When one can be an artist endeavoring to make money off the art, there’s always a point of which your art becomes a business. Many working artists resist this notion because to our minds, the artwork is pure and should not be tainted by things such as business and money. We have a problem with the business end of our art because we are artists, not accountants, and we are artistic, not number crunchers. Most of us dread turning our creativity into an income generating business because we don’t want to lose the pleasure in creating or lose our concentrate in the creative process when we have to sell sell sell.
I started considering this a long time ago once I started discussing what I did in my studio room as “work”, as in “I’ll work now!” after I remain my home in the morning. I did so not succeed in coming up with another word that didn’t sound totally contrived to spell it out what I do throughout the day. I go to my studio room and work– that’s it. And there are certain realities I’ve had to figure out how to deal with as a full-time self-employed musician, and these are the risks of being a working designer.
While it offers me great pleasure to utilize clay, I don’t make my pots solely for pleasure, I mainly do it so I can avoid having to move into that working workplace. Sometimes I must make things I don’t feel … Read the rest