Your Art Career Should be Worth $18

Did you ever have one of those days where a kind, simple comment from a stranger nearly levels you? Well, today was my day. A speaker found a bit of encouragement in the "twinkle" in my eyes, as I sat in the audience tonight. I wasn't feeling very bright eyed on a day that began with my contemplating the difference in gliomas all while picking poodle poo out of the grass in Central Park. But anyone who knows me knows that I can pull beauty out of chaos like nobody else, so this became the newest set of challenges to build from.

Earlier in the day I had a long discussion about "righting" patterns of behavior. I am no stranger to this topic, as I often find myself willingly and "happily" clinging to my addictive ways. I don't have your obvious glaring societal addictions (aside from my on again off again battle with coffee), but I do suffer from the classic artist addiction. You may be thinking the worst right about now, but artists often suffer from a downright crippling ailment where we put everyone and everything before our art. It becomes a crazed whirlpool of making others successful all while we shove our own art into little spurts of effort.

When someone you know and love faces a health crisis we can respond in many ways. Supportive, informed, and overall solid actions need to occur, but I also think it is an important time for self-improvement. It is a time where we put others first of course, but if we loose all sense of self we are not very healing to be around. Self deprivation can be as toxic as the disease that we are trying to coax out of a loved one's system. I mean really, how are we going to help anyone see the beauty of life if we are not allowing our own selves to see it?

So off I went into the depths of New York City to remind myself that I am an artist. As I cruised my usual empowerment haunts I looked for a sense of possibility. So much possibility surrounds us in New York City that I think it almost suffocates us. Too many options can be more frightening than too few, but it was my mission to try to turn that way of thinking around tonight by wallowing neck deep in artists who want to be career artists. We could have been slinking around in Williamsburg bar, but instead we clustered into the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's current Artist Residency Space on 77 Water st. It was such a great turnout that the location had to be moved so that we could hear Jackie Battenfield discuss the likelyhood that we can all be career artists if we continue to push ahead.

Battenfield has just published a book called The Artist's Guide: How to Make a Living Doing What you Love http://www.artistcareerguide.com/ . It is the kind of book that you will have in your life forever. My immediate response was to wrap my arms around it's 400 page girth as one might hug a pillow before bed. I held it this way during her lecture as well as on the train ride home. I found myself alternating between hugging it and reading it, which is a combination that I admired from the start. There are a lot of career guides for an artist to choose from, but this one feels different already. First of all, I liked her both as a person and as a speaker. Secondly, it is chucked full of intelligent quotes in the margins. Lastly, both her talk and her writing style is a bit like the career coach that you thought you would find in art school, but never did. Most of us did not have someone who stayed "on you" just enough to bring you to your best, but Battenfield's well layed out book can help compensate for that void.

Alright, it is time to close up for the night. Promise me that you will spend the $18 bucks as a gift to yourself.