.so you want to be an artist.

Because someone went and hired me for an art job in which I talk to a lot of high school kids - many of whom are aspiring designers - I get asked for art career advice all the time.

Here's my first piece of advice: Go find a different career.
It's not that it's an impossible task to find steady work as an artist, but it's close. And it generally doesn't pay well. The number of "in-house" design/art positions are extremely limited, and are usually only with big corporate companies that will tear out your soul and have you under your desk conspiring about how to take down the man within a year. Freelance work isn't necessarily much better - spotty at best, with the arduous task of trying to get people to actually pay you. If you go into commercial design work you will be constantly questioned and second guessed and you have to take it because that's the job.
If you can find a job.
If you are young and glossy eyed and a tad ambitious this may sound like the gross exaggeration of a tired old person who doesn't try hard enough. It's not. Out of my graduating class of illustrators, only two other people are working in the field. That's bad odds.
Meanwhile you may be going over in your head the number of successful artists you've seen or read blogs of - I'll get back to that bit in a minute.

Second piece of advice?
Go to a cheap school.
You may get a slightly better education going to a specialty art school that cost $26,000+ a year - but you also might not. 70% of your education is the effort you put into it, which means doing your assignments, doing them on time and putting 100% of your effort into your education. My mother gave me the best piece of advice I've maybe ever received before I went off to college:

There is sleep, school, a job, and a social life.

Pick three.

She was not wrong.
Funny thing is, it's not very different after college, except you take out the school part and insert "attempt to function as a human adult."
But back to that "cheap school" thing... Unless your parents are independently wealthy and willing to foot the bill, you're going to end up with student loans. Hell, you may end up with student loans anyway - art supplies are not cheap and you go through a lot of paint and illustration board and newsprint and charcoal during that first year of Foundations. Looking forward a few years - you're going to be an artist when that's all done with, and you're going to have to pay all that money back. Starving Artist is a cliche for a reason.
Because it's true.
Meanwhile I know a guy with a two year associates from a community college whose the creative director of a huge design firm and doing fantastically. But he's also a creative genius.

Third piece of advice: Learn to do Without.
Assuming you go to college, graduate and find work - the art has to come first. When my husband and I first started dating we had this Big Giant Rule: The art comes first. We were not allowed to get angry and pouty with the other because they were working, but the art came first. Always. We didn't see each other much despite the fact that we almost immediately moved in together and that worked out beautifully. Our day job schedules were completely opposite so we had lots of quiet at home alone time to work on our craft (this despite the fact that he works much better in an open studio environment with people to talk to and I work better alone by myself in my basement hole).
The other part of that is the fact that art is not like riding a bicycle. If you don't practice every day you're going to lose all of that skill you spent so much time and money earning in college. And art supplies aren't cheap. And all of that adds up to eating Ramen at home and not going out to parties and bars every night of the week. Despite Damien Hurst appearances - the life of an artist is not all Glamour and Parties. Except that it is.
Except that it isn't.

Which leads to my last bit of advice.
You need, right now in this moment, to accept the fact that you are going to have to sell yourself.
It's a little like being a prostitute on a grimey street corner. Except without the prostitution.
Technically.
Noone is going to see the value of your work unless you sell the value of your work to them. Which is a different problem than actually selling your work. And you will have to accept jobs that you absolutely do not want to do, and you have to do them perfectly every time because if you went to high school you know how rumors spread.
It's no different in the art world.
Actually it might be worse in the art world because money is involved.
And then you have to sell your value and your work some more.
And the work never ceases. And no one can do the work for you.

And in the end, it's like I said back in November:

"You have to need to do it. You have to need to do your art so badly that not doing it is more painful than constantly failing at it."

.fortune cookie.

Which I did not get to eat, coincidentally....

.reenchantment.

I picked up a new book the other day.
Literally picked it up off the floor in my studio. Turns out it's one of my husbands books from his art teacher in high school, and it probably accidentally migrated when I was moving bookshelves from his studio to another room.
This book is an art book, philosophy-ish, and probably a little out of date in terms of the fine arts world - but very possibly totally relevant to what's going on in the bellydance world right now. One paragraph has hit me particularly hard:

"Some artists have taken offense at what I write because it doesn't appear to validate what they are doing; but a paradigm shift can't occur without the consequences to the way we see and do things, and the uprooting of accustomed habits of thinking often has uncomfortable personal consequences. Condemnation of the ways that our society, as currently structured, fails to provide any context for a socially or morally sensitive art is easier, and less likely to demand a change of consciousness, than the more formidable effort of trying to construct a new vision and put it into practice. It is not part of our legacy to view ourselves as powerful agents of change; however, we are being confronted with the necessity of transforming our old modes of understanding if we are to survive the predicaments that are our collective fate right now."

-Suzi Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art

I really look forward to reading the rest of this little monster.

art, science, and nature

My favorite artist of all time has to be Andy Goldsworthy. A British artist who specializes in collaborations with nature, I first saw his work in an article in Discover magazine way back in the 90's when I was in high school. His work transcends reality - primarily because he exclusively uses natural materials in the area where he found them - that his art quickly reverts back to nature just makes it more beautiful to me. From his own webpage:

At its most successful, my ‘touch’ looks into the heart of nature; most days I don’t even get close. These things are all part of the transient process that I cannot understand unless my touch is also transient—only in this way can the cycle remain unbroken and the process complete. I cannot explain the importance to me of being part of the place, its seasons and changes. Fourteen years ago I made a line of stones in Morecambe Bay. It is still there, buried under the sand, unseen. All my work still exists in some form.

There is an excellent documentary about Mr. Goldsworth, title Rivers and Tides, during which you can watch him constructing an ice sculpture not entirely dissimilar to the one pictured above.

Yesterday afternoon, I was listening to a How Stuff Works: Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast (which I highly recommend) titled This is Your Brain on Art. The podcast was primarily about the relationship between art and neuroscience, but one of the examples that was brought up during the podcast was the curious Courting rituals of the Bowerbirds. I'd heard of Bowerbirds before (who hasn't?) and heard about the Bowers that the males construct to attract females, but listening to the podcast, and being in front of Google, I was finally motivated to look up these constructions.
And they are gorgeous. The birds themselves are gorgeous, particularly the Satin Bowerbird, which has the most amazing blue eyes (a bird with blue eyes - who knew?), but the bowers they construct, without the use of hands or thumbs - I was floored.

from the Birds in Backyards website - of a female Satin Bowerbird

photo by Barry Hatton, via Elmtwig

i

image from ARKive

But these constructions - and you really should look them up and read more (the Satin Bowerbirds actually paint the inside of their bowers with chewed up berries and charcoal), remind me quite a bit of Andy Goldsworthy's work.

If I ever get back into sculpture - this is the kind of work I'd like to do. Now if only creating the kind of art you loved to look at was a guaranteed thing...