How To Earn Your Living As An Artist and Creative Person. - Kathy Shell, Artist, Author, A Creative Life.

How To Earn Your Living As An Artist and Creative Person. 02/04/2010

A pastel portrait by artist Kathy Shell, from a photo, an example of turning an art form into a successsful service based business, attending to customers needs.

You need to treat art as a business if your business is art.

If you think that artists do not need to work, that it is all play and creating when you feel like it, then do everyone a favour and call it a hobby, don’t expect grants from public money, the world does not owe artists a living.

Art is our choice and we should not be subsidised if we are unable to earn our living at it anymore than someone, should get, a grant to go and play golf all day instead of going to work.

Lol, J, OK I have got that off my chest. Being a professional artist is going to involve very long hours of work and becoming multi skilled.

I have known dozens of talented artists who cannot earn a living at art, because they have not grasped that we need to develop four different types of skills to succeed in the arts and indeed, most professions.

1.       Talent We need the talent or skill to have something to sell. Develop this. Make it a lifetime commitment to be on an ongoing search for knowledge and learn from everything and anything you can, while not contravening the copyright of others, make sure you didn’t have a fool for a teacher, by insisting on being ‘self taught’.
Yes, one can be self-guided, but expertise is learned from experts.

2.       Public Relations skills.If you are not skilled in public relations, then learn these skills. It might be easier to employ someone to do the PR for you, but the truth of the matter is, that unless you have an income aside from your art, few artists are going to have the funds to pay for a good PR representative. So learn how to do this for yourself.

3.       Business skills. It does not matter how well you create, paint or how good the items you have to sell are, nor how well you are able to market these, using your PR skills, if the business side of things breaks down and you make unwise choices accounting for and usuing the income you make. There needs to be a balance of all skills.

4.       Diversify. Art is a non essential, item. If you look at how the stock market fluctuates, then realize that art is also going to fluctuate, only the fluctuation will be wider.
No one, can tell you in advance what artistic skills might peak nor suffer in the next fluctuation.

Take the example of the need to diversify, from what happend during the last big depression to my own artistic family, who all survived based on the actions of one family member, my mother, the only one who diversified her skills.

My father the architect, rated at the time as one of the top 6 architects in Australia, had no essential sevice skills and was unemployed during the last depression.

My uncle, one of Australia’s best musicians at the time, a man who during the peak of his career, left millions to charities due to the success of his career, had no other developed skill aside from his musicianship and he could not make enough money to provide a home for or feed his family during that depression as people would not pay for his, non essential service, skill.

My mother, a dress designer, was able to diversify, from making high end fashion to designing clothing to fit people with deformity, then accept commissions to make military uniforms and her income as a young woman in her twenties, supported three families of six adults and three children, all because she was prepared to diversify her artistic skills when the need arose and not be too proud to take orders or work with heavy harsh on the hands, military materials.

When I informed my family that I intended to be an artist, they were 100% behind my doing this, they never told me that ‘I would not be able to earn my living at the arts’, as many tell artists. They did however insist that I have diverse talents and essential skills.

Back then, I did a science course as my essential services ‘fall back on, if I needed it’, diversification from art. These days with my interest in web design and reliance on computers I would probably choose to study for and have IT Jobs as my essential industry, fall back, should I have times when art needed subsidising with other work.

Develop varied and essential service skills and your integrity as an artist is protected and you have the financial stability you need as a base to develop a successful artistic life. Happy creating :-)

Another portrait commision by Kathy Shell, in artist's pastels, completed to a clients instructions, showing the combination of artistic talent, PR skills of working with the client and the business ability of marketing commissioned portaiture as a service.