2019 Art Advice: For the youngsters...and oldsters.

2019 Art Advice:

1. Don’t worry about “finishing” your pictures. It isn’t a test to see if you can manufacture a product. The key word here being “your”. For commercial work understand the criteria, deadlines, and standards before you set pencil to paper and define the project boundaries. No picture you ever do will be finished. Each piece of paper, stroke of graphite, and pixel is connected to the prior and the next.

2. Beware imposter syndrome. It is a waste of time and a diversion. Relax. Stop looking in the mirror, it’s not about you. Sometimes a chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg.

3. Pay no attention to anyone telling you to draw or study for 12 hours a day. Study isn’t a slave labor camp. You WILL ruin your body if you do this. Art isn’t boot camp or a sport. Take care of your back, hands, wrists, eyes, etc. Study other things, enjoy yourself, be lazy on occasion, get a pet, read a book, and very important: exercise. Your proprioception is a fundamental aspect of drawing and if it is unpracticed and atrophied you will limit your abilities. Get off your ass. Art is not based on art, so learn other things and travel in the world.

4. Don’t listen to how tos on breaking into the industry. The “industry” is in persistant flux, and your entrance will depend on your ingenuity, ability and invention. There are no recipes or clear paths because you also have to invent tomorrow. Understand art marches in the front, not the end.

5. Don’t be passive to recruiters or in interviews. Don’t throw your pearls before swine.

6. Don’t trust art directors who do not volunteer a portfolio of their own work. And if it is substandard don’t trust them. Always ask for clarity when someone says “pop” or “epic”, it is usually meaningless jargon. Art directors, creative directors, and other like positions owe knowledge and expertise to their staff. If they have arrived in their positions through politics it is completely reasonable to distrust them.

7. Specifically to young women artists: bias against you is real, and the world is full of creeps. I’m afraid you will have a harder route, at least at the moment. That said, you aren’t alone. We are all in it together. So call out if you need back up. Don’t let the bastards grind you down. 

8. Don’t let the audience guide your standards. And also don’t let your standards fall to “good enough” or “what can I get away with”. Set your standards impossibly high. Reach for the stars.

9. Art is not subjective, in the sense of preference, anyway. Long ago it was noticed there is no hard line between subjective and objective. The idea of a threshold between the quantitative and the qualitative is pretty helpful. That is, in a sense, a gradient between data and meaning.

10. There is a persistant drive among some sectors of society to understand art and artists as frivolous, eccentric, and frankly, stupid. Do not trust these persons and be careful dealing with them. They are incompetent in understanding the level of their incompetence (the Dunning/Kruger effect). Don’t let them demoralize you, guide your decision making or con you into subservience.

11. Try harder. You will not live long enough to be where you want to be, artwise. But what you hand off to the next artists may help them step forward, and they will do the same. We are all in it together.

12. Your career and reputation are yours. Guard them, be careful with them, cultivate them and never suffer vandalism in any sense. You are their only hero, take care of them.

13. Be calm about deadlines, time box your tasks, don’t nag your work, don’t be confident or scared-do your utmost, do what needs doing and enjoy the chance to run. Understand there will be times to won’t make it. Be clear about shared risks to everyone in the project.

14. Learn to be calm in the face of adversity, think before you speak or act, and craft your responses with precision. Artists are not airy dumb folks.  

15. We are all in it together. Be good to your neighbor.