The vast majority of artists I work with are looking for ways to sell art online and off. They dream of one day becoming a full-time artist and having their artwork pay their bills.
Are you dreaming of a career as an artist too?
While being a full-time artist is a worthy pursuit, a day job is often necessary for the sake of keeping a roof over your head and your bills paid on time.
But being an artist and having a day job doesn’t make you less of an artist. In fact, it provides a liberating opportunity – if you’re willing to reframe the way you view your day job.
In this article, I’ll explore what it means to be an artist and hold down a day job too.
The reality of the fact: Odds are not on your side (and it doesn’t matter)
Entering the art industry can offer a profitable income source for your creative skills. As an artist, you have the opportunity to explore various career paths such as traditional fine arts such as painting, sculpture, graphic design, or the digital entertainment sector. These fields can provide a great sense of job satisfaction and potentially allow you to work as a freelancer, giving you the freedom to choose projects that interest you and set your own schedule.
However, the percentage of individuals who successfully pursue a full-time career as an artist is not 100%.
While it is challenging to determine an exact figure, some sources can give us an idea. For example, a Washington Post article reported that approximately 1.4 million people were earning a living as artists in the United States. Though the exact number of aspiring artists in the country is unknown, the total population is around 320 million.
The vast majority of those 1.4 million individuals are white and earn a median salary of around $30k, which may not be considered a sufficient income in certain cities. The sad reality is that there are more individuals imprisoned in the United States than artists are earning a comfortable level of income from their art.
In essence, while it is not unattainable, most of us will likely never reach a level where we can fully support ourselves solely through our creative pursuits. Therefore, it is crucial to recognize that it is perfectly acceptable to be an artist who also holds a day job.
Perhaps you have been dedicating years of hard work to your craft, yet it has not achieved a desirable or sufficient income. It might be that you have urgent financial obligations or a desire to spend more time with your family rather than running a business.
You may not have any interest in turning your art into a source of income.
Alternatively, you might be at the early stages of your career, finding it incredibly challenging to earn enough money to cover your expenses.
Here lies the realm of creative individuals who hold regular jobs, a space where many of artistic individuals reside willingly or not.
What happens when making art is your full-time job?
Over the course of my career I’ve worked with many successful artists. It’s interesting to observe what happens when your art only exists to support you financially.
I once knew an artist who hit the big time. Her work started selling like crazy and she had to work like crazy to keep up with the demand. Living the dream. Right?
But for this particular artist, it became a nightmare. She was spending all of the money she made. Bigger house. Horses. Cars. In many ways, she felt she deserved these things. But then she became chained to them because now she was working to support them.
She wanted to change her style of painting, but she couldn’t afford to. She wanted to take vacations, but she needed to keep working. I watched this artist paint all day long and in the evenings, she moved her easel in the living room and painted all night too.
Now I’m certainly not suggesting that will happen to you! But it’s worth keeping in mind what success as an artist might look like.
For this artist, the playful aspect of creating art eventually dissipated. Would you be ok with that?
When your art becomes your source for survival (in a monetary sense) it might become less about making art that is meaningful and more about making art that will “pay the bills”. So you need to decide what your true motivation is.
A day job provides a divide between finances and creativity
Having a day job – or finding flexible work as a freelancer – can provide more room for you to be creative in your art. It can restore a sense of freedom in your work. By having a day job you take the pressure off having to sell your art.
Often the best art comes when you’re not trying too hard. When you aren’t worried about your art supporting you financially, it’s easier to step into a state of artistic flow.
As my friend artist Kiki Smith once said, “Your art doesn’t exist to support you, you exist to support your art.”
A day job gives you the freedom to say no
When your financial life is taken care of through other means of work you have more power to say no. Without the safety net of a day job, you might have to take on projects you don’t fully support or believe in simply because you need to make some money. With a day job to take care of the bills, there’s no reason to say yes to what should be a no.
The job you pick matters
Don’t fall prey to the logic that says a bad job helps you suffer for your art; there’s plenty of suffering in the world to inspire you. Being in misery 20 or 40+ hours a week will not help your creativity in any way.
I understand that it may seem difficult to do, but finding a new job is not as simple as just wishing for it. Making a major change like this can be intimidating, but it is crucial. It will alleviate a significant burden from your shoulders. Despite the effort, frustration, and setbacks that may come with job searching, it is important to persevere.
This is your life, and it is worth the hard work to secure a more fulfilling job.
The key is to search for a job that allows you to express your creativity or fulfills one of your other passions. Engaging in creative activities, even occasionally, can prevent extreme boredom. Explore job opportunities in an industry that interests you. For example, if you are a musician, you may enjoy working at a record label. Alternatively, a painter could also find gigs that fits his technique or style.
The wrestle between time and energy
There are certain caveats that come along with day jobs though. With a day job, artists need to sacrifice their time. And if you’re working long hours 5 or 6 days a week, you might feel as though you don’t have the energy to be an artist as well.
If you find that your day job is totally draining, you may need to find less intensive work. Pursuing work as an artist and being a full-time heart surgeon may not be realistic.
But on the flip side of that, if you do have a less intensive day job but you find yourself consistently favoring TV over making art; you may need to ask yourself some tough questions about whether you actually want to figure out how to be an artist. What is this artist’s dream really worth to you?
I know many artists who juggle multiple jobs to pay their bills and still find time to create their art. So it might be worth treating the art of creation as you treat exercising – you might not feel like doing it in the beginning, but once you get started you’ll feel so much better.
The day jobs artists had before they got famous
Now let’s take a look at what these famous artists did for work before they made it big. If you find yourself doing something similar, don’t feel discouraged – instead look at it as a stepping stone on your path to finding success as an artist.
Henri Rousseau – Tax Collector
Henri began his career as a tax collector and didn’t even start painting until his early 40s. At the age of 49 he decided to leave the tax office to pursue his art full-time, and even then he still played violin in the streets to pay his bills.
Vivian Maier – Nanny
During her life Vivian never managed to sell any of her photographs, only becoming famous in her posthumous years. Her work was picked up at an auction by two collectors who put her photos online, the photos then going viral. She supported her photography by working as a nanny throughout her life.
Jeff Koons – Wall Street Commodities Broke
Jeff Koons is an artist known around the world for creating the most expensive work of art by a living artist sold at auction. Koons started his career in finance because it allowed him to, in his own words, “make exactly what art I wanted to make – and I would always know that I didn’t need the art market.”
Barbera Kruger – Graphic Designer, Writer, Professor
Barbara has had multiple careers throughout her life; starting out as a graphic designer before writing columns for Artforum and then teaching at U.C.Berkeley.
Throughout all of these careers she was consistently creating her own artwork. Her experience as a graphic designer informing much of her iconic feminist art.
The balance between a day job and being an artist
If you can support yourself fully as an artist and still live a well balanced happy life – more power to you! But if you’re not there just yet, there is absolutely no shame in taking a day job to support yourself.
Often artists are under the impression that in order to be a ‘real’ artist, you can’t do anything else to make money. But there’s nothing romantic about struggling financially and trying to get by on your artwork alone.
Remember, your art doesn’t exist to support you, you exist to support your art.
The fashion and design sectors naturally complement the visual arts, which explains why artists often gravitate towards these fields for employment opportunities. In this category, numerous artists have developed a keen understanding of how to enhance the visual impact of objects through their work, intentionally erasing the boundaries between art, fashion, and design in their creations.
Your day job can help you shape you craft
One common misconception that artists often hear is the idea that they should rely solely on their art for income.
This notion is absurd. Nearly every artist has held other jobs at some point in their lives. Some artists even maintained these jobs throughout their careers. For example, William Carlos Williams worked as a doctor in New Jersey, Henry Darger was a custodian in Chicago, and Harvey Pekar was a clerk at a VA Hospital in Cleveland. JK Rowling who was a secretary. It’s important to remember that success as an artist does not always mean relying solely on your art for financial stability.
True artists have multiple jobs during the day, at night, and in the afternoon. True artists create things aside from their art, and find the time to create art because it is yearning to be expressed from within them. Whether it’s shouting, pleading, or softly speaking.
The influence of these jobs manifests itself in varied ways—sometimes through materials, other times methods or subject matter, and in numerous other ways,” “Influences are immediately legible in some works and more subtle in others.
It’s easy to be enamored with spectacular natural or iconic scenes of cliffs and crashing waves, yet many of us live in more modest locales. Painting what’s right outside your back door or immediate presence in your (or just down the street) is a great way to maximize limited time.
Careers options adjacent to the Arts
It is not necessary but it can be greatly beneficial to be as close as possible to art in your daily life, some industries do incorporate the visual arts and performances also demand a constant influx of new talent.
When outside of art galleries, museums, fashion brands, art studios or productions companies, amateurs artists also consider some more technical fields like:
- Animation
- Art and Creative Direction
- Architecture, Urban Designer
- Conservator, Curator
- Photographer, Painter or Muralist
- Art Teacher or Historian
- Designers and Illustrators
- Fashion and Interior Design
- Tatoo and Crafts
- Cultural and event production
- Media and Film
- Editting or Printing
- Set Designer, Costume Designer, Makeup Artist
- Stylist or Makeup
- Art or Antique Dealer
These are just a few and general examples, and whatever field you find yourself working in, the ability to collaborate, communicate and interpersonal skills will be crucial for navigating your career in visual arts, no relationship or opportunity should ever go unnoticed. Being a dynamic thinker able to solve problems are valuable anywhere and employers actively seek for outliers,
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Working in the international world of contemporary art, Crista Cloutier has spent her career selling art and marketing art to art galleries, museums and private collections.
Using her professional experiences, Crista has created The Working Artist Masterclass, where she’s developed a global reputation as an artist’s coach. Crista can teach you how to be an artist; including how to sell your art, how to sell art online, how to sell photographs, how to price your art, how to succeed at art fairs, and even how to find your art style.
Crista has worked with established, blue-chip artists to raise their profile and attract greater opportunities. And she’s also helped thousands of emerging artists to build a professional art practice. To learn more, visit https://theworkingartist.com