EARNING A LIVING

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Submitted Date 01/15/2020
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Earning A Living

If being an artist is your main priority, the demands of earning a living will often derail your good intentions. This has happened more often than not. Being an artist, is in a sense, a full-time job even though you might not be making any money from it.

And, as all your family, friends and relatives will tell you, being an artist is not practical, not realistic, and only for dreamers.

Well...maybe, maybe not. The trick is to find the kind of work that will either not be too demanding or that will give you experience and increase your artistic skills.

BUT -- and this is very important -- there are two sides to the earning money equation. Two sides! One is how much you earn and the other is how much you spend. We all know this of course, but I have found that you can spend much less money than you have been taught by learning some basic frugality skills. And no, you will not look like a bag lady if you do it right. In fact, no one will know if you don't tell them, but I will save that part of the equation for a series of later articles.

To concentrate on the earning money side of the equation, here are some pointers.

Experience of just about any kind -- up to a point -- can give you a different way of looking at things and can be good for your artistic output. So if you are offered a job that will give you a new experience, go for it.

BUT you want to avoid jobs with continual deadlines. Such jobs are stressful and will drain your energy and leave little for your artistic work. Avoid jobs where a boss or supervisor is always looking over your shoulder. Avoid jobs that have little room for error.

The bottom line is that at the end of the week you should feel that you have enough energy, enthusiasm, and vision to work on your art. If you feel exhausted, burned out and just want to binge-watch Netflix, you might want to reconsider your current job. A friend of mine once said that the job he had was 'soul-sucking', after a day of work he felt drained and empty.

So there are a number of ways you can approach earning a living.

== Basic jobs that are not too demanding:
You can find a low paying job that is not too demanding, for example. A friend of mine was a janitor. He only came to the office after everyone had left at night. So he was by himself without anyone looking over his shoulder. The work was basic and routine. There was very little stress and there was even the satisfaction of seeing the place looking cleaner than it had when he arrived.
Another friend drove a taxi. He enjoyed seeing all the different neighborhoods in his city and meeting a variety of people. Both of these friends had plenty of energy when their job was over to work on their art.

== Find a job that adds to your artistic skills:
As a visual artist, you might want to work at a press or do layout. These jobs are not usually too demanding and you will be learning some visual skills that you might not have learned otherwise. And the pay can be good. Sometimes these jobs can be deadline-oriented, which is stressful so be aware of that aspect.

Here is an example of a job I took that helped my skills but in the end was too demanding for the money that it paid.

As a beginning photographer, I landed a job at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Photo Lab. This was a coveted job as only people with advanced photographic skills were allowed to work there. However, the pay was minimal. I worked there for nine months and learned more than I could have learned in a classroom or working for a studio photographer. I went out on assignments, I developed negatives, I printed all my work and I learned to use a large-format camera -- a Graflex 4X5 inch camera which took sheet film, something I never would have used otherwise. Moreover, the director of the lab had worked at Kodak for decades and he was a gold mine of information. But (you were waiting for that but) there were many drawbacks, so many, in fact, that I stopped working there after about a year. My immediate supervisor was incredibly moody and always looking over my shoulder. One day he would be a great mood and sluff off any problems, the next day he would be supercritical. Yet after a while, I learned to interpret his state of mind and avoided him, if I could, on bad days. Even worse was the fact that as university photographers we were on-call on the weekends. I lived way out in the country so coming into town to take a few photographs at a University dinner event was a real hardship. And for our trouble, we were paid minimum wage.

Now, don't get me wrong. I loved working there and I do not regret it. But after about a year I felt I had learned just about all I could learn and I went on to other work that paid better. My next job was to videotape doctors in the UNC hospital who were learning how to interview patients and who then watched the interviews we taped in an effort to improve their interviewing techniques. It paid very well and I was learning new skills as videotape was a new technology at that time.

 

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