Artist For A Living

Making things is all I’ve ever done. I’ve done that before I knew there was a name for the act, that it could be witnessed, that it could be negotiated. Making felt less like a decision and more like a condition: I had found a way of existing in perpetual dialogue with whatever moved me. I took the ideas, sensations and moods I encountered wherever I went, and turned them into a surface, a sentence, a shape. I needed no audience for it, no permission. That’s just what I did and how I lived, how life passed through my hands. Artist For A Living.

It was about translating what I felt and couldn’t always name into something that would exist outside of me. Noticing the emotional climate of a room, feeling into the way a moment emerged then disappeared. Wait, what do you mean, paying your bills that way? Oh, I just assumed that if I kept being whimsical like that, everything else would arrange itself around it. Or not, whatever! But either way, I’d still be doing the thing. You know, being an artist. Living.

Artist, artist. Artist. I embraced the word before brushing myself up against the nuances of its meaning. I liked the sound of it, how the sound resonated inside when I said it out loud, to no one but myself. How it made me feel. Not because it clarified anything, but specifically because it didn’t, not really. It was space giving. I always had a sense I could fill up that space with anything I wanted, and that somehow, I would never run out. There would always, always be more.

At this point, art wasn’t a career path, or a plan, it was just a way of being. A way of metabolizing experience. You know, Artist For a Living. As in, sustained by the essence of all that lives and feeds the mind and heart... No? It’s not that I wasn’t thinking about money. I was thinking about it all the time. Just not like that. I was thinking about how my mother’s bedroom was also our living room, of all the ways she sighed at the cash register. I had never thought about the reality of earning an income in relation to my very serious mission to move through the world with attention to texture, temperature etc. Ah! You mean, artist for a living. My bad. Nevermind.

I didn’t grow up thinking of the art world. It didn’t occur to me for a long time that there was such a thing, even after I had a foot in it. I wandered into it sideways, almost by accident, while watching many friends enter through the big front door, wondering where they were going. Art school? What for? I was praised and celebrated when I landed my first gallery job, and yet I clocked in daily asking myself what I was doing there. By the time my contract ended, I still didn’t know. What I knew, is that wasn’t for me. Problem is, I had already drank so much of the cloudy water, faking smiling at “important people” and listening to conversations I couldn’t be bothered to have, that I got really dizzy, and it took me a second to shake that off.

Intoxicated, I started watching other people be artists, but not in the way that you look up to them. I was trying to learn something before anybody could find out that I didn’t know it. I came with curiosity, I stayed with insecurity. I wasn’t observing anymore, I was measuring. And I saw bigger containers. Louder signals. More certainty. It’s not that they taught me how to do that at the gallery, but I learned that there was something more to gain out of being an artist, a different type of “richness” (and not just financial) than the spiritual wealth I had made for myself, building worlds in my bedroom. I wondered if whatever I had to offer was still enough. Needless to say, I was little light-headed from dissociating in order to play a game I had no fun playing. I could have left my cards on the table and walked away, but instead, I stayed and played another round.

Now, I had something to prove. It’s as if legitimacy lived somewhere outside my body, guarded by scale and recognition and numbers. I stretched my practice past its natural elasticity. I started pretending and lying I wasn’t, because if having someone doubting me felt dangerous, having them knowing that I doubted myself too was deadly. I gave my art a house it didn’t fit in. I moved my ideas (fragile, intuitive, still-forming) into structures that weren’t built for them. I unpacked all my stuff but never found a place for any of it, so I pushed it in the corners instead.

No wonder the money bit was such a sore point. With a better grasp at what being an artist for a living really meant—less poetic, more consequential, I worked hard at it, but for the ambiguous reasons. I wanted to be an artist for a living too, but not just to follow my genuine poetic impulses. It was about making up for the self-esteem I had lost and thought I’d recover with the title. Artist for a living. I saw what success looked like for others, and how good it looked on them, so I forced my shame into the same outfit, hoping I’d see a corrective experience or at the very least, a better story reflected back to me in the mirror. Spoiler: I saw neither.

Money came and went. Sometimes generously, sometimes not at all. Even then, I rejected the myth of the starving artist, having seen too many artists live well for that—but I did, at times, let precarity harden into a stance. I had a point to make. As if enduring instability and fighting my way through it could further dismantle the illusion that passion must be traded for safety. There were moments when resisting that narrative gave me more momentum than the whimsy itself. Not sexy to admit, but it’s true. This particular and frenetic ego dance lasted almost a decade. At last, party’s over. I’m still a bit hungover, but I’m glad to finally go home.

In the aftermath, I worked a full-time job where my hands never touched clay or paint, and I’ve never felt more like an artist than then. I had promised myself I’d never go back to an office, and doing so brought mixed feelings as well as this heart-opening insight: the art was still being made. Internally, relentlessly. Attention was still tuned. Desire, still circulating. I was still translating life as it passed through me, even if the translation was at time intangible. Intangible never meant not real, and this new setting brought as many possibilities as it seemingly took away.

The substance doesn’t evaporate because the container is porous, or vaguely undefined. You don’t stop being an artist because you step away from a studio, or because you earn money doing something else, or because you let your practice go quiet for a while. The impulse doesn’t retire. Ever. It transforms. With you.

That’s the thing I forgot for a moment, but now I remember: you get to choose how you live. Sure, being an artist is a job you can make a lot of money with. Or a little. Or none at all, or just enough to live comfortably and be able to keep making art.

But none of this matters, as long as you keep touching beautiful things and remain touched by them. Touched by feeling, by longing. Touched by the fleeting intelligence of a moment that ends as soon as it starts, then begins again. You can’t stop doing that, even if you wanted to. There’s just no way. I’m saying all that to say: I have always been an artist and in the millions of versions of myself I have yet to become, I know I’ll never be anything else. For better or for worse. Artist For Life.