Unhappy in your art career?

Envy, covetousness, and false expectations are all ways to guarantee a rotten time as an artist.

Dyce Head in the early morning light, Carol L. Douglas

I haven’t been able to paint for weeks. It seems as if my peers have made fantastic strides in that time. I look at their work on Instagram and Facebook and it’s downright depressing to see the clarity, color, and compositions they’ve achieved while I’m lying on the couch with my feet elevated.

I’m competitive; I’ll admit it. It’s not a good trait. I have a dear friend who is capable of shrugging off the worst jurying news. She isn’t focused on the competition, but on her own development as an artist. If I ever grow up, I’d like to be just like her.

As Ecclesiastes reminds us, “all toil and all skill in work come from a man's envy of his neighbor. This also is vanity and a striving after wind.” Envy leads to anger and covetousness, but it also burns up the envier. Being competitive is a rush when it’s all going our way, but more often, it just makes us miserable.

Lonely Lighthouse (Parrsboro, NS), Carol L. Douglas

Another great way to kill your joy in painting is to tailor your work too closely to a niche a gallerist has identified for you. Yes, lighthouses sell on the coast of Maine, and they’re fascinating to paint. Do you want to spend all your days churning out pictures of them?

Fitting work to the marketplace is wise. Fitting it to anyone else’s expectations is very foolish. What will sell is not just a matter of content; it’s a combination of that and your approach to the content.

If you’re a young person, you probably seek advice from your parents. Neither of mine were entrepreneurs. Their advice, while grounded in love, was the product of their own experiences.

Cape Spear Road (Newfoundland), Carol L. Douglas. That's not one, but two, lighthouses.

Even though my father taught me to paint, my parents were hardly enthusiastic about an art career for one of their children. I remember my first complete bust of a show. I’d sold nothing and a pastel fell off the wall, damaging the frame. “Well, you gave it a good try,” my mom sighed, thinking I’d get over the idea of a career in the arts.

This isn’t because families are not supportive; it’s because they believe the lie that it is impossible to prosper in the arts. To a degree, they’re right; it’s a lot easier to make a living as a computer programmer. But the arts are not a one-way ticket to poverty, either.

Owls Head Light, Carol L. Douglas

Still, once you decide to follow a career in the arts, you’ve made the decision that money isn’t your paramount value. Why, then, would you let money dictate every small decision you make thereafter? The marketplace is too intelligent to reward this, anyway. Trying to produce work that looks just like someone else’s is a guaranteed path to insignificance.

It’s all relative

Money can’t buy happiness but the lack of it seems to annoy just about everyone.

Waiting, by Carol L. Douglas. I no longer remember what bureaucratic inefficiency prompted this so many years ago, but I can still feel the frustration.

Last week, a line squall took down a branch from the maple in our front yard. Going out to inspect the damage, I saw that woodpeckers had hammered neat holes into much of it. The tree is mortally ill and there is no solution other than to have it taken down. It’s not a job I want to tackle because it overhangs power lines, Route 1, and my roof.

It’s going to cost about $1250, but that comes on the heels of $2000 in car repairs and $1400 for a washer and dryer this month (replacing a pair that died at the ripe old age of four years). I was having a small fit about cash flow when I got a text message from my pal Helen. I’ve written about her before: she’s a poor woman from North Braddock, PA who works part-time as a residential advisor for mentally ill adults. She has sarcoidosis along with an insatiable yearning for learning.

Helen was cheesed off. “I lost my nail clipper,” she fumed, “and I don’t have $1 to go to the Dollar Store to buy a replacement one right now.”

The Gleaners, 1857, by Jean-François Millet, was never meant to be romantic. It was initially viewed with deep suspicion for its sympathetic portrayal of the poor.

For some reason, that totally cracked me up. Here we are in vastly different places in the American economy, suffering from the same darn problem: lack of ready capital. It makes me wonder whether anyone, ever, has enough money.

There are 442 billionaires in the United States. If a billionaire spends $100,000 a day and never makes another dime, he will run out of cash in 25 years. That seems very secure to me, but I really don’t know how billionaires live, any more than I truly understand how Helen lives or she me.

I imagine that when someone is that focused on acquiring wealth it’s either aggression or a mental aberration related to hoarding. Perhaps being down to their last million could make them feel as nervous as I do when I’m down to my last centime.

Ruth, by Carol L. Douglas, was painted to demonstrate indirect painting, but it's also a portrait of someone short of ready cash. It's another very old painting from the mists of time.

Helen was homeless last year at Christmas. It was a terrible concatenation of circumstances that ended up with her, her daughter and her granddaughter losing all their personal possessions and being stashed by Social Services in a motel. She had nothing, not even her winter boots.

Being involved with the social welfare network means you get advice from social workers, whether you want or need it. One of them told Helen, completely seriously, that she needed help with her ‘hoarding problem.’ Apparently, standards for hoarding are very low when all your possessions will fit in the trunk of a Ford Fiesta.

Les Foins (Haymaking), 1877, by Jules Bastien-Lepage, who keenly felt the plight of the French peasant.

All of this is just a reminder of the wisdom of M. Micawber's famous recipe for happiness, from David Copperfield:

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.”

We live in a credit-driven economy that would be quite unrecognizable to our ancestors. Everyone does it—families, businesses, government. I try not to play, but I also know there’s only so much worrying one can do about money. After all, we’re bound to make more tomorrow.

Artist faces mountain of student debt

Abstraction, by Carol L. Douglas. Art can be done with nothing more than charcoal and newsprint.

Alex Katz is famous for having destroyed about a thousand of his own paintings while he tried to solidify his style. “There didn’t seem much reason to keep them. The positive thing was what I got out of the painting, not the paintings.” That was on top of an already-prestigious art education at Cooper-Union and Skowhegan.

That was in the 1950s and it runs deeply counter to our current zeitgeist. Today most artists document every stage of every painting on social media. I’m a product of my times and I like the way we work today. However, I did think about Katz recently while counseling a younger artist.

I’ve known G. since she was doing her master’s in art education at a private (and pricey) school in Rochester. She worked as my figure model. For her, grad school was a terrible career move. It didn’t translate into a job. Combined with her undergraduate bills, her loans ballooned to more than a quarter of a million dollars.

“Submission,” by Carol L. Douglas. G. modeled for this when she was an impecunious grad student.

In response, she took the path of least resistance: becoming an economic non-entity. That was one thing when she was a carefree sprite, but now that she has a husband and a child, she wants to work legitimately. She will find this close to impossible in a nation with no secrets. There is a big hole in her work history from when she stopped working in the formal economy. In this age where new employees are subject to credit checks, her overwhelming debt makes her a non-starter.

(I’m seldom nostalgic, but there was something to be said for the past, when a person could hop a train and leave his youthful indiscretions behind. Today our histories are tattooed into some kind of master database. We can never escape them. Even the supposedly-judgmental God of the Bible is far more merciful than that.)

This is, of course, a personal disaster for G. In a way, it’s also a perfect opportunity. She has explored Etsy as a means to making money, but hasn’t had a lightning-bolt idea. Why not take the Alex Katz route and make art as a process of self-discovery? Art can be made with nothing more than a block of wood and a sharp knife. She has both, and lots more. I suggested that she produce and destroy many works. When she finds what she is looking for, doors will open; they always do.

A maquette from the days when I still had time to experiment. Not being able to make money in art is in some ways a great liberation.

I’m the last person to recommend that anyone drop out of the formal economy. But the need to be a productive member of society outweighs our requirement to follow rules.

A few brief mentions:

A reader pointed out to me that several studies have shown that some men do not change their underwear daily. Market research firm Mintel found that “one in every five males do not change their underwear on a daily basis.” UK retailer Marks & Spencer pegged that at around a third of men. And Clorox found that one in every eight guys wear their underwear multiple times between washings.

I’m not sure what she thinks I can do about it.

Remember my post about Britain scrapping the A-Level in Art History? There was such a public outcry that the course has been reinstated. As we were in the middle of an election here, I missed the news about how they mounted their protest. I can’t see art historians rioting at the Palace of Westminster; they’d be much too careful of the furnishings. But I’m sure glad they succeeded.