How to be an Artist
Would you like to be an artist? Here's how:
Make art
Keep making art
That's all. That's the post.
Oh, you want more? That’s too simple? Maybe you're right. How about this.
Seven Things You Don't Need to be an Artist
1. An art degree
Degrees are great. Art degrees are great. School is great. You get to work on your craft, study and learn from the best in your field, and meet other artists. But you don't need a degree to be an artist. You just need to make art.
2. An audience
I don't know how you feel about having an audience. For me, the thought is simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating. I would rather die than be noticed, but also please look at me and read my stuff.
Whether or not you share my ambivalence to having an audience, the fact is you don't need one to be an artist. The experience of art is a co-creation between artist and audience, but the making of art makes the artist. A baker who bakes a cake that no-one eats is still a baker.
3. Talent
Talent is overrated. Take my word for it as a gifted kid still recovering from a paralyzing case of fixed mindset: Talent will trip you up. It will make you think you don't have to work as hard as you do, and it will create a self-image that you have to protect by never taking risks.
It's fine if you were born with an eye for composition and take good pictures without trying, or if you're blessed with great rhythm or a good ear. Talent makes things easier… for a little while. But at some point — maybe after a few months, a few years, or even a decade — your ambition will outstrip your talent. Then you'll have to figure out what all your less talented colleagues already know: How to learn. How to persist. How to suck at something until you don't.
4. Skill
You don't even need skill to be an artist. I'm serious!
Madonna built a career as a not-very-good singer. She didn't take singing lessons until she starred in Evita, thirteen years after she released "Holiday", her first chart-topping single.
When I met artist and author Adam J. Kurtz, I asked him to sign my notebook. Instead, he drew his famous Feelings jar, joking, "I can only draw three things!" He has built a solid career as an artist and designer without fancy drawing skills.
5. A studio
It would be a lovely thing to have a beautiful studio, awash in natural light, with plenty of shelves and drawers to hold all your wonderful art things. Nobody would complain about having a studio.
But you don't need one to be an artist.
You can make art in a corner. You can make it in the bathtub. You can make it in a little notebook you stuff in your bag. You can scribble poems on sticky notes and create dances in alleyways.
With a little imagination — and I know you have a little imagination — you can make art without a studio.
6. Money + Time
Like a beautiful studio, it would certainly be nice to have plenty of money and time. It would be wonderful to be able to buy the best materials, the finest paints, a splendid instrument. And to have uninterrupted hours in which to practice and work.
But it's not a necessity. With ingenuity you can make art with cheaper materials, practice on a mediocre instrument. With persistence you can figure out how to make art in little slices of time, or in longer bursts but less frequently.
7. Youth
Last but not least, you don't need to be young to make art. You don't need to have already started. You can start now.
So what do you need to be an artist?
1. Desire
You have to want to.
2. Persistence
You have to keep going. When you don't have money or time. When you don't have a place to work, when you don't have a lot of talent, when it's hard and you're frustrated. You have to go back and do it again. And again. And again.
3. Ingenuity
All those obstacles can be figured out and worked around. You can work with more accessible materials, or find a way to get something better. Borrow, inherit, steal! (Don't steal. Or if you do, don't say I told you to.)
Can you create in the early morning? At lunchtime? In twenty minutes snatched at a coffee shop every day before work?
I know you can figure this stuff out. You're creative and ingenious.
And besides, you have to, so that you can make art. Because you're an artist.