Anonymous asked: I’m a 21 year old painter and graphic designer who is feeling a bit boggled at this point in my life because I’m about to graduate college, am not sure what I want to do with my future, and feel slightly overlooked and unappreciated. I would like to ask how you felt at this point in your life/what your plans for the future were, and any advice in general pertaining to artists trying to make a name (or stable source of income and fulfillment) for themselves.
I might be projecting here, but the tenor of your post makes me feel like your expectations for art school were inflated. It’s okay though. I think it’s a common thing. For people unhappy with the soul-numbing slog that is K-12, art school takes on a mystical air. It seems like the logical place to take a wounded, creative soul.
As you’ve found out, though, art schools are no different from other schools in their inability to help with or even acknowledge spiritual malaise. As an artist, you are expected to be happy and grateful that you get to do that “easy fun stuff” while the vast majority are toiling for the man. But you toil, too, don’t you. You are not so different from everyone else.
This is why the most interesting developments in education, what few there happen to be, are not in arts education. But I digress.
At your age I was still in junior college and working on a portfolio for Art Center and going about it all rather poorly. When I was close to graduating Art Center, I felt much the same way you did, and I think that uncertainty was a big reason I went to graduate school. What I didn’t get from K-12 I didn’t get from Art Center, but I was sure this time with graduate school things would be different. They were and weren’t.
I was also a different person back then. I was very cynical and judgmental and [pathologically, Ed.] insecure. Even if Art Center were a thousand times better, I still would have felt “slightly overlooked and unappreciated’ because no one thing can ever fulfill the expectations of a desperate person.
I used to think that I could separate art from life. I used to think I didn’t need people so long as I had great work, press, attention, gallery affiliation, and a hot website. Nowadays, if I am lucky enough to have a show, I am extremely grateful career-wise and all that, but really what I look forward to most and later recollect most fondly and vividly, is seeing my friends. It has made my knock-kneed efforts in this area all the more satisfying. This is probably super obvious to most people, but it is genuinely something that took me a long time to understand. A far cry from Steve the undergrad curmudgeon of yore.
My plans were and always have been to make the incredible work I felt—51% of the time—I was capable of. These days, I hope, I’m less frantic about the future part of it, the planning part, the most insidious part. Thoughts towards the future have to be loosely sketched in and referred to infrequently, just enough to give your day some shape. Otherwise, quality of life suffers. I’m not the type to declare much of anything, but on this, I do declare.
I hesitate to give advice because I hardly feel qualified. Yet here I am, typing, pontificating, as usual. Anyway. I’ve found failure—and therefore success—to be emotional in both origin and makeup. I won’t say anything beyond that as there’s a lot of material out there on the subject. If you’d like, you can e-mail me for some book recommendations for a modest start on the matter.
Good luck.
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Steve Kim is an artist living in Los Angeles whose refreshing approach to art made me sit up and take notice. He maintains an up-to-date and thoughtful site full of his finished pieces(paintings and drawings), sketches and musings.
I love how through Steve’s process pieces, I am able to observe a unique style unfold. He builds up a clean cut and detailed drawing/ painting over the course of a few documenting photographs..only to drastically alter the form in the next shot. A bout of abstraction occurs, a face gets scribbled out, a limb becomes an amalgamation of colors, so as to become almost unrecognizable from its initial form.
Being able to observe how Steve works is almost like being let in on a secret.
He is added to my “when I make my first million” list of artists. Congrats!
It’s worth pouring through the 50+ pages of his site.
It’s a Tuesday morning, what else are you doing? ♥
