Create Yourself as a Working Artist

If you have chosen to make your living painting, writing, or performing, you must treat your talent as a business or you will starve.   Commitment to your craft requires a commitment to success.  In order to be successful, efficient management of your time and money must be taken into consideration day in and day out.

Art requires discipline of mind and attention to details.  The latter being the hardest for right-brain thinkers. We most often want someone else to be responsible for managing our lives so that we can pay attention to creating.  In today’s world, if you turn your life over to someone else to manage, you better know what they are managing and the questions you must ask to find out if they are doing their job well.

Your art is a commodity.  Its intrinsic value is based on many factors.  However, personal sentiment is not one of them.  How much you care about what you do or how much you ‘suffer for your craft’ is entirely out of the financial equation. Simply put, you must see yourself as blessed not with talent but with opportunity.

As a successful Artist, you must realize how many opportunities there are to stretch yourself beyond your current level of creativity, to find focus of theme or breadth of medium, to utilize your inherent artistic skills in your everyday life, to sell your work, and to make a living from doing what you love. These are the commitments the Artist must make: to birth new visions and to create himself.

Tags: art, business, creativity