Who is an Artist? - Amazon S3 · the artist feels is important. 3. For the money: Some would deny it, and just as many more would place money ... buying public for whom artists paint

ISBN: 978-1-77193-050-5Copyright © 2014 Drawspace Publishing (http://www.drawspace.com) and Jim Lane (http://www.jimlaneart.com). All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transferred, or transmitted in any form or

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Who is an Artist?

Information specific to the historical identities of famous artists and invaluable tools to help you identify who you are as an artist

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 10.1Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease: 54.4Drawspace Curriculum 5.2.R1 - 16 Pages and 10 Illustrations

Figure 1This resource has ten sections:• What We Are• Why We Paint and Draw• The Successful Artist• Skills and Creativity• Amateur Artists• Painting: Now and Then• Labels: the Name Game• Art Genealogy• Art Genes• The Top Ten Myths about Artists

The point of this resource is to get you thinking about who you are as an artist. First, read through these 16 pages. Then, the homework assignment: interview yourself.

Follow that up with a one-page biography (third person, singular), and save it for future reference. Then line up and examine all the artwork you’ve ever done over your entire adult life (rent a warehouse if necessary). That’s who and what you are as an artist.

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Having done that, re-read this chapter, and ask yourself if this little MRI (Metaphysical Reassessment Inspection) has infl uenced your image of yourself as an artist.

At this point, you may decide that you are perfectly happy with who you are as an artist. However, if you feel a need to evolve as an artist, then you may choose to change some aspect of your artistic endeavors. This resource may help you fi nd some new directions.

What We AreI don’t imagine there’s a single artist who hasn’t gone through some manifestation of an identity crisis. “Who am I?” “What am I?” These questions are healthy, and they indicate a desire for personal change and possible growth. The natural processes of examining who you are as an artist often occur at monumental times in life, such as when you start or fi nish school or a career, when you fall in love, when you marry, or when you are suddenly faced with changes in your life beyond your control. Thankfully, as an artist, you have your artwork with which to express yourself.

The question of who you are as an artist is very closely tied to the roles you play in other aspects of your life.

For a young artist, the answer may be very mercurial, changing weekly, almost daily for some. For better or worse, as the artist ages, he or she usually fi nds more concrete answers that are satisfying to both the ego and the career.

However, all too often, the answers eventually become too satisfying. The work begins to sell, the money begins to roll in, and out, and the artist’s reputation begins to gel. At this point artists may feel a need to re-evaluate their artistic identity.

If neither the artist nor their work changes, perhaps for many years, some unexpected event or serendipitous revelation may jog that artist so severely that he or she gets bounced high into the air, and doesn’t come down very gracefully. When that happens, the artist may be forced to take a look at where their artistic undertakings are going, or not going, and may encounter a catharsis.

For example, if an artist has been painting for money and has acquired substantial fi nancial gain, their artistic vision may begin to seem hollow. On the other hand, an artist who has painted mostly for the approval of others may come to realize that her or his efforts now appear trivial. And fi nally, artists who have painted mostly for personal satisfaction may begin to see more than a little self-indulgence in their art.

While none of these reasons for creating art are necessarily wrong, experiencing some form of catharsis may cause the artist to discover a whole new way of thinking about art.

The key here is introspection. Refl ect on how you have changed as an individual over the past decade, and then compare that change to changes in your art. If the gap is wide, perhaps your art is in need of reexamination. Maybe the time is right to consider where you’ve been, where you are, and most importantly where you want to go as an artist. Then, redirect your thinking to take you there.



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Figure 2

Why We Paint and DrawCreating art is an addiction that no other activity or substance can quite replace. There are probably as many reasons why artists paint as there are artists painting.

Here is a top ten list that gets to the heart of why we create art:

10. Sheer boredom: Time often passes slowly, especially for the young. Hence, artistsmay sometimes paint, or try to, when they really don’t feel inspired. A close cousin of boredom: artists often turn to art when they feel the need to “output” in order to escape the various “inputs” of life such as TV, family, or friends.

9. Guilt: Being able to create art is a marvelous gift. Many artists have lavished exorbitant amounts of time, effort, and money on their talent, and may subsequently feel that not painting is hugely wasteful.

8. To learn: Though not the only way to learn, actually wielding a pencil or brush is by far the best way. Those who don’t create for this reason risk stagnation.



7. To cover walls: Artists are fanatical about being surrounded by beauty: the artifi cial kind they put on canvas, the natural kind as seen through a window, or that of the person they stare at bleary-eyed across the breakfast table each morning. The art they choose for their home may not be their best, and is often not even their most beautiful, but almost certainly, it is their favorite.

6. As therapy: Setting aside the compulsive painter, all artists have painted to make themselves feel better. To release feelings and images that could never be expressed any other way is the most personal of all reasons to paint.

5. For immortality: This is an element in an artist’s daily existence that becomes more prominent as the artist grows older. All artists consider how they and their work will be thought of by succeeding generations. Some artists even take steps to chronicle their daily thoughts and lives in journals or books, thereby adding a narrative to their paintings.

4. For self-expression: Generally speaking, artists are visually and verbally expressive. A picture may be worth a thousand words; however, a few thousand words can’t hurt. Though perhaps not the ideal, both are often necessary to say what the artist feels is important.

3. For the money: Some would deny it, and just as many more would place money fi rst on this list. For many artists, fi nancial success validates their existence, thus becoming a very important element of who they are as artists.

2. For approval: here are three audiences for artists. First is friends and loved ones to whom artists are more likely to give, rather than sell, a painting; second is the buying public for whom artists paint salable work; and fi nally, fellow artists, who are by far the most critical. These three groups make up the judge, jury, and witnesses at whatever court of public opinion an artist chooses to exhibit.

1. It’s fun: There are few joys, short of chocolate chip cookies, that can compare with the sheer ecstasy of swishing around the luscious richness of oils, or the creamy, sensuous mass of acrylics. Even the somewhat unpredictable and fl uid thinness of watercolor has a vibrant excitement that is nearly intoxicating.

In the fi nal analysis, artists do art for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – though not necessarily in that order.

The Successful ArtistI’m sometimes asked by students or people I meet at art shows, “What makes a successful artist?” Over the years, I’ve met, talked to, and interviewed hundreds of artists. I have noted that many of the attributes of creative personalities (i.e. artists) frequently make those individuals ill-equipped to deal with the public.




Many artists struggle with shyness or insecurity with regard to their artistic worth. Others, who have had a taste of success, often become so self-infl ated they have diffi culty dealing with their public.

A friend of mine once won Best of Show for one of his many abstract watercolors. The painting was a huge, beautiful thing, full of painterly tricks and technical expertise he had learned or devised himself over many years. The result was an eye-catching work that even seemed to be appreciated by those whom one might not expect to like abstraction.

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Figure 3His award resulted in a TV interview, which quickly turned into bland rhetoric when he was questioned about the painting, its inspiration, and abstract art in general.

He could discuss only the technical aspects of painting, while everything else was apparently intuitive. I suspect he was mostly interested in merely playing with pretty colors and lovely effects.

Artists, be aware; the mass media tends to seek out personal meanings in artists’ work. Sadly, this artist’s inability to discuss his work on such a level was painfully obvious.

Thus, as I see it, four things make up a successful artist:

• Doing art: Artists need to know how to draw and paint, and create a reasonable amount of work to prove it.

• Knowing art: Artists must know where they are coming from, and have some idea of where they are going. Being aware and cognizant of past and present art, as well as possessing some marketing and business acumen, are arts unto themselves that extend beyond the pencil and brush.

• Being something more than just an artist: Otherwise, that which the artist creates will ring as hollow as the Best of Show abstraction my friend did. An artist is what knowing art and doing art is all about.

• Declaring your identity as an artist: Successful artists must be ready, willing, and able to take everything the public has to throw at them, both positive and negative, and, if need be, throw some back. Sales? Yes, money is nice. However, it comes as an adjunct to all else.




Many other factors are important too, but in the fi nal analysis, the successful artist can pay someone else to do all of them – if they’re willing to foot the bill. The four items mentioned above, however, are absolutely essential.

Skills and CreativityArtists amuse themselves and their children by posing ageless, unanswerable questions, such as, “Which came fi rst; the chicken or the egg?” Or, if they’re in a little more fowl mood, and not quite so erudite, “Why did the chicken cross the road?” A similar question asked of artists for the last fi ve hundred years or more is, “Which is more important to the artisan or the artist—skill or creativity”?

In 1657, the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez made that very point with his painting titled The Spinners or sometimes titled, The Fable of Arachne (Figure 4). Even the inexperienced eye can see two paintings in one, hence the choice of either of the two titles.

The foreground depicts the routine activities of the Madrid tapestry factory of Santa Isabel. In the center of the painting, depicted through a brightly lit arch, is the showroom where two stylishly dressed ladies admire a fi nished tapestry titled “The Myth of Arachne.”

The contrast between the bright, sunlit front room, which is actually in the back of the painting, and the drab, dark back room in the foreground is dramatic. The carefully balanced composition making up the foreground depicts Velázquez’s virtuoso handling of color, values, masses, and movement among the fi ve working female fi gures and a sleeping cat on the fl oor.

His attention to detail extends even to the effect of objects seen through the rapid rotation of the spinning wheel from which the work gets one of its titles. Yet, as undeniably interesting as the foreground is, your attention is quickly drawn to the intriguing juxtaposition of mythology and the mundane when you peer through the enormous arch: fi rst at the factory product, and then at the lovely ladies and their dresses as they admire the work of the skilled artisans.

The tapestry on the wall is based on the myth of Arachne from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which depicts the climactic moment when Athena, resplendent in all her armor, assumes her divine presence. She raises her hand to smite the beautiful Arachne for challenging her weaving skills by turning her into a spider.

Though the work is often interpreted with many mythological complexities, Velázquez’s implication is that the artistry of the weavers can be the envy of even the gods. Yet, in the foreground the spinners benignly continue their drudgery, seemingly unaware that without their labored skills, the creativity of the artist would be for naught.

As with the chicken and the egg, you have a circular question, “Which comes fi rst; the skill or the creative inspiration”?




Without the artist’s skill, his or her ideas would be just fl eeting, ephemeral, momentary thoughts. Yet, without those fl ashes of creative genius, the artist’s work would be as mundane as the spinner’s thread, or Arachne’s spider web.

Amateur ArtistsThe term amateur, in the United States at least, has come to have rather negative connotations in art as in most other areas. That’s largely a development of the 20th century, perhaps as a result of the evolution of professional sports.

In the 1800s and before, the term carried no stigma whatsoever. Amateur simply described those who painted for their own fulfi llment and pleasure with no thought toward making a living from their art.

Women of the upper classes in particular were almost expected to take up art, and were tutored from childhood in drawing and painting, especially watercolor.

Just as today, when women probably take most of the snapshots of daily family life, back then, they were expected to capture the daily vignettes of family, friends, and scenes from their travels. Only men could be expected to handle a camera in those days.

Figure 4




Both sexes accepted that painting and drawing were effective and virtuous ways for young ladies to sharpen and cultivate skills, making them accomplished women. Of course, once a woman married, she was also expected to give up her art in favor of the pursuit of family matters.

The very term amateur is of French derivation and was not in general use until the latter part of the 18th century. Indeed, the word may well have been coined to cast a respectable light upon those women who did not choose to give up their art when they gave up their maidenhood. However, this euphemism for women who painted casually was not broad enough to contain the likes of impressionists Berthe Morisot or Mary Cassatt, who made up a new breed of modern female professionals, moving in the same artistic circles as their male counterparts.

Strangely enough, a generation earlier, another French artist of the female persuasion might well be counted as one of the fi rst of her gender to call herself a professional.

Figure 5

Her name was Rosa Bonheur. Born in 1822, her rural landscapes, painted with an almost photographic realism, were derived from life in the French provinces. Her father was a socialist drawing instructor, and her interests seemed primarily centered upon farm animals, which she studied from zoology books. No demure young easel-painter, her canvases usually measured six to eight feet.

She is sometimes compared to the female writer who wrote under the pseudonym “George Sand,” who, like Bonheur, took on a male manner of dress.

One of Bonheur’s best paintings (Figure 6), Ploughing in the Nivernais (1849), may have been inspired by a line from a Sand novel: “But what caught my attention was a truly beautiful sight; a noble subject for a painter...a handsome young man was driving a magnifi cent team of oxen.”




Painting: Now and ThenBeing an artist is not easy. It never has been. However, being one today is certainly nowhere near as diffi cult as it was fi ve or six hundred years ago. I suppose that’s true of all long-standing professions. Times have changed, and so has nearly everything about being or becoming an artist.

Today, artists sometimes shake their heads in wonder and dismay at the extremes of specialization that have crept into their profession. Virtually everything an artist might need to do can now be farmed out to specialists, including actually producing the work itself. Today there are artists, for instance American contemporary sculptor, Jeff Koons, who regularly hire and supervise workers and technicians in the production of their artworks.

At the most primal level, people think of an artist as an ideas person. Yet, in extreme cases, the idea – from the moment of conception – can pass through the hands and heads of dozens, even hundreds, of art technicians, production workers, and marketing specialists before reaching the purchaser. Even the idea itself might not be the brainchild of a single individual, but rather the work of a team of conceptualists, as in the case of the typical animated fi lm.

An artist during the Renaissance had none of these specialists to depend upon. In the fi rst place, a young man, or in very rare cases, a young woman, had to really want to become an artist just to get a foot in the door. There was no such thing as an amateur artist as people think of them today. As a bare prerequisite, the young, would-be artist had to have developed outstanding eye-hand coordination on his own. He would have also been blessed with exceptional intelligence as there were no art academies to attend. And he would have exhibited a willingness to withstand many long hours of diffi cult, menial labor, a work ethic that would probably eliminate 90 percent of all artists today.

Figure 6




A provincial lad of twelve or thirteen would have to travel with his father to a major city and practically sell himself into slavery for a period of no less than four years, and often twice that, just to master his trade.

As an apprentice to a master artist or engraver, the boy would probably start his art training by learning to clean out the stables and sweep the studio fl oor each night. For this, he would be afforded a meager room over the stables, which he would share with perhaps a dozen others like himself. Leftovers from the master’s table served as sustenance. All this was required in return for perhaps a few hours a day of drawing classes, which were usually under the tutelage of the master’s chief assistant.

As the years passed, the young apprentice would move up to learning all of the menial, but skilled, tasks associated with the production of great art. He might begin by learning to cut oak or poplar boards for gluing and planing into panels, then preparing and applying layers of chalk or plaster mixed with rabbit-skin glue to form a smooth surface upon which the master might paint.

The would-be artist would learn by doing, by digging up and grinding down the earthen or iron oxide pigments, or burning peach pits to obtain black pigment. As the young apprentice matured, he might be allowed to prepare the more precious minerals such as cinnabar to make orange-red vermilion, or malachite for use as green pigments.

Or, rarest of all, he might then be entrusted with lapis lazuli, imported from what is now Afghanistan, for use in making ultramarine ‒ a pigment which was then even more costly than gold. Likewise, he might fi nd himself grinding azurite, or copper ore for cheaper, but less intense, blue pigments.

Today, artists think of the cost of paint and other materials as almost incidental to the price of a work of art. During the 14th and 15th centuries, art commission contracts often specifi ed the colors, especially the amounts of blue and gold, to be used in a work.

Even tools such as paintbrushes, which artists today take for granted, could be purchased from brush makers only in major art centers such as Florence, Rome, or Venice. Otherwise, the artist or his apprentices would have to fashion them from the tail hair of an ermine, gluing them into a cut quill, which was then fastened to the pointed end of a wooden handle.

Many items, such as the common graphite pencil or an eraser, simply didn’t exist at the time. To draw, the artist used charcoal in one form or another, or perhaps a soft, silver stylus (silverpoint). As drawing paper was seldom made in-house, this commodity was quite costly and not to be wasted on either side. Yet paper was indispensable in the preparation of preliminary drawings, which were in turn indispensable in avoiding costly mistakes on the painstakingly prepared panels or newly plastered walls.

Today, when you visualize an artist, you picture a solitary individual working alone, often in a single room of his or her home. Before the Renaissance, and for hundreds of years thereafter, master artists directed what were, in effect, in-home art factories.




Labels: the Name GameNot long ago, an artist friend of mine observed, “What we need is either another word to describe those of us who work with paint and/or drawing materials, or else another word to take the place of ‘artist’.” He added, “I always thought ‘artist’ should be reserved for those who produce works of exceptional quality or merit, as when used to describe a musician, author, chef, or woodworker.” A new word for artist? A new defi nition of artist? Yeah, nice trick if you can do it.

As a painter, I’ve always felt that quality or merit was best expressed in numbers – not words, fi gures on price tags, or in statistics known as sales fi gures. However, I guess that hype or hyperbole (both being words, by the way) have a lot to do with those numbers, so maybe not.

Later they formed ateliers (workshops) of students and other like-minded artists. Seldom did they do work on speculation either, hoping a painting might sell, as artists do today. Such a practice was simply too costly. Moreover, in that there were no art galleries or museums during the Renaissance, the master artist was also a gallery owner and salesman too.

In fact, by the time an artist reached the top of his profession, he might do very little actual painting himself. His time was simply too valuable, consumed in chasing commissions, preparing preliminary drawings and proposals, supervising assistants, and, on rare occasions, training apprentices.

Earlier, I cited the corporate nature of today’s large-scale multimedia productions. Ironically, medieval artists and their workshops of apprentices and assistants-in-training were, in a sense, a combination art school/production company. Although today, such enterprises are not specifi cally in the business of training artists, their employees still learn from their supervisors and more experienced coworkers. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Figure 7




Technically, an artist is anyone who produces art. So the defi nition doesn’t so much revolve around the word artist as around the defi nition of the term art. As in any jargon, there are general terms, such as artist. Then, as one moves deeper into the fi eld, more specifi c words and phrases such as painter emerge. From there you move in one of three directions; to defi ne the medium, such as watercolorist; to defi ne the subject matter, such as landscapist; or to defi ne style, such as impressionist.

However, there are no common single words for some kinds of painters, such as still-lifer or abstractor. So this is where you get hit by modifi ers all over the place, such as oil portrait-painter. Add to that stylistic differentiations, and you have realistic oil portrait-painter.

The search for specifi c, one-word labels is a natural search for simplifi cation; not for artists’ own use so much, but as shorthand for public consumption in place of long, technical phrases such as abstract expressionist oil-painter. Though not necessarily a fruitless or even pretentious search, it is a long shot. For a new term to enter general usage takes either a great deal of time and effort on someone’s part, or an overwhelming need for such a term, as with Internet.

Personally, I’ve got better things to do than worry about such things, much less make any effort to change people’s use of the language. I’m just satisfi ed to be a picture painter. How about you?

In the ’70s, when I was doing graduate work in education (as in how to teach our progeny), there developed a tremendous bias against any kind of labeling. As an example, when I started teaching, special education students were referred to as “mentally retarded” – until the taunt “retard” evolved. Of course, even that was an improvement; during the 19th century, actual clinical terms included the labels “idiot,” “moron,” and “imbecile.” Shortly after I started teaching, the whole area of special education became known as “Occupational Education” (until O.E. became a derogatory acronym). Then came the term “challenged,” and today the words “intervention” and “remedial” get used a lot.

No wonder parents are intimidated by the school environment. Just when they get a handle on the jargon, someone takes offense at its implication, or a term becomes an epithet, and the whole industry goes scampering to come up with new terms. Perhaps for the same reasons, some artists hate labels too. In fact, the only people who seem to like labels are people like me who write about art, or anything else. Labels give writers something to call things.

Labeling in art seems to be thought of as most reprehensible when used to label the artists themselves, rather than their output. “He’s a realist; she’s an abstractionist.” “Dali was a surrealist.” All are fairly innocuous descriptions. However, when you begin to probe a little deeper, hackles get raised. “He’s a macho abstractionist,” or “she’s a feminist impressionist” (whatever that might be). The deeper that probing goes, the thinner and slipperier becomes the ice upon which writers must stand. When you begin to dig into the painter’s psyche, his IQ, his ethnicity, her upbringing, socioeconomic status, politics, religion, or sexuality, writers need to make sure they lock their doors at night.




Yet, every one of these areas, to varying degrees, are valid avenues to explore by writers and readers in trying to come to grips with an artist’s work.

Every one of the above mentioned areas goes into the making of an artist. Take Michelangelo for instance. He was a visual genius, but also a cold, hard-as-nails Italian, who was raised in a motherless, all-male home, and shunted off as an apprentice before he was twelve. He went straight from a lower-middle-class environment into the lap of humanist de Medici luxury. He cared not one whit for politics and was deeply religious. Every single one of those factors played a part in the nature of his work. If you were labeling Michelangelo today, you would call him a lonely, highly intelligent, Italian, middle-class, apolitical, humanistic, deeply religious sculptor. Though somewhat overwhelming, in one short burst of carefully chosen labels, you gain a deep understanding of who Michelangelo was as an artist.

Art GenealogyRecently, an online quilter friend was apparently somewhat overwhelmed by my discourse on the multitude of “isms” to be found in 20th century art, coupled with the enormous index of other art labels. She wrote to me: “Please, Mr. Lane, tell me who and what I am?”

Being somewhat familiar with her work, I replied: “You are a fabric artist living in the postmodern era with strong infl uences from expressionism, abstract expressionism, vorticism, synthetic cubism, purism, and probably even more of which I’m unaware. Really, though, you must be the judge of this.

Delve into your art genealogy. Trace back all your previous experiences in art, looking at anything from the past that might bear any resemblance to what you’re doing now. For each style or ‘ism,’ there is a corresponding manifesto, sometimes literal, sometimes merely theoretical, that provides the DNA that carries its infl uence into the future. However, don’t expect this research into your creative past to be without some effect upon what you’re doing now, and will do in the future.”

Figure 8




Just as genealogy gets you in touch with “Who am I, and where did I come from”? this creative analysis allows you to examine yourself in a clearer light. Looking at your creative genealogy enables you to refi ne your intellectual and visual infl uences as you continue to produce art each day.

As boring as art history can be at times, and as complex and confusing as art appreciation is, they are an indispensable foundation for your continuous artistic development. Like poking around in a stuffy old attic, you fi nd lots of dust, cobwebs, spiders, and other creepy-crawlies.

However, in among the “eww gross” you also come upon some old toys to play with, interesting old magazines to browse through, fascinating books to read, curious whatchamacallits and thingamajigs to ponder, things that make you laugh, and things to make you cry. Similarly, all your past art experiences and infl uences are exciting contributions to the creative genius behind your artistic output.

Art GenesAlthough geneticists have not yet been able to isolate it, few would dispute the fact that there seems to be an art gene that runs in families.

The Peale family in Philadelphia, during the fi rst decades of American history, is an excellent example, as is the Wyeth family of today.

As an art instructor, I’ve seen such genetics up close. In the twenty-six years I taught, I “art educated” one entire generation of a rather large family, and started in on the second generation. Not surprisingly, the art gene seems no less dominant in the second generation of children. Not every member of this family has it, of course, though a signifi cant number do.

In the 1400s, there lived in Augsburg, Germany, a master tanner by the name of Holbein. Given the time and place, his trade was held in very high regard by the community. His output, if not quite an art, was at least a highly respected craft. He had two sons; Hans, born in 1460, and Sigismund, born in 1465. Both of them became successful artists, their work largely composed of portraits and religious subjects.

One of these brothers, Hans, became the father of two sons himself: Hans, known as Hans the Younger and Ambrosius. These two brothers also became artists, though Hans the Younger quite outshone his brother, and even their father, known to art historians as Hans the Elder. Around 1515, Hans the Elder apparently had some fi nancial diffi culties and moved with his two sons to Basel, Germany.

There, Hans the Younger met Erasmus (the writer), and ended up illustrating his essay, “In Praise of Folly,” which was a tremendous success and spread the Holbein name as far away as England and Italy. The sudden infl ux of Spanish gold from the new world precipitated a fi nancial crisis in much of Europe around 1520.




This caused Hans the Younger, who, by this time, had yet another sizable generation of Holbeins to feed, to journey to England, where his etchings and incredibly detailed portraits were an immediate hit with the court of King Henry VIII. In 1543, Hans the Younger painted a highly detailed portrait of Henry VIII (Figure 9).

It was eight years before Hans the Younger returned to Basel. The next several years seem to have been a series of trips back and forth as the artist found wealthy patrons in England, yet raised his family in Germany.

History doesn’t record how many fourth-generation Holbeins became artists, only that their father, in 1543, while on one of his many sojourns to London, fell victim to the plague and died. He was forty-six.

Figure 9

The Top Ten Myths about ArtistsCall them misconceptions, inaccuracies, false precepts, or outright lies. For the most part, they can all be lumped together into what you could call myths. I suppose every profession has them, and art is no different.

Therefore, I present to you the top ten myths about artists:

10. Having a fi ne arts degree makes you a great artist. Not necessarily. However, having a BFA (Bachelor of Fine Arts) and an MBA (Master of Business Administration) with a major in marketing certainly helps.

9. Selling lots of paintings makes you a professional. Nope. However, selling them for high prices defi nitely puts an artist in that category.

8. Artists are all a bunch of crazy loons with no more common sense than a toadstool. False, I know lots of artists with far more common sense than toadstools.

7. The best artists always have lots of paint all over them. Not so; most of them bathe daily. But check out their clothes ‒ that’s always a sure sign.




6. All the best artists were once starving artists. Wrong; only the skinny ones!

5. Watercolor is the most diffi cult art medium. No way! I always thought crayons were the hardest. I mean, just look how few professional crayon artists there are working today.

4. All great artists have their work represented in museums. Defi nitely not, I know one who doesn’t. Don’t we all?

3. Great artists are only appreciated after their deaths. Actually, such recognition can come any time after ninety.

2. The more an artist’s work costs, the more valuable it is. Not on your life! Just look on your refrigerator door ‒ priceless art. Nice magnets, too.

1. And, the number ONE myth about artists: They paint solely for their love of art. Not even close! Mostly they paint to get out of doing jobs around the house!

Figure 10




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Who is an Artist? - Amazon S3 · the artist feels is important. 3. For the money: Some would deny it, and just as many more would place money ... buying public for whom artists paint