To Dole or not To Dole

I've been doing some field research over the past few weeks into the life of the artist turned constant job hunter. My working life is now a set of revolving doors. I've worked for two different businesses, been ejected from both since, and dumped many many CVs upon the populace since I've returned to Galway and ran up a lot of rent and bill debt. I consider myself a piece of sea foam floating on the turbluent seas of minimum wage employment. This is part of my overall research into how to make money as an artist in Galwayand the realities of an artist trying to make it in the recession. As well as being..well, reality.

I have established the two Ugly and Unavoidable Realities that must be dealt with when you first decide to become an artist. Very simply, once you recognise and overcome them both, you'll be flying. They are:

1. Wanting to be an artist. 

2. Having the support to be an artist.

With regards to point no.; if you're a typically sensitive artist with low self-esteem, self-belief and out-in-out poor self-motivation, you can watch a lot of videos like this and this, read a lot of inspirational quotes like this and this, get all pumped up, black out the ever-present Nay-sayers, and be sent, battle-crying, to your Wacom tablet. It can take months, years, even decades, to get beyond this point of self-doubt (thanks education system).

Got to lending one of these and it has solved all art material and art technology mental-block problems. Every artist should have one.

However, once you finally start to feel good about your own ability as an artist and commit yourself to the most Difficult Job in the World (because, let's face it, you know you couldn't be happy any other way), Reality no. 2 emerges. You realise that the rest of the world demands, without fail, a consistent weekly cheque from you. The rest of the world being; the banks, the landlords, the telecommunications and electricity companies, specsavers, etc. The brand new artist does not get a weekly check from their imaginary art boss. You're reading inspirational Zen Pencils comics to get you in the arty zone one minute and then you're forking over the last coins in your wallet to print out dozens of CVs the next so you can pay for the UPC bill. Joining the nearest self-sufficient artist-atelier in Paris as the next logical step just isn't a viable option for the artist these days. Because...you know...we live in the real world and not an art history book.

The economy does not have an Artist Entry Route with a form to fill out and certificates to collect so that you can be granted access into the Art Market, earn a weekly wage and pay your weekly living expenses for various state services and general exisitng costs. There are enough pressures out there from the likes of Conservative Parents, Rubbish Critical Peers (who are all jealous of your commitment to The Dream) and the Conventional Education System telling you to go back to college/get that masters/get a job with KPMG etc. without having to live in a stressful and terrifying hand-to-mouth world for an undetermined length of time. A new artist doesn't need to this myriad of voices telling them to stop before they've even begun on top of an economy that appears to not want their economic contribution (no matter how much it might actually need you).

In order to face this Reality no.2, I like to regard the survival plan in two ways – you can go public or you can go private. You can sign up for the financial security offered by the state in the form of job seekers allowance or you can hack it in dirty world of private industry, i.e. Perusing the Visual Artists Ireland website for gallery submission ads by day, very very slowly building up your reputation and portfolio, and working in lots of call centres and pubs by night until your sales on Etsy start to break even (which it took you about 2 months to set up because you were so busy working). Then you can maybe consider moving to art full-time, after a term of employment long enough and terrible-manager-less enough to accumulate some capital.

Obviously the greatest problem I have with the private solution (which also happens to be my area of “research”) is the obvious lack of security when you're truly expendable (and when your manager thinks you have no knowledge of labour laws. Or human rights.). You have a lot of work to do as an artist. Especially at the beginning (by beginning I mean the day you overcome Reality no.1). You are an entrepreneur as well as a craftsperson. You need to manage your precious time, build up contacts, publicise yourself endlessly, be in a constant state of learning and upskilling, generally learn to business, and of course, make the art. 

Working in a minimum wage job has certain benefits to an artist: you have contact with non-artists, which is good for the soul, staving off solitude, and finding someone whose auntie might like a painting of their cat. You earn more money than if you go public. You get richer faster - more materials, more courses, more travelling, more peace of mind. “Keeping the day job” is regarded as essential to being a working artist by some (see Austin Kleon's advice and Hugh McLeod's list (scroll down to no. 7). A dual-life or artist/barista or artist/teacher or artist/dog groomer is an important daily mental exercise for many, like tuning in and out of both sides of your brain to maximise efficiency and creativity. And for others (like myself), it can leave you totally work-drained. Even when the creative synapses are still firing and crying out for an outlet, your poor little hands are limp and covered in ground coffee stains.

Here is the public option outlined - Signing-on to the dole. Which can take months. After you're on, your weekends are spent fastidiously filling out forms and generally chasing more various avenues of artist funding, from the artscouncil and from intiatives from your local county council (again hounding the adverts on Visual Artists, what a website). Some day, after fighting apathy and the temptation to sleep in until 2pm every day, you might just be able to develop your own sense of entrepreneurship and make your own money, save for a mortgage, and earn independence.

Here's two of my favourite pages from an online comic I got to reading years ago. I highly reccomend it. After a couple of years of burger-flipping, courier-ing, and being a masseuse, and surviving the humiliation of abject poverty in Montreal as a Fine Arts Graduate in Ceramics, Liliane attempts to begin her own freelancing illustration business. Naturally enough, she runs into financial difficulties immediately and is encouraged by her friends to overcome her prejudices about social benefits, having worked hard all her life to make ends meet:

Jen Hesnan is an arts facilitator who has her foot firmly into the broader Community Arts network, who runs the GALCA Galway Community Arts facebook group (find it and join it RIGHT NAO), has some great words about not only the artist's inevitable and logical dependence on the public sector, but their necessary direct contribution to it, community arts and arts facilitation through community-focused programmes being her forté. Putting an artist in a community role is a no brainer when you think about it. Doesn't it make sense for an artist, whose job is to make art that makes people happy, should be repaid by the community they enrich through designated public funding? In theory?? In particular, the much maligned Jobbridge scheme can actually offer a three-pronged benefit to the starter artist – they can get connected to a community, make both arts and non-arts-sector contacts (rather than be a recluse waiting for their millionaire to ride in the door on a winged unicorn or only make friends with grumpy coffee merchants) and they can produce art in a genuine art-career setting. You are officially in the arts sector and you don't have to move back in with the parents who live in Ballynowhere, Co. Isolated ! This is after the appropriate training of course, especially if you're going to be assisting in areas like art therapy or art and health promotion.

Jobridging with an arts organisation or general youth organisation is an option I had never really considered, being so focused on getting the profession of artist on an equal setting to other professions (which isn't necessarily...necessary or realistic, as the more research I do reveals). Arguably, this solution is even more effective with keeping in touch with the outside world through the non-arts sector “day job”.

What have I decided to do? Well, I like the idea of the Artist Dual Role and, 2013 being the year of following life-long dreams and all that, I'm trying my hand at a new trade that will satisfy the tech itches, the design itches, and the start-up business-mania fascnation itches – Web Development. It's time to get serious about making the blog look good (I'm thinking that teal is a nice signature colour). I think that getting a better understanding of the basis of the tech market, the apparently most thriving industry in Ireland for now, would be great to examine non-conventional careers for the art grad. Also I found this article, amongst others from TechCrunch, a few days ago and squeeee-d everywhere.

It is a glorious new world.

Aditionally, I could always make artist portfolio websites for the artist list myself. Gathering the Galwegian artists together on an internet platform is proving...challenging.

To conclude, here is a brilliant video about being a writer in Galway on the dole, by Julian Gough and Olaf Tyaransen. 
"In a way, our generation was quite lucky, in that we didn't have the option of work...if you could keep your overhead low enough, you could explore culture; you could read, you could go to the library, you could find out what you wanted to do with your life. It was actually quite a luxury."

Galway Artists and the Death of Ambition

Riddle me this: how possible is it for an artist to make a living off their work in Galway city?

Impossible? Easy if you work hard? If know the right people? Are we going to assume that artists already have a clear idea of what it is exactly to make a living off the arts?

I'm not.

In my research on artists and business, I came across a terrific framework used in the following study: Investingin Creativity: A Study of the Support Structure for U.S. Artists, by the Urban Institute, 2003.

Based on interview data, polling and database creation on awards and services for artists, these six factors were determined to be what make up the essential support structure for an artist (this includes visual arts, musicians, dancers, actors, etc), that is essential for them to be able to earn money and keep practicing their art:

Validation: The ascription of value to what artists do.

Demand/markets: Society's appetite for artists and what they do, and

the markets that translate this appetite into financial compensation.

Material supports: Access to the financial and physical resources

artists need for their work: employment, insurance and similar benefits,

awards, space, equipment, and materials.

Training and professional development: Conventional and lifelong

learning opportunities.

Communities and networks: Inward connections to other artists and

people in the cultural sector; outward connections to people not primarily

in the cultural sector.

Information: Data sources about artists and for artists.

You'd think they'd teach this "biznuss theery" stuff in art school, in preparation for the big bad world or art? Nope. Sure that would make sense.

I have to admit that when I found this study and poured over it on the bus ride back to Galway, not only was I illuminated, impressed and giddy with excitement at the prospect of building more Galway-based research out of this, but I was also unbelievably smug to see all of my artist stereotypes and very "wrong" generalisations that I've acquired over careful years of observation become fact through the validity of a research paper. Absolute win.

And, lastly and critically, the “environmental approach of the Urban Institute's research leads us to use place as the organizing principle for our research and findings”.

On that use of “place” as the defining underbelly of the framework, it's time to challenge Galway's reputation for being an “artsy” city, if we're going to see how artists are expected to heat their houses and scrape the mould off their curtains this winter.

Super artsy Macnas Parade: good and creepy.

The belligerent title “Graveyard of ambition” has deeply disturbed the naive and idealistic me ever since I first heard it from the mouth of the collective cynic. I have always known Galway as much for it's activists, organisers, ralliers and ideas people as much as for it's compulsive dole-burners, whingers (ugh) and professional apathetics. Galway is just so fun and free, I had always thought. Galway has a constant magic in the air. This wonderful, a swirling cocktail of Excitement and Potential and some other mystical, addictive substances, shot through with street lights and neon, that hovers in a gaseous mass over Quay Street, stretching over the Corrib mouth and ends in a torrentous twister over the Roisin Dubh. This cloud is sucked in by the live musicians and exhaled in delicious smoke rings by the poets, writers and actors. But in the realm of visual arts, whilst I believe that vision is probably abound, real production is just....limp.

That's a good word to describe Tulca so far, actually. It's a bit...nyeh. Although I did see George Shaw, David Hepher (WOW) and Lisa Malone's really lovely work in the Galway Arts Centre which was very satisfying to my art taste buds. Also: the Galway Arts Centre is the weirdest venue for art shows that I have ever seen.

Now, the visual art is there, and it is there in some wonderful ways - see the gorgeous, properly visionary and up-to-date street art of Basqr and AKACrap (we tried to invite Basqr to come speak and teach an awesome street art workshop for ArtSoc last year, alas he has to remain anonymous otherwise the cops will get him, so sad). The art in Galway is also there in other, more obligatorily high-brow, conventionally art-world, totally publicly-inaccessible ways - courtesy of the hard work of the 126 gallery collective. These, alongside the Galway street artists, have made the most strong and noteable efforts at getting their art into Galway's face as individual movements of art culture. They even have blogs and websites which they update regularly, apparently some art collectives are considerate and sensible like that.

But, but...why can't there be more? This is what I'm always asking. Why can't there be more forms of art (there's more to art than just blotty, abstract canvases hanging in your living room and the whole paint-wall formula)? Why can't there be more art everywhere? Why can't more Galway artists be set free from stereotypical financial shackles and go mad arting their little hearts out? This is taking into account Galway's population size, which is not big Art-scene-Dublin for sure, but this is also considering the ratio of amateur musician, writer and playwright (and yes, they've all got their NUIG Masters to pay back) to layperson that Galway clearly posesses and struggles to support. Is the "Starving artist" stereotype/reality why the visual arts just isn't screaming as loudly as everyone else? Or are they screaming with bold new art, and they are just no where to be seen? (this thought actually kills me a little bit)

When I walk around Galway and breathe in it's magic, I want to see the Art House Tacheles (RIP), converted art spaces, abandoned warehouses jam-packed with artists, a bohemian, Castro neighbourhood with artists collaberating, experimenting, innovating and generally saving the world from apathy and despair.

The Shed is a really exciting new-ish artspace on the Docks. Sadly, it is still misused as a bizarro contemporary art space and dismal as hell on the inside. Each to their own like, but for such a central location they should have thrown the Occupy Galway guys in there and gave them a load of paintbrushes and found art, they would have collaberated and workshopped the fuck out of  that space.

I am all too aware of the legends of hovels of artists hiding away,in suburbs thousands of miles away from the action and connection of the city centre, working their asses off to remain alive in jobs that kill their artistic wakefullness. What if all these artists are failing to balance mortgage-slave life and artist life? What if they are giving up in their droves, under the pressure of  recession-fear and pressure to fall into convention? They could be dissolving slowly and painfully into this kind of disconnected lethargy (as our generation tends to do now), with any impetus to do work quashed by a sick and dying self-esteem, never picking up a paintbrush again? What if they really do spend their time hanging around Neachtains pub bitching about the Arts Festival excluding local artists, whilst not innovating or researching to combat the obstacles they face? What if all they need is a little hope and a lot of business acumen? I certainly know artists who fit these descriptions, and I know more young artists who are in real danger are taking up that same slow miserable march away from the hopes and dreams and away from their divine vocation to make people happy. And there must be scores more, if the discharge of 100 art students Cluain Mhuire GMIT Art college emits every year says anything about professionally-trained artist surpluses in this city.

Sigh. This is all very upsetting.

Is this our reality for artist graduates?? Also do watch this film/read this comic, it's very good.

To finish off my part-investigation, part-diatribe into the struggles of the hypothetical new and energetic young artist settling down their roots in the cutest and artsiest city in Ireland (which may or may not be a real person and may actually be me and not hypothetical at all), here is something very simple and very brilliant from the wikipedia book Business and Artists to stick in one's pipe and smoke:

The artists' labour market

The labour market for artists is characterized by four things in particular:

• There is an extremely unequal income distribution within the market segment. A very small group of people earn a high proportion of the total income.

• There is a structural excess supply of labour. There are always more people who like to earn their income as an artist than there is demand for them.

• There are intangible returns to labour, so that people accept lower wages than their qualifications would earn in a different market.

• Non-separation of artist and work. The image their product gives them, is important to artists.

This isn't cited or proven per se, which annoys me, especially as a former law and economics student, but it is brilliantly simple. It is a good, clear place to begin, along with the help of the in-depth analysis of the American study above. What I would love to do is verify this with real data first off, Galway-centric naturally. Then I would like to do something to educate struggling and frustrated artists about this reality (God knows the art schools don't bother with this tedium of commerce and technology, that's why some of us decide that business school may be a better option than art college) and, crucially, work to eventually rebalance the supply and demand graph for artists in this city. This involves encouraging artists to move off the traditional fine-art, painter and ceramic specialisation and finding new, morecommercial artistic specialisations to suit artists that are needed by consumers and business people (whether they know it yet or not, as the capitalist genius Steve Jobs would say). As I hope to uncover in my research, the art of a country reveals so much about the happiness and hope of the nation itself. The lives of her artists reveals surprisingly a lot about the health of the economy. On this micro to macro level, the story of art in Galway reveals just how tragically unbalanced our entire economy is and how our entire labour force, extending far oustide "the arts sector", is negligently disproportionate.

Inkscape and Vector Art: Part 1

I have discovered Pomodoro. comprehension of Twitter remains unlocked.


So, as part of my artist-reboot misison, I'm learning vector graphics via the lovely open source program, Inkscape.

Yay it's Inkscape!

I'm methodical and Victorian about my life (like categorising and favourite-d books), so rather than carefully picking Inkscape apart and learning-by-doing, like so many masters have recommended, I have found this extremely tedious and quite boring list of tutorials to plod through one-by-one. Right now I'm working on this:

Look, it's a peacock.

I may or may not post up my finished copy, depending on how much awesome I will inevitably add to the original design.

I have encountered and taken in the basics behind a lot of Vector rules so far – paths, fill and stroke (which I love now), dragging nodes around and gradients (eh, they're flashy but bewilderingly complicated on execution). I'm still waiting for my visual mind to start seeing all the landscape, friends and family as nothing more than a collection of strategically layered objects plotted by many bezier curves.

I have manifested an absolute revulsion of layers over the years. I took the step up from MS Paint to Photoshop a few years ago, and toppled down that staircase booted by Layers himself. Beginning to add plumage to the peacock has definitely given me some enlightenment into the reasoning of Layers, but I feel like he has been smugly smugging at me for years, from atop the stairway of needlessly complicated achievement. And now it is almost within my carpel-tunnel mangled grasp.

I really need one of these. Never make digital art OR play Age of Empires without one.

The data limits are for my wireless 3 dongle are severe, so I need to watch my streaming and downloading digestion. Besides an insufferable shortage of Andrew W.K-spiration, I am unable to watch and learn further from all those very useful Youtube tutorials done by that 11 year-old image manipulation prodigy. I always learn better through videos. Although I'm pretty sure that those particular videos are for GIMP (or so I remember from attempting to design the Art Society magazine cover by myself one year, watching one of these tutorials, and crumpling into a big ball of editor-stress). Also yes, I need to learn GIMP. Soon. That will be my Everest. Or at least my Mont Blanc. Inkscape is my Magillacuddy.

Killaarrrnnneeeeeyyy

Becoming competent in digital art has been one of those skills that has been languishing on my to do list for about six years. Growing more and more intimidating, as school, college and self-doubt kept getting in the way. Like learning French or German or getting fit. Happily, getting fit is something I'm doing right now. And I'm learning Polish instead, because it just sounds nice and fuck your educational linguistic imperialism.

I was too half-hearted, woefully unresourceful and far too dedicated to homework and school to give this my full attention. There was also a large self-esteem quotient that held back my art. One that was to grow paralytic.

 

Right now, as I sit before my Inkscape window, my cursor is quivering with frustration. I am crying for a pen and mathcopy paper. I feel like I'm learning to use a knife and fork, or like I'm spending a whole semester on shoe-lace tying to standardise the education of the whole class before we open our textsbooks on set jumping whilst been forced to sit in a stadium and watch the olympics. Yes, that is exactly how I feel.

My first completed original project on Inkscape will be to do something with this blog's design (yes I know it's currently rocking minimalism now but I do like a bit of kitsch and Laura Ashel chic so there will be at least a horrendously awkard logo). I should throw up doodles about that, okay that will come next.

In the mean time, check this out for the logos which I will one day compete with with my secretary. Romantic sigh.  

My first ever logo. Designed for my brother's friends band.

 

Preamble

You know the story. It's the story of our 2000's everyman. You live in a tiny Irish back-arse of no where town (rather, your family does). You have your green fields childhood. You make art all the time. You have an uncomfortable and secluded, supremely nerdy adolescence. You still make art all the time. Then, you go to the big city for College. You are born. Experiences and friendships and relationships flood and whirl around you like glorious colourful magic. It's all wonderful and exciting. You grow delirious, dizzy and confused. You haven't made any art in a long time. You start to hear and read a lot about the economic crisis. You get to study it in college. And unemployment. And emigration. More and more of your friends post on their facebook feeds about the comedic dole-collecting videos made by their Youtube sensation friends and about their own arrangements to leave the country.

You walk out of your last exam. You move out. You go home. To that place that you haven't thought of as home in years. Maybe you tried to find a job, maybe you didn't. You move back in with your parents. You take a good look around, settle back in front of your laptop and throw up Facebook.

I never thought that I'd find myself in that predicament.

And yet, here we are. Back up in Donegal. All around my bedroom lie the scaffolding and half-constructed castles of my teenage ambitions. When I wanted nothing more than to draw comicbooks and bring a delicious, fat portfolio to Image Comics headquarters. How things change. How much I have convinced myself of. Up until I moved back home, I was contemplating internships and masters. And even...for about two seconds...the dreaded LLB.

**shudders**

I didn't want to butcher my inner-child's self-esteem that much.

So, now that I'm out of the system, there is only one left to do: make art. All the time. Fantastic, massive art, all the time. Fill my house with stacks of canvases leaning against each other, clogging the hallways, shelves of resource books and magazines, infinite folders on my laptop with cropped cuttings of jpegs and loaded, catalogued online galleries. Nothing left but do exactly what 16 year old me has been waiting for me to start doing for these centuries of self-development.

But it's terrifying.

Making art and following my art to wherever it decides to take me is monstrously scary. It is overwhelming; full of doubt and paranoia. Forget that I'm faced with the underdevelopment of a cohesive and accessible “art market”, in Ireland and everywhere (I have a LOT to write about with regards that, you'll see); the tremors and tempests of the self is the worst. The. Worst. And for being an artist, unfortunately, it's more than relevant. It's the deal breaker. The clincher. The figurative be-all and end-all for real commitment to the field. And how easily that commitment comes in and out of breathing, like the living dead. It dies, then resurrects itself, then dies again, leaving you, the artist, completely self-admonished.

The self.

The self-trust, the self-discipline, the self-discovery and solidifying self-determination. The massive self-confrontation you have to do and the self-deconstruction you have to do, along-side that hideous dismantlement of systemic habits and side effects about 20 years of the conventional education and career system has afflicted you with. You're like a small nation after a revolution or a dog staring into a mirror - you have to be ready to rewrite everything.

All of this art-exercising and art-exorcising (wahey) will definitely provide more than enough content for my blog all on it's own (I still need to design my header, logo, profile...stay connected). Besides, there is my need to comment on art, on art developments, on the art world and on artists, those quirky, kamikaze creatures. On why we need art to stay alive, on why RIGHT NOW IN 2012 art is more important that ever (yadda yadda)...

For the first time in about eight years, I have the time, the lack of dire money shortages (I work for my mum as a psychiatric secretary, our office is downstairs, my living quarters are upstairs) and I have the physical space necessary to start arting the fuck out of my generational lethargy. This is it. As Rob Lowe's character, Billy Hicks, from one of my favourite coming-of-age films of all time, St. Elmo's Fire, famously says to his break-down, clinically depressed mess of a friend, “We're all going through this. It's our time at the edge.”

Some people go to Australia or Thailand or back to college to find themselves. I went home.

Oh, and RSS feed me, bro.