What Is An Artist?

Common themed questions about becoming an artist, being an artist and what an artist is.

How do I become an artist?

What is an artist?

What does an artist make per year, on average?

My friend say's I'm not a real artist. Why?

And so on.

The label, "artist" is not exactly like some other labels, such as "Lawyer," "Doctor," "Real Estate Broker," etc. These actually require degrees specific to their careers. One can't just, "practice law" and be a lawyer. One can actually be arrested and sent to prison for "practicing medicine" without a license. One can't be a real estate broker without taking classes, passing a test and acquiring special permits and licenses.

There are other kinds of jobs, of course, that don't require any kind of degree to go along with the title. One can be a musician or dancer without any formal schooling or degree. One can be a carpenter without being a licensed contractor. One can build computers from scratch without a degree. One can be an artist without degrees or schooling of any kind.

In fact, in my definition, all one needs to be called an artist is to create art. I'm not going to define "art" at this point. That's for another post. I make my definition of an artist as broad as need be. The preschooler who brings home a scrawled crayon drawing to be hung on the refrigerator door is as much of an artist as Pablo Picasso. Sure, Picasso made a lot more money than the preschooler, but, you may have noticed that my definition makes no mention of getting PAID to create art. After all, one may argue that Picasso's most abstract designs make no more esthetic sense than the child's.

Not all art is particularly "good" art. So, to be an artist does not mean that one has to only create good art. I'M a good artist, but not every piece I create has to be a "masterpiece." A lot of folks on Yahoo Answers seem to expect that everything they produce has to be a good, "finished" piece of art. That's not so. I spend a LOT of time practicing by doing some quick sketches. This practice is equivilant to a pole vaulter practicing his technique, or a gymnast doing hers, or a race car driver doing lap after lap. Not every lap has to be the fastest. Not every routine is expected to be picture perfect, not every pole vault is expected to break world records. Not every sketch I make is worthy of hanging in the Louvre. We are all working on our technique. Like any skill, improvement comes with repetition. We learn our technique and then do it again and again.

That's why it's called "practice."

And, like any of those other skills, to keep the level of performance high, it requires continued practice. Luckily, one can be an artist for a lifetime. But to be a good artist for fifty, sixty years and more, one must continue the practice. That means a lot of drawings and many of them won't be all that good. It only needs to be good when it counts.

So, just because not all my "work" is good, does that mean that I am an artist only at those times when my work is up to high standards? Does my job title go away when I mindlessly doodle some crap on a note pad? Of course not. So, by my definition, being an artist requires only that the person produces art. Maybe not good art, but, what's good and bad, in art, is pretty subjective. (see Picasso vs. Preschooler, above)

So, it's not necessarily talent that makes an artist, nor even skill. It's not money that's required to wear the mantle of being an artist.

That leaves us with the finer point of what makes for being a "professional" artist. By it's broadest definition, all it takes is for someone to buy a work of art for the creater to be a "professional." It's not the same as making a living being an artist, but THAT standard would be pretty hard to pin down. Would one have to insist that an artist works, say, eight hours a day, five days a week to be considered a professional? What about the artist who might work two or three hours a day, take several days off, and works a little more the following week, and then sells a piece for five or ten thousand dollars. Is he not a professional artist because he doesn't put in enough time at it. That potential ten thousand dollars makes a pretty convincing argument for his "pro" status.

Can it be the volume of work that counts? Is an artist who manages to produce only a dozen masterworks any less of a pro than one who can produce hundreds of pieces in a lifetime?

I leave it to you to determine your own definitions and answers. I have mine and now you know where I stand.

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Follows is some more of my sample images.

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This image was for the opening page of another artist's website. He doesn't do photographic work. The woman's photo was from stock photography collection as were most of the other elements of the collage. Hard to make out in this example, but there is a sand dune image in the background that was repeated and flipped horizontally. The far back area, on the right is a stock photo of crystals growing in their matrix. The globular feature is the same crystal images run through the "spherize" filter, and then repeated for the smaller globules. There are star images taken from a NASA photo. The series of crescent shapes near the bottom are the same stars, "swirled" in Photoshop and repeated. In the close up of the woman's face, I acheived the transluscent quality of the left side by using the gradient tool in the "Quick Mask" mode. This was done a LONG time ago, when the latest version of Photoshop was Photoshop 3. NOT CS 3. Just Photoshop, version 3.0. It was the first version to have the "Layers" feature.

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This one may actually relate to the discussion I posted above in that I did a "professional" job but ended up NOT getting paid for it. A friend I've known for many years was a die hard racing enthusiast. He was a long time member of the Sports Car Club of America and participated by racing his and other team cars, officiating and attending virtually all events. He got together with some of his other pals and made serious plans to take over Bob Bondurant's Racing School at Laguna Seca Raceway, in Monterey, California. His "consortium" sort of "fell appart," and with them went the money for the enterprise. Unfortuanately, the money to pay me for this design work went with them. While there WAS a contract written up for the job, the client, in this case, was the non existant consortium. Who could I sue? I wasn't about to go after my friend for payment so I just let it go.

Let's see. The red Porsche was a photo of a car I saw on the street. The yellow one was of, I think, a car making turn at the bottom of turn 4 and 4A, the infamous "corkscrew" at Laguna Seca. I believe it was one of the old CanAm series. The "ghostly" figure standing in back was a driver I caught, hanging around the paddock area, next to his car. The geometric figure was a layout of the old track at Laguna Seca which, I frankly stole from a race program.

I got some use out of it as part of my first online portfolio. This is the only time this has been shown in public since then.

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I've often mentioned, on Yahoo Answers, that before going nearly 100% digital, my favorite color medium was color markers. I had a massive collection of nearly 500 different markers. So fast, so easy and so versitile. Depicted is an illustration for a cookbook distributed by a local restaurant. The colors didn't scan well but it shows some slices of medium rare roast beef, covered in beef gravy, sliced carrots and sprigs of green onion.

On this image, the "Sample" label is distorted but in the larger scale portfolio image, it is clearer. But, I hope it shows the quality of the actual illustration and the ability of the marker pen to help create fairly realistic, believable images.

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I really liked this image and am very sorry I couldn't find, either, the larger scan or the original illustration.

Some of the detail is lost behind the "sample" watermark, but one can still pick out some of what the illustration tries to depict. This was created as one of the slides shown behind the speaker at a convention of "Process Engineers" It shows a drawing of a hand, (mine) with the dimensions of it's elements shown as if the hand were engineered from a technical drawing. I added the color just to bring it one more step removed from the "natural" form of the hand and bring it closer to some of the point of what "Process Engineering" does or brings into the manufacturing process.

The hand and dimensions were done with pen and ink on paper. The color elements were strips of transparent plastic sheets with adhesive backing.

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Wow! THAT was fun. Ranting, I mean, Blogging is very theraputic. Helps clear my sinuses.

Until next time my Drooghies.

Luv,

vince