Over the course of the last few Art Escape weekends a handful of people asked my advice on becoming a full-time artist. I hope my answers at the time were helpful but here’s a more thoughtful response now I’ve had time to reflect on the last decade and the years before.
Before I started painting full-time I was a sea kayak guide. I guided half day trips from Hahei Beach for Cathedral Cove Kayaks in the summer and in Winter Tyrell and I travelled to the Whitsundays and worked as guides for Salty Dog Sea Kayaking. Tyrell worked full time guiding multiday, full day and half day trips but there wasn’t enough work for me to be full time which suited me perfectly. I would spend the majority of each month I as a hermit painting all day every day. I would arrive back in New Zealand in spring with a tube full to the brim of new work.
Before we went to Australia each year we would pack up all our belongings into our old Toyota Hilux and park it at Tyrell’s Nana’s house and when we were in New Zealand we lived in a guides’ flat or in a tiny two roomed house with an outside bathroom. We shared the car but hardly used it as we would walk or bike most places. Our expenses and our responsibilities were minimal so when I made the choice to be full time and not return to Australia I didn’t have the stress of having big bills to pay or children to provide for.
So my first piece of advice is to take away any pressure to sell. Have another job, just enough to cover things until you’re confident you’re at a point that your art can take over and that allows you enough time and energy for art. Sea kayaking was perfect for me as it was physical, it kept me fit and strong and it immersed me in the environment that inspired me. Minimize your expenses as much as possible.
Paint what inspires you. It’s easy to fall into the trap of painting what you think people want or what you think will sell. Don’t. You do your best work when you paint what gets you motivated and excited. I paint because I have to, it’s a necessity for my happiness and making a living from it is a great by product. With every series I set myself a focus, something to learn or improve on and each new series built upon the last. For example some were to use light a shadows accurately, to be more spontaneous in my brushstrokes, to merge design and realism seamlessly.
It’s easy to look at other artists and feel lost, useless, that you’ll never be that good. Art isn’t a competition, never compare. Find the thing that makes your art yours. What is it that you do differently to everybody else? Is it your subject matter, colours, style?
Find a mentor. Find that special person that you can call up when you get stuck and say, ‘how do it fix it?’ and they don’t tell you the answer but give you the knowledge or ask you questions so you work it out for yourself. Once I was stuck on how to make an orca look like it racing through the water in a tight turn. Rather than tell me the fin was pointing the wrong way Souzie told me to watch videos of orca to study how they move. How do you find that person? Good question, probably like me, totally by chance, talking to people, sharing your work and your goals.
Being an artist isn’t just about creating although that’s the bit we enjoy the most. You also need to spend time, thought and energy on sharing your work with the world and on making it really easy for people to make it theirs (then you get to spend more time creating!). Now the tricky bit is how to do that. Do you want your work in a gallery and to pay commission for some else to do the second two parts of your job for you? I struggled to get into a gallery at times. There were so many awful rejections that I’d given up. Luckily, I had a few successes especially when I tried a new gallery here in the Coromandel. I was given a trial with Bread and Butter Gallery then exhibited my work there for ten years. It was fantastic for me at that time of my life and career.
As I was early in my career it gave my work endorsement. It was during the years I just wanted to paint and be prolific, I had my boys and time was limited so I was able to spend what little hours I had on the part of my job that I loved. I also lacked the social media and technological skills to do it myself efficiently. However, if you have those skills use them. The world is changing, you don’t have to do things the way they’ve always been done. Be creative, be unique! The opportunities in this field are only limited by your imagination. This is outside my comfort zone and doesn’t come naturally to me but I’m enjoying the challenge and learning.
There’s no blueprint to creating a life as an artist, it’s a very individual journey but I hope there’s a few gems in there for anyone wanting to follow that path. If you have any more questions for me or anything in particular you’d like me to write about please get in touch. I also include a tips and tricks section in my newsletter so if you haven’t joined that you can find the subscription box on the contacts page.