10 things about being an artist that art teachers don't tell you

What art students need to know is: can I make a living from being creative? The answer is more complex than you might think

Be creative when it comes to job-seeking. Illustration: Emily Browne for the Guardian

 

There are many misconceptions about the art world. Ask someone to describe what it means to be an artist, and they will probably paint a picture of one of two extremes. There is no perceived middle ground, no stability, no security: there are simply those who make it, and those who don't.

The quintessential artist-failure is dedicated, talented, yet tragically unappreciated. Regrettably, their work acquires value only after their death.

The other extreme is the artist-celebrity. The conceptualists, the YBAs, the Damien Hirsts – these cunning characters are able to sell anything, particularly if it has some kind of biological waste product artfully smeared across it.

If popular opinion is anything to go by, the creative sector is a huge gamble, braved only by reckless, or masochistic, individuals. But if you're an art student, you need to know if this "make or break" view bears any relation to reality.

I've completed three years at art school, and am now an MA student, and as far as I can see – no, it doesn't. But with all the stereotyping that goes on, it's tough for students to work out what to expect from a career in the arts. So let's try to make things a little clearer – and maybe dispel some myths along the way.
Here are 10 honest truths about work, life and leisure in the creative industry.

1. Many artists work freelance. A study by the Arts Council finds that 41% of creative workers are self-employed. Temporary work contracts can make for an interesting and varied career, though periods of unemployment between jobs are a reality for some artists.

2. Freelance artists budget carefully. Being self-employed means you are without pension, holiday pay or maternity benefits. Contingencies such as falling ill or having children require pre-emptive financial planning.

3. Artists self-promote. Many showcase their talents on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Linked in, as well as on their own websites. Having a good online presence shows employers that you are self-motivated and digitally literate.

4. Artists love socialising. Networking events are the art world's equivalent to job hunting, but with less misery and more booze. Whether you're searching for commissions or trying to advance your career, networking gives you the chance to meet industry professionals and expose yourself to new opportunities.

5. Many artists form collectives to publicise and exhibit their work. Kate Rowland, an illustrator from the collective After School Club explains: "Being in After School Club is great for motivation. It allows us to utilise each other's skills, therefore we have more resources to help one another. It's kind of like a creative support system. And lots of fun."

6. It's all about your portfolio. The visual arts are less grade-centric than other disciplines. An art director at a graphic design company once told me he'd think twice about hiring someone with a first-class degree, as he worried they'd have no time for hobbies outside of work. In his words, not mine, "they might be really boring". This isn't to say you shouldn't aim high – another employer might appreciate a first-class candidate. Rather, you should focus on making your portfolio the best you can possibly make it. A good body of work speaks louder than grades.

7. Some artists supplement their income with a second job. Doing so gives them financial security while they exercise their creative passions. Take a look at some of these prolific "double jobbers".

8. Many artists take on internships to help kick-start their career. Working for a company can prepare you with essential industry skills and improve your employability. The question of payment is a hot potato – in general, the shorter the internship, the less likely you are to get paid.

9. Job opportunities are growing. There are currently over 1.9 million people working in the creative industries. However, by 2016, the government expects this figure to skyrocket, with an additional 1.3 million new jobs in the private sector alone.

10. The creative sector is characterised by high levels of job satisfaction. As a result, the industry is highly competitive and jobs are sought after. If you have the passion and the motivation to stay ahead of the game, then a creative career can be an exciting and rewarding experience.

Urban art brushes back vandalism

Savvy businesses employ talented graffiti specialists to block untidy tagging 

 

This building was painted with permission by several graffiti artists during the Hopscotch Festival earlier this. Tags used to cover the building, but not anymore.

 

AN ANGRY CARTOON SUN glares at pedestrians walking past Nauss Bike Shop on Agricola Street. Nearly illegible bubble letters claim an entire exterior wall. A desert landscape runs along the bottom. Thought has been given to filling the entire space with graffiti-style art.
For years, taggers targeted Nauss, costing the small business hundreds of dollars a year in paint to cover it up.

“We weren’t getting artists writing on our shop — we were getting kids who were making a mess,” Nauss manager Brent Halverson says. “You clean it off and it just gets tagged again.”
It became obvious to the long-time bike shop employee that a new strategy was needed.

Over the summer, Halverson put the call out to six local graffiti artists (also known as graffiti writers) to paint murals on the bike shop.

“I knew that it would at least be an improvement to cover it up with something more colourful, more attractive, and hopefully get locals artists and the community involved in the project.”
He pitched the project to the shop owner, who didn’t like the idea at first, but eventually came around.

Nauss hasn’t been tagged since the murals went up.
The shop is one of several small businesses on the Halifax peninsula that are using an unwritten code to their advantage.
In general, graffiti writers across North America follow a series of unwritten rules. They don’t tag houses, religious structures, memorials or tombstones. And they won’t tag over another tag. It’s called “crossing out,” and it’s considered disrespectful.

Following that logic, graffiti artists won’t paint over a mural unless they can improve on what was there before.
There’s also a rule that writers should respect mom and pop businesses, Halverson adds. But not everyone does.

After the Nauss murals went up, an unsolicited fat-lettered tag known as a “throw up” appeared on the bakery next door.

Murals can prevent tagging, but they may also attract attention to a space, giving the impression that graffiti is welcome on blank surfaces nearby. Nothing is guaranteed.

Just over a year ago, George Kapsalis, owner of the Paper Chase Newsstand and Cafe on Blowers Street, tried the same strategy as Halverson, with mixed results.

For as long as Kapsalis can remember, one wall of his cafe, located in an alley, has been a tag magnet. Pressure washing the wall didn’t help.

The tags always came back.

So when a young graffiti artist approached Kapsalis with a portfolio of his work, the owner decided to give him a shot. The artist painted a series of graffiti-style murals on the wall. Kapsalis paid for his materials and gave him “a little something for his trouble.”

“Instead of somebody doing it that I have no control over, at least I’ll allow someone that has some type of artistic value to put something there that might dissuade other people from tagging it,” the cafe owner says.
“Doing something like that is not going to stop everybody from tagging — people who have no sense of honour or code or whatever. But I weighed it out and thought that was my best option.

“There’s some kind of code. I don’t really know. But so far, so good, you know?”

His business partner and wife isn’t so quick to agree. She points to a tag on the wall at the end of the alley. “This is new,” she says.

The artist left empty space above and below the murals. The new tag appeared in the empty space below. Still, one tag in one year is certainly an improvement.

According to one local graffiti writer, people will tag any empty space. He didn’t want his name or alias used, so we’ll call him John.

“Clean surfaces invite tags,” John says. “Had the mural filled the space fully, it is less likely that third party tags would appear there.”

“Writers by and large respect murals. To tag a mural is a sign of disrespect within the writers circle and rarely happens.”

Another local graffiti artist — one of those who painted Nauss — concurs with John. He didn’t want his name used, but his alias is Bike More.

“There is a good chance that the mural won't get touched, but that still leaves the rest of the building open,” Bike More says.

“If the space is not entirely filled, it will be,” he adds. “If a business commissions or grants permission, it is wise to ensure that all of the negative space is filled. This is even true for graffiti writers practicing on legal walls. If you do not ‘take out the spot,’ it will catch tags.”

The unwritten rules in the subculture stem from the New York City graffiti scene in the 1970s and 1980s, which was popularized by movies like Wild Style and documentaries like Style Wars, John explains. “The rules are somewhat outlined in those films and still remain gospel for the most part,” he says. Both artists emphasize no graffiti rules are universal, however.

“Tagging can never be stopped completely as long as humans are being taught the written word,” John says. “But maybe society can impact the nature of the output through tolerance rather than opposition.”

Halverson gave Bike More and his friends the freedom to paint what they wanted as long as they did it well. Down the road, the Nauss manager hopes to build removable plywood panels on the exterior of the building so artists can paint murals and later sell their work.

The idea of businesses commissioning or permitting murals in order to prevent tagging resonates with John and Bike More.

“A good way to help establish respect is by allowing people to paint (a wall) as they want, setting rules such as ‘if you tag my building, the wall will be taken away from you’ or something similar,” Bike More says. “It is all about working together here.”

“I feel like it's beneficial to all,” John says. “For the business owner, it allows their business to become a landmark and visually unique. For the artist, it showcases their abilities and legitimizes their credibility as an artist. For the community, it brings character to the area and facilitates acceptance and appreciation of public art.”

Tattoos form missing ink between dying art and the art of dyeing

Time lines … Lauren Winzer and her handwritten tattoos. Photo: Tamara Dean

IS HANDWRITING set to ''vanish from our lives altogether?'' Are emails and texts robbing us of ''the most powerful sign of our individuality?'' So asks Philip Hensher, author of the new book The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting.

But Lauren Winzer would beg to differ. A tattoo artist with Sydney's Hunter and Fox, she says a growing number of people over the past year have requested their loved ones' handwriting be permanently marked on their bodies.

''It's definitely more popular, it's always something meaningful that they want to get tattooed in handwriting,'' Winzer says. For instance, she has had mothers request their own names, as written by their kindergarten-aged children, be inked on them.

Pure appeal ... handwritten tattoos by children and friends are all the rage.

''And two weeks ago, a guy came in; his friends know him specifically for having really horrible handwriting. He drew the stencil of the phrase, 'I've had a gutful' … in his own handwriting, and I just traced on top of it. It's [the writing] shocking. There's two 'a's in there, and they're completely different from each other. He was like, 'This is kind of what I'm known for; I'm going to kind of embrace it.''

 

The chief executive of Bondi Ink, Wendy Tadrosse, has witnessed the same trend. She says, in the case of children's handwritten tattoos it is the ''purity'' inherent in the frequently wonky scrawls that account for their appeal. ''You just look at it and … 'Yeah, that's just pure. It's just innocence'.''

Tadrosse has also had several sailors recently come in to have love letters written decades ago by their grandmothers, to their grandfathers, tattooed on their ribs.

Personal touch ... a man known among his friends for his terrible handwriting decided to have it tattoed on him.

''They've had their grandparents pass away, and it's love quotes and sonnets and things like that,'' she says. ''I would never think to do something like that. Usually you'd have a symbol of the grandmother, not actually her handwriting.''

According to Winzer, these tattoos do, indeed, fulfil what Hensher says is one of the most meaningful functions of handwriting - to show how ''distinctively human'' we are.

As an example, she gives the two tattoos she has of her best friend JJ's handwriting; the phrases ''Sick as hell'' and ''Pretty wise'' - which are inside jokes - on the front of her ankles.

''Because it's a boy's handwriting, it's just overly shitty looking. I think it's kind of harder for boys to write, so when they actually put the effort to try and write something out, it's kind of cute.''

Art: Wealth of works, all by women

The Alter collection - 500 pieces - debuts at the Academy of the Fine Arts.

"Sea Shells, Gold Fish and Rain" (1993), oil on canvas by Janet Fish. It mixes still life and landscape. 
Linda Lee Alter's collection of art by women, 25 years in the making, makes its public debut at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under the title "The Female Gaze." 

At the entrance to the show, visitors are greeted by a monumental ceramic "grandmother" figure by Viola Frey that unequivocally announces not only that one has entered the domain of female art, but that this art easily holds its own with any other. As one quickly comes to realize, the "gaze" in question refers not only to women expressing how they experience daily life and the world, it embodies the intelligence that shaped the collection.
Alter isn't an art historian or exclusively a connoisseur; she's also an artist. Yet her vision goes beyond even a female artist's perspective.

The nearly 500 works in a variety of media, which she gave to the academy two years ago, incorporate an emphatically humanist point of view.

Aesthetic judgments played a role in her acquisitions, but the unifying thread is a concern for how people, especially women, get on in life. This, not just the desire to give female artists more visibility, is what gives her collection special appeal.

Curator Robert Cozzolino had the not-so-enviable task of figuring out how to shape this mass of art into a workable show. The collection itself offered only one hint: It's mostly representational, strong on narration and symbolism. Abstraction isn't much of a presence.

It isn't a collection of stunning masterpieces, either, though overall quality is consistently high. Judging by the catalog, which includes all 185 artists Alter acquired, the art that was left out would have made an equally satisfying show.

Cozzolino decided to organize the 244 works into three sections - Selfhood and Community, Politics, and Nature and Ecology. The first could easily be two categories, while the other two are broadly elastic.
Nevertheless, they serve the intended purpose, to impose structure and make the show comfortable to navigate. Alter began to collect about 1985, by which time the feminist movement had proved the argument that female artists were woefully underrepresented in museums and galleries and in the art market.

She says she was guided by several principles - to form a collection she eventually would place in a museum, to buy art she wanted to live with, and to patronize artists in the Philadelphia region as well as those known nationally.

She also decided to concentrate on the last four decades, which gives the exhibition a contemporary flavor.
Both the show and the catalog suggest that over 25 years she bought art by just about every prominent woman who exhibited solo in Philadelphia. Off the top of my head, I couldn't think of anyone she missed.
While local artists are strongly represented, there are enough national figures to preclude provincialism. Besides Frey, they include Louise Bourgeois, Joan Brown, Kiki Smith, Gladys Nilsson, Alice Neel, Judy Chicago, Miriam Shapiro, Beatrice Wood, and Faith Ringgold.

The collection's humanist dimension emerges in several ways. One is the generous percentage of minority artists, especially African Americans and Asian Americans. Another is the large number of works that address motherhood and female self-image, particularly nudes and self-portraits.

Two examples: As a declaration of pride and self-assurance, Diane Edison's semi-nude self-portrait is the most assertive, even combative, image of its kind I've ever encountered. And Neel's full-body nude portrait of a pregnant friend, Claudia Bach, posed as an odalisque, defines a genre no male painter could hope to equal, even in the unlikely event one was drawn to the subject and brave enough to attempt it.

Alter's collection oozes empathy both for female artists and for women's lives. It gives the expected attention to traditional "women's media," particularly fiber art, in just the right proportion.

In fiber, Alter chose examples - such as Ringgold's painted story quilt and Shapiro's collage image of a dress - that combine fabric and painted elements in a way that de-stigmatizes the dominant medium.

Yet the collection doesn't go overboard on explicitly feminist polemics, with two prominent exceptions: a plate from Judy Chicago's Dinner Party and Elaine Reichek's embroidered sampler that caustically decries female "bondage" dating back to Adam and Eve.

The Nature and Ecology section is perhaps the most amorphous of the three themes and also the least manifestly "female."

It includes landscapes and still lifes, and an effusively colored painting by Janet Fish that mixes both. An exquisitely detailed pencil drawing of trees by Emily Brown and another of coastal rocks by Edna Andrade, both of which represent intense scrutiny of nature, also stand out as exemplars of female sensibility.

The Alter gift has been integrated into the academy's full collection, not segregated as an autonomous entity; some pieces from it will always be on view, the museum says.

This approach is not only sensible, it responds constructively to the nagging question of whether regarding "art by women" as a genre has become a patronizing anachronism.

Female artists haven't yet achieved full parity with men, in museums or in the marketplace, and, as the Alter gift demonstrates, art by women does deal with themes that men avoid. Yet the gift also confirms that, in aesthetic terms, female artists no longer should be judged by a standard peculiar to them.

Keepsakes await at Berea's Velvet Box Art Glass Studio

One of the Jennifer Pitts' creations that has won several awards.

BEREA - The Velvet Box Art Glass Studio in Berea came by its name quite viably.

"I wanted to create jewelry that you don’t hang on a bathroom door, but pieces that you keep to pass on to your children and grandchildren. I want the purchaser to keep them in a velvet box."

Jennifer and John Pitts own the hidden gem that is tucked in with industrial-looking buildings on West Bagley Road. The studio, located at 794 W. Bagley Road, has a mini-open house from 3-9 p.m. Dec. 7. The studio will offer a "buy two, get one free" bead special at the event.

The two create sparkling and unusual European "add-a-bead" glass beads that can be worn on bracelets and necklaces as well as specially made sculptured glass jewelry. The gallery also has artwork from local photographers, sculptors, potters and blacksmiths.

Jennifer makes beads that will fit any type of bracelet or necklace. Some the designs have raised swirls and sculptured beads. Her Tree of Life piece is a wearable glass sculpture with a highly detailed, multi-dimensional tree.

"The raised swirl design is technically very challenging. It changes the way light hits the glass and really shows off your bracelet," she said. "We also have silver inside our beads. They are truly different."

John is the silversmith. He places a solid sterling silver core in the beads. He also does fused glass work, which is done in a very strong flame. He cools and then heats layers of glass, which fuse together creating distinctive patterns.

"He hand paints designs on them, which almost no one does," Jennifer said. "He then coats them with a clear covering. They are extremely durable."

Some of John’s favorite hand-painted pieces include a light house and windmill.

These are some of the handmade beads available at the studio.

 An out-of-the-ordinary creation they offer is the memory gem. The glasswork mingles ashes from a loved one or pet into a molten-glass design. Jennifer created the first piece after her father died. She avoided the original vial that contained his ashes. As she was creating some glasswork, she thought of what her father would tell her when they looked at the sky years ago.

"The brightest stars in the sky were loved ones we lost watching over us," she said. "I created a heart as dark as the night sky with thousands of glittering silver stars and gorgeous aurora borealis streaks. Into those layers I incorporated Dad’s ashes and a diamond he gave Mom. When I wear it, I feel him close to my heart and I know he’s there watching over me."

The studio also offers classes for individuals and groups. The Glass Experience class includes an instructor, a torch that anyone can use during the class, refreshments and appetizers — giving you a first-hand experience working with glass. Other classes are available, or customers can rent a torch during the day.

Store hours are 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday-Friday. It is open on weekends when the couple is not at an art show. Sundays are by appointments.