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Category: career in art

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Tenacity

Cece and her self-portrait in progress.
Cece has been working on her self-portrait for two weeks; Jingwei  for a week. This is a laborious process of learning to measure, learning to model, and then assembling these techniques into an autobiographical whole. This is the hardest assignment I give to high school seniors, and their ability to buckle down into it says a lot about their future prospects.
Sandy’s charcoal self-portrait of this week.
Since Sandy Quang was here and we weren’t painting, she decided to do a fast charcoal self-portrait as well. This gave me a great opportunity to compare her drawing to the one she did for her own portfolio in 2008.
Sandy’s graphite self-portrait of 2008.
The biggest difference between a teenager and an art school graduate is assurance. Sandy whipped this drawing off in an hour, and her mark-making reflects that. Her measurement and transcription were painstaking in 2008; they’re automatic today. That reflects hundreds and hundreds of hours of drawing in the interim.
Jingwei’s unfinished graphite self-portrait.
Every plein airpainter is used to certain comments from passers-by. One that I’m sensitive to is, “I used to paint, but I don’t have time anymore.” Another is, “That looks like so much fun!” Yes, art is fun, but it rests on a solid foundation of instruction, learning and practice. If you’re not willing to do that, you’d be wise to choose an easier career path.  Most successful painters I know have spent years learning their craft. When youngsters come to me to study art, the first question is whether they have the tenacity for an art career.
Cece’s unfinished graphite self-portrait.

I will be teaching in Acadia National Park next August. Message me if you want information about the coming year’s classes or this workshop.
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Hobby losses

The Au Sable River at Jay, 12X9, oil on canvasboard. Painted on the side of the road in Jay, New York.
I once had the following discussion with an IRS auditor:
She: “Your mileage log doesn’t identify destinations. You need to show destinations.”
Me: “I’m a plein airpainter. There are no ‘destinations’. I drive until I find what I want to paint, and then I paint it. The best I could come up with is something like ‘cows at the side of the road’.”
She (unmoved): “For the purposes of a mileage log, you need to show destinations.”
Teaching on the side of a road somewhere near Lincolnville, ME.
At the end of the interview, she suggested to me that I’d better start showing a profit or the IRS would consider my work a hobby. She was (contrary to popular opinion) very nice. But I am keenly aware that my tax returns are a red flag: we have high W2 income and Schedule C losses.
That’s actually typical for artists. Even the most successful of us usually do something else, like teaching or graphic design, to cobble a living together. But if you ask us our profession, we are artists. The big money on our work will be made after we’re dead. Denying us the tax advantages other businesses get is adding insult to injury.
Sunset over Saranac Lake, by little ol’ me. Painted on the side of a road somewhere in the Adirondacks.
In 2010, the IRS accused Professor Susan Crile of underpaying her taxes by more than $81,000, saying that her work was not a profession but something she did as part of her job teaching Studio Art at Hunter College. (See Forbes’ coverage hereand here, and the NY Times’ coverage here.)
The IRS’ determination was based on her lack of a written business plan (!) and the idea that she made art not primarily to sell but to keep her job as a teacher. Never mind that her work hangs in the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim, the Brooklyn Museum, the Phillips Collection, the Hirshhorn, and at eight colleges and universities. 
Painting at the side of the road near Lake Placid, NY.
Mercifully, the judge saw it differently:
She has worked for more than 40 years in media that include oil, acrylic, charcoal, pastels, printmaking, lithograph, woodcut, and silkscreen. She has exhibited and sold her art through leading galleries; she has received numerous professional accolades, residencies, and fellowships; and she is a full-time tenured professor of studio art at Hunter College in New York City. (Judge Albert Lauber)
“Bottom line is that, in general, lawyers have much better educations than accountants,” wrote Peter J Reilly. He went on to note that Judge Lauber holds an MA in Classics from Clare College, Cambridge.
Painted at the side of a road in Camden, ME. (Available from Camden Falls Gallery)
While Professor Crile has prevailed on the Section 183 (hobby loss) question, she still has to answer the question of how much of the quarter million or so in losses she claimed over the last five years will be deemed legitimate. That’s a reminder to us to be honest, even conservative, in our bookkeeping.

Message me if you want information about next year’sclasses and workshops.
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Did you miss your calling?

Dr. Seuss was a successful commercial artist when, at age 34, he wrote his first book, “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.” It was rejected by publishers dozens of times. He was in his late 40s when he began successfully writing and selling children’s books. He did this advertisement in the 1930s.
This past week I had conversations with two artists about the feasibility of being a full-time artist.
One is a woman with a young family, a mortgage, an MFA and a good (albeit temporary) job. Judging by the work I’ve seen, she has prodigious talent. If given the opportunity for a permanent position, should she take it? Or should she chuck that idea and try to work as a waitress nights and weekends so that she can still make art.
As a working mother, she is already doing two jobs. Adding a third job will be difficult, if not impossible. Until her kids are old enough for school, she’d be smart to do whatever pays best, and save money against the day she drops the day job and takes up painting again. In the meantime, she can carve out a small corner of her house and a few hours a week to nurture her talent, even if it’s by sketching in her spare time.
Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses, was the poster girl for late-life career changes, having turned to painting in her seventies. Here, Country Fair, 1950.
In essence, that’s what I did. I worked in the marketplace until I was in my late 30s, when a combination of life events made it possible—mandatory, even—for me to resume painting. (There was a time when our society acknowledged that raising children was valuable work. Now, childrearing is supposed to run silently in the background, taking no time or effort at all.)
One of my painting students has an MBA and work experience in an area of business analysis I won’t pretend to understand. She picked up brushes in response to a life crisis and in the process discovered that she has a real affinity for it.
On Saturday, we discussed what the next step might be for a person who wants to start selling paintings. As so often happens with these things, Life answered her question; she was approached about doing a solo show at a local venue.
Vincent Van Gogh didn’t actually start painting until he was in his late 20s, when he only had a decade left to live. Most of his masterpieces were created in the last two years of his life. Wheat Field with Crows, 1890, is generally accepted to be his last painting.
That’s a tremendous affirmation, but as we old-timers know, a show is just a doorway through which you enter the next phase of your work. She still has a long, hard slog ahead of her, but she has the character to endure it.
Neither of these women will find it an easy road. But in both cases, I think they will find something very valuable comes from it.

Come to Maine and learn to paint before it’s too late. I have two openings left for my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.
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The trials of a young art-school graduate

Meeting of Fronts, from Jeff Swartout’s senior show went to New York and was sold. Heady success for a young kid.

One of the groups affected disproportionally by the 2008-13 economic malaise has been recent college graduates. About half of them scrape by either unemployed or marginally employed. It’s always taken time for kids to find their niche, but it appears to have gotten tougher in the last five years.
Art students, however, have always expected to cobble a living together after graduation. Sadly, many of them leave their field, since it’s an unreceptive world that pretty much leaves the young artist to flounder without mentoring.

A cat, drawn in multiple poses by Jeff Swartout. Hard to take on big projects without the structure of a studio, but one can always draw.
I’ve watched the career of one young artist with considerable interest. Jeff Swartout is a 2012 graduate of Alfred University and a talented young painter.
When Jeff’s painting, top, went on to New York and sold in May of 2012, I was optimistic about his chances of success. “It was a hugely validating experience,” he said. In a normal market it would have opened the door to more opportunities, but that didn’t happen. “In the back of my mind I knew I wasn’t experienced enough to live on my own or make a living as an artist.”
Jeff has great painting chops, but he can’t really see a clear path forward. When I asked him where he wanted to be in twenty years, he answered, “I don’t know.”
“I could do anything and be happy as long as I’m learning something. The more I think about it, and look back on my past work, the more I think I want to pursue illustration/animation,” he said.

That confusion is common enough at that age, but it’s made more difficult because in our society, artists get almost no help in establishing careers.  However, even without a clear goal, Jeff knows the first step is to get out of Binghamton and move to a vibrant regional art market. His choice is Asheville, NC. “I just want to marinate in a different culture for a while,” he said. “I fell in love with North Carolina, felt inspired, and loved being so close to the deep outdoors. Plus, Asheville is such a cool and progressive city.”

And figure studies, done this year, by Jeff Swartout.
To that end, he’s working nights at Kohl’s and looking for a second job. It’s a good plan. Although we New Yorkers have been trained to think of Manhattan as the Center of the Known Universe, a good regional market actually makes more sense for an emerging artist.
Almost every college student expresses doubts about career choices, but the art major has the added burden of having spent his or her formative years hearing from almost everyone how an art major is a dumb idea. “Before college I had so many aspirations, and somewhere between my sophomore and senior years my motives changed. I’m still figuring out what the root of that is and if it’s ultimately helpful or harmful.”
But I’ve observed that most young people actually like what they’ve chosen once they actually start working. For one thing, work is a structured activity. Your job assignments take the place of your school assignments.
That’s a luxury artists don’t have. “Without a studio, peer review, or advisors to discuss my work with, I found after college that I didn’t know what to do with myself,” Jeff told me. “The motivations I had to draw before and after college were completely different because I got so caught up in assignments and projects that when I no longer had a prompts, I floundered.”
Jeff’s path may never involve a conventional job, but he may be getting to the recharge point all the same. ”I’ve recently inhaled a gust of inspiration, so perhaps that will change as I practice.”
Stick with it, kid. The world needs what you’re selling.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!