Working the Creative Life
How do you have a creative life? The good news is that there is no wrong answer. The bad news is it’s not easy.
I believe that the single most important requirement to have any success in the arts, and by arts I mean anything that is a creative effort whether it’s writing or photography or quilt making or painting or whatever your specific passion happens to be, is that you know what you want.
OK, wait, back up. That’s not right. First, what is an artist? Let me be clear, it doesn’t matter what anyone but you decides that is. If you believe that an artist is a person who works 30 hours a week in a studio doing life drawing, that’s great. If you believe an artist is a person who spends two hours three nights a week on wood carving in their garage, that’s also great. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks, only what you think.
The reason is that regardless of the amount of time, or the level of skill a person has, the difference between regarding yourself as a hobbyist and an artist is a big one. You need to believe in yourself, your work, and your career in order to promote your work. Certainly you can believe in your hobby and sell what you’re making, but the amount of effort it takes to build a career in the arts is on a completely different level from selling to friends and participating in local craft sales, though being in those is perfectly fine. There’s nothing wrong with selling your work where ever you can.
Once you’ve defined yourself as an artist, what do you want? Do you want recognition? Do you want to sell work, and how much? Do you want to win awards or receive grants or show nationally or publish in three foreign languages? You need to know your goals.
I have short term, mid term, and long term goals for my work. My short term goal is to sell enough art work and photography to cover my travel costs to the places I need to go for the images I want to make that support the themes that matter to me. I have a mid term goal which has to do with expanding my name recognition through broader representation and getting at least one grant, and a long range goal which is getting a Fulbright or some other large foundation grant that will enable me to accomplish a specific project in Greenland that is my heart’s desire, and that I certainly can’t do without major backing.
You may notice that not one of these goals is “make a lot of money.” Not many people manage that, even if they want to.
Once you know what you want, you might want to think about your relationship with your public. Who is your audience? Where do they spend their time? How can you reach them? Do you believe that you’re best served by a traditional relationship with a gallery? Do you want to reach a broader audience by launching yourself into the online world? Do you want complete control over everything you do, including your relationships with your audience?
There’s no wrong answer, and these can all be answered with “ands”. Have a local gallery AND work with several online venues. Self-publish AND send work out to agents. Sell at craft stores AND look for representation in a museum. This is your strategy, it can be whatever you want, just have one. Because if you don’t, maybe you’ll be lucky and succeed, but more likely no one will ever see your work until it’s found in the garage after your death. Posthumous fame doesn’t interest me.
Decide how much time you want to spend on the business of art, which includes marketing, sales, tracking, bookkeeping, applying for grants and residencies, and a million other things that are not creative work. Figure out how much time a week you want to spend on business, compared to how much time you spend on doing your work. That will also impact your choice going forward.
So what did I do?
My choice is born from knowing many writers, and watching what happened as the traditional venues for professional writers shriveled up. I watched people struggle with self-publishing and all the arguments about it. I thought about my experiences as a younger woman in the traditional art world when I was represented by a gallery, both in Portland and in Toronto. I watched the rise of Kick Starter and Go Fund Me and Patreon. I thought about my personal philosophy of art and the public in the light of the astonishing speed of technological change, the repeated attacks on copyright protections, and the rise of social media. I watched friends of mine both succeed and fail, and thought about why.
My decision was to take advantage of social media. I can reach people across the world on FB in a way I couldn’t with any other venue. I saw my friend Wendy’s success as she bared her soul on her Kick Starter and realized that an important part of my value for my audience lies in who I am, what my life is, and what I want to do.
I made a specific, conscious choice to share a large part of my life with my audience. I invited them to become my friends, to share my joys and sorrows, to talk about what was important to me. I work to build a social network that enjoys my art and my adventures and is supportive of my goals. I am fortunate that many people have shared my work beyond my reach. Yes, I give up a certain amount of privacy, but I feel the rewards have been worth it. Frankly I think privacy in the 21st century is an illusion anyway.
When I began this adventure, I had 20 friends. I now have 500. Many of these people have become friends-in-life as well as online friends. Many of these people have supported me both financially and emotionally as I have struggled to refine and define myself as an artist. Without their support I don’t know if I would had the courage to keep pushing forward. No artist works in a vacuum.
But this has a cost. I spend hours a day online. I try to touch everyone at least once a week. I have a strict online policy of likes for likes, of responding to every comment, of answering messages. When I can, I create events for people in nearby locations to meet me, to come see my work, to have physical contact as well.
I’m doing the same thing with Instagram, which is an even more tit for tat network. I’ve received co-marketing proposals from photographers abroad – if I’m willing to follow them and/or recommend their work to my followers, they will do the same for me with the goal that we will both win additional followers. And, in fact, I just sold my first photographic print to a complete stranger on Instagram, which was a red letter day for me.
This is not for everyone.
In addition to spending several hours a day on FB, and usually 30 minutes a day on Instagram, I spend at least a full day and currently more on business and administration as I play catch up from my arctic residencies on the other work that must be done. Maintaining an inventory. Making, selling, and shipping calendars. I have to update the work on my website. I need to turn the key on the shopping function on my website. I need to investigate ways to increase traffic to my website.
In the world of Kick Starter, Go Fund Me, and Patreon, I chose Patreon as my monthly income model. Let me be clear, I don’t make much money from Patreon, but as a friend of mine pointed out, every dollar I make from Patreon doing something I was going to do anyway is a dollar I didn’t have before.
I think that’s something that needs to be pointed out. Unless you’re unusually fortunate as an artist, you need multiple income streams. I sell calendars, photographs, paintings, and run a Patreon. I hope to develop more products to sell this year. I hope to jump start a particular photographic niche for myself, I will be applying for grants for the first time this year (and that was half a day researching grants and then calendaring the dates by which I should apply for them). Some of my followers have said they would support a Go Fund Me for me to go to Antarctica. Wow. That floored me.
This would be impossible if I had a full time job. And this is the dirty secret no one likes to talk about. To succeed in the arts you need to be able to afford the time to make art, and the time to sell art. Doing this while working a regular job is very, very hard. Add in a family and a relationship, and it becomes nearly impossible. I’ve written about this before here on my writing website. So if you have a partner who’s willing to support your art habit, or a government that will give you money to work at being an artist, or a wealthy aunt who left you some money, you’re lucky.
It’s vital to take your art business seriously. It’s work. It’s a job you may love, but it’s still a job. I work every day. Some weeks I take off one day for pleasure, but usually I work seven days a week because I must do everything myself, both making the art as well as the business of art. That takes a lot of time. Is it worth it? It is to me, but there are things I sacrifice. I don’t watch TV, I don’t see movies, I don’t read many books. My romantic life is close to non-existent. My friends are fortunately understanding, or they would be few indeed. It’s worth thinking about what are you willing to give up to have this life.
I’m sure I haven’t answered every question, but my hope is that this give a realistic view at least of my experience as a working artist. I’m happy to answer questions if you have them, as long as you keep in mind that my experience is not necessarily going to be your experience.
A year ago, more than that, when my host invited me to stay with her and referred to her home as being outside of London I imagined a two bedroom flat, possibly one bedroom and I would sleep on the couch, in Twickenham or Croyden or perhaps Chelmsford. There would be easy access by rail to London, and a decent sized town to drink coffee and go to the pub and perhaps do a bit of shopping.
What I did not expect was to be picked up at Luton in an ancient Volvo station wagon, and then be driven down a lane with hedgerows towering above the car while the light faded. Feeling a bit like a Bronte heroine, I watched with both fascination and surprise as we turned into a rutted lane barred by an automatic gate. We went through, then pulled up by the side entrance of a large brick house; I wondered if it was apartments, or if she had a place in an out building. But no, we entered the house, and immediately went for a walk in the last of the light across pastures full of sheep and at least one 300+ year old oak, then made a quick tour of the walled garden where the carp in the pond had died but the ancient apple trees produced delicious apples and acid green pears dotted the grass. I met the two chickens and the noisy flock of guinea hens and the “wild” white geese that serve as watchdogs just like ancient Rome.
I am in one of England’s home counties. My friend owns a country estate of 100 acres. She lives in a country house with a History, a walled garden, a park, a woods and several beautiful outbuildings. The closest pub is 2.25 miles by the public footpaths that cross fields and meander through woods and are the glory of England. If you go by winding country road through the hedgerows, it’s more like 3 miles away. The closest hamlet is Weston, which has a pub but no shops. The second closest is Gravely which has two pubs but no shops. The collection of six houses where my friend lives is the hamlet of Chesfield. She owns Chesfield Park, which is right by Chesfield Farm, and not far from Chesfield Stables. The other great house in the area was Graveley manor. Weston, a Templar-built town, has no great house, but a lovely church. Oh, and that pub I mentioned.
Everyone I’ve met here lives at least partially by the land. They raise sheep or chickens or have horses. They talk about the drought last summer and how bad it was for the lambs. My friend’s tenant Rob, who raises sheep on a massive scale, came by to discuss the next quarter’s terms and bitch about Brexit. 60% of his wool his is purchased by France. He is understandably concerned, though his wife Jane said that they would manage. They always have. Like the Starkadders, these people have always raised sheep here.
My friend is torn. She loves her home. She also loves to travel and has fashioned a life that leaves little time to handle the roof repairs, or replace the brick wall in the garden that blew down, or arranging to get the windows washed, or the oil delivered, or the chimneys swept. She mourns her inability to slow down and ease into the seasonal life of her beautiful property. Many of her friends are like me, from other places, met during her travels as an expedition doctor. She longs for Pakistan and Uzbekistan and Chile. She longs to see Christmas in at Chesfield Park at the same time as she longs to be in the Swiss Alps, or Russia, or Harbin, China for the ice festival. She cannot have both.
There is nothing wrong with choosing to live a bounded life. There is something deep and beautiful about staying in one place. It is a sweetness to become intimate with how the leaves change and that first frost on the grass and the booming of deer as they rut and mate. It’s beautiful and tender and I see the appeal. It’s a good choice to love where you are and throw down roots so deep you can’t be moved. To know your neighbors intimately – all their joys and heartbreaks – to be part of the closest village and do local walks and drink every other night at your local pub and have friends and lovers who know you down to your bone marrow. I understand that appeal.
Both are good options. What you can’t do is have both. You can’t nestle into the comfort of the accustomed seasons and celebrate the subtle changes of earth and life while at the same time riding the wind and pushing your own boundaries for that sweet adrenaline rush. You can’t choose to have no home, no roots, no hearth waiting, and at the same time be predictable in your time and plans and expectations. You can’t have both.
But I see the beauty of boundaries. I admire constraint in art. I force myself to work within limits because I believe the best work comes from knowing one thing well. From making that one line over and over and over. There is a tug to a life chaptered by seasons and expectations and belonging. It’s just not my life, though I am grateful for this chance to step in a warm room for a moment and stretch my hands out to other people’s fires. I know my choice is cold, and possibly lonely, so I am grateful indeed for these moments of comfort and friendship before I must leave.
My time in Longyearbyen is a little more than half over, and a month now seems way too short a time to stay here. I should have opted for two months, but I did not. In two weeks I have watched the change from 24 hours of daylight to 13 hours of daylight – 11 hours of true night – in just two weeks. Think about how fast this is happening! The days are much colder now, mid 20s to 30, and with the wind blowing down the Longyeardalen it is definitely cold, although for some locals this is still “sweater weather.”
The arctic is changing. We know this in the sort of way we know gravity exists; it’s a fact we just don’t think about. That’s a mistake. If there’s a canary in the mine of climate change it’s the arctic. The ripples from every iceberg’s birth touches every shore. Our comfortable lives depend on the world’s freezer remaining frozen, and it is not. But more than that, human greed is also a wreaking ball in the arctic.
Last year, 145,000 tourists came to this town to travel into the arctic. Predictions for next year are for more people. Even with the most stringent controls, there’s no managing the damage such a quantity of humanity will do. Cruise ships dump their waste into the arctic seas. People ignore warnings not to walk on the fragile tundra destroying plants hundreds of year old. They approach wild animals they should leave alone. They litter.
And this doesn’t take into account the shoving that the northern countries are doing over mineral rights and shipping rights as the northwest passage opens. It doesn’t take into account that we have no idea what bacterial and viral plagues have been kept hidden under the ice. Rabies is endemic among arctic fox, first appearing in Svalbard in 1980. No one knows how it got to the island, and theories range between carrier foxes crossing the ice in winter to foxes finding infected carcasses that have been frozen for years, but are now thawed enough to be scavenged.
For me, it’s vital to witness this world disappearing. As I think about my work I realize that I’m painting the last days of a great and magnificent landscape that is vanishing even as I walk it. All I can do is paint my experience of this disappearing beauty in what can only be an arctic elegy. It breaks my heart, and yet I know I am lucky to be here to see the arctic in its last glorious days.
the place, and the very loveliness that is being lost seems eternal on canvas. I want people to see that this remarkable place is being damaged beyond hope of recovery. I haven’t figured out how to do that, but I’m working on it. Maybe something time-based, but that’s just an initial idea. Whatever I come up with, it will be hard. And it should be, it should be painful because if it doesn’t hurt me, how will anyone looking at the work understand the tragedy that is unfolding?
Today, thanks to a question from a friend, I did the research to discover that I am in fact drinking glacial meltwater when I drink from the tap. That’s… amazing. Astonishing. It means ice for drinks – 10,000 year old glacial meltwater. When I wash my face, 10,000 year old glacial meltwater. When I flush the toilet…. You get the picture. It makes sense. It’s the water that’s readily available. Indeed, the Longyear River and all the feeder creeks that flow into it – all glacial meltwater. It’s just not a thing those of us who live elsewhere contemplate. It feels like it should be rare and special. But here, you can drink it straight from the tap. Also, there’s a local company that sells it. They pour it into glass bottles, put a pretty blue label on it that says “Glacial Water from Svalbard,” then sell it to tourists for 75 euros a bottle ($87). I kid you not.
My studio neighbor Barbara said to me today that tourists will buy anything made in Svalbard. This came out of a conversation we had after she came in to see what I was working on. After admiring the work (featured here) she suggested I go to a couple of local shops and museums and show them my work. I brought a number of 8” x 8” pine boards. Her feeling was that if I combined the fact that they’re painted on wood, of Svalbard landscapes, painted with graphite (which might come from Svalbard) I could sell quite a lot of them. “You’ve got a real niche, my girl. You shouldn’t waste it. And anything you sell here, you don’t have to bring back with you.”
After he left Barbara popped in again. “If you don’t want to see him, you can walk down to the marina. You’ll see a big mountain of coal waiting to be shipped out. It’s free to residents. Most people here heat with coal. You go and pick up whatever you need, whenever you need it. Just pop it into a shopping bag. No one will say boo. You’ll have more graphite than you can ever use. He’s right, it’s great stuff. It really is the best in the world.”
