Showing Up and Doing the Work

 

The past couple weeks I have been interviewed by college students about what it means to be an artist and more importantly, how to be a working artist.  Trying to be realistic about this question, the simplest and most honest answer I could give them was to show up and do the work.  It doesn't matter how ("starving artist" to carving out a few hours before/after a day job) you go about supporting yourself in order to make art, you just do it.  Get over what you think an artist is supposed to do in order to be called an "artist", and just work.  I was by no means the most talented of my fellow students, but after school I still stuck with painting because that's all that made sense to me and that came natural.

For a more in depth breakdown of how to be an artist, I found this piece by Austin Kleon to be on point.