety of reasons for being troubled by the choice. In either case, visual arts or literature, the competition is fantastically high and getting published nowadays, is more difficult than it ever has been. On the other hand, the Internet has presented writers with a whole new area of interest. People are actually making money by publishing on line and charging for the continuation of a work of art. Self-publishing too, has grown more common and small, individual and group presses have sprung up all over the country. Most regional arts councils will not fund self-publishing projects but they will fund other ventures, such as travel to research a novel, and funding “time” to finish a novel or a work of non-fiction. Grants are numerous and the dedicated and serious writers may find a whole variety of sources for funds. A magazine like Poets and Writers lists available grants and competitions open to the serious writer at any level of career.
A local novelist devoted thirty years of his career to teaching in the English Department of a university, another, a dentist, has published work in magazines for decades, another writer of non-fiction is a university administrator and started her career with publications in magazines, making enough income from that endeavor, to get herself through graduate school. Thereafter, she published full length books of non-fiction while maintaining a career in the university. There are a great many success stories. Universities and schools, even other institutions, are rich with people who work at some level in the arts. Most of the names you know as the ultra-famous of American literature have at some point in their careers, devoted some time to education, to teaching. Normal Mailer, John Cheever, Toni Morrison, have all been university teachers. Rare is the individual writer, (Truman Capote) who never set foot in a classroom. There is hope for the aspiring writer and the possibilities for the poet, the fiction or non-fiction writer are growing and blossoming with every day.
Marlon Davidson a nationally known visual artist, writer, and retired professor who lives and works in the Region 2 area. You can find his work at mnartists.org. His work and his collaborative work with partner Don Knudson can be found in many collections. His book Pig Barn can be found at Amazon.com.
