Making Art

small manufacturers

Let's examine what an artist actually does if an artist wishes to make a living at their art. They are really small manufacturers. They manufacture a product, sell it to people who place it in their home or business (occasionally a public place). Therefore an artist, like any manufacturer, has to spend time doing the manufacturing, doing the marketing of their product and doing the other matters that business necessitates. This is a lot of work. And because they are selling their product to an end user who requires it for a specific purpose, they must - if they wish to be successful - make their product attractive and useful for the end user, plus make it competitive in the market place.

Therefore, if we look at this stripped-down version of what an artist's job really consists of, the core problems become evident. The biggest one is time. An artist is having to play too many roles. Trying to find the time to be creative is a really tough thing to do. The other part is beliefs, and this is a big one. Artists keep thinking - or at least feeling - that they are supposed to be creating all the time, and that they are supposed to be creating whatever their muse leads them to do. But if they stop for even a moment to think about the conflicts between what they want to do and what they must do, they would realize that that there are logical impossibilities afoot, especially emotionally.