How to Become a Professional Artist

You loved to make art as a kid but gave it up in order to pursue a career and/or a family. Now you are considering going back to art. You’ve been messing around in your home office with some watercolors or computer collages or pastels and of late you have had an inkling to become more ‘serious’. Here are some mental and physical snares you will most likely encounter should you choose to jump into the professional art scene.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

1. Understand the isolation of the career. Making art can be a lonely lifestyle. Ways of getting around this are to get a studio that you share with others, start or join an artists group that you can meet with monthly, or to actually become an artist team. The pitfall of these suggestions is that your art time can become purely social and you won’t concentrate enough to get anything totally original done.
2. Realize that a large part of your time is spent in self-promotion. Have your artwork professionally photographed and burned onto CDs. Also on the CDs, and in print form, include your resume, artist statement and a list of the images on the CD along with the information on every image included. You will need to research, talk with people, and hire professionals to help you and do any number of promotional activities to promote your work. Whomever you send packets to, make sure to follow up with a call – don’t pester, but let them know that you care.
3. Make preparations for an exhibit. Alternative spaces are a great place to start. Slum around to various coffee shops and bookstores that exhibit art-–there are so many these days. Often these are not ideal places to display work–-they have insufficient lighting, viewers must lean over tables, etc. But at least it’s something for your résume.
4. Understand that gallery representation is not for every artist. Some artists do perfectly fine promoting themselves and selling work during ‘open studios’. Remember, a gallery will take 50 percent--at least–-of the retail price of your artwork. You have to price it pretty high in order to cover your time, framing and commission. Plus, if you’ve been selling your work cheaper before you get into a gallery you will have to double your prices, which means you will need to start over and build a whole new income bracket of collectors.
   
   Alas, if you really know you want to get into one then get in line. Any gallery worth their salt is going to be tough to break into. Even when you get in there is a good chance the gallery won’t do much for you. You’ll still have to promote yourself, get people to your show that might be interested in buying your work. The gallery is going to want to show people who sell art, also, so that they can pay the rent and reimburse the expenses used in promoting you.
5. Be prepared for discrimination. Dealers have to spend money to promote artists. Who are they going to want to promote, a young person with lots of potential and fresh work or a middle-aged person? Art is for the young and the art world is, unfortunately, ageist. Young artists get the buzz, middle-aged ones get almost nothing, and old artists get sympathy reviews and awards.
6. Endnotes

Tips & Warnings

• If your art is authentic and original, something that has never quite been seen on the face of this earth before, people are not going to be able to ignore it. It’s just putting all of your juice, your originality into the art and being able to balance promoting and networking that is a demanding dynamic.
• Chance and timing are factors in success, too – your style may have been popular back in 1989 and the clamor for it may not come around again until 2019. You’ll just have to continue to work no matter what the world is up to and when and if it is to happen, i.e. your selling enough artwork to live on or close to it, you’ll be ready for your fans that are scattered very thinly throughout the world.
• Then again, nothing much may ever happen with your work no matter what you do. So, the bottom line is that you had simply better love making the stuff because the pleasure of creating may be your only reward.

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