Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Swing Time
The Mission Paradox Blog: Being able to make a full time living means that you must have the stomach to handle the swings. A lot of people don't. There is no shame in that, it just means you have to be honest about your own ability to handle uncertainty.
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So I do not really consider myself to a artist in the traditional way. My art that I enjoy doing is more of what many people would call good skills. Lining up the perfect cut, measuring correctly, or having the whole plan come together. I consider it to be a art but in a way my art supports other peoples art.
So to be able to do my art full time I would say is possible. But the question is where. If time gets tough I could switch the real world residential/ commercial construction but to me that losses something. When you have a ridiculous design and you get to figure out how to create that that is some moving to me. My experience at CMU is short but watching the joy in scenery designers as the scenery comes together is pretty exciting.
More important I do not know how I would handle the feast and famine type work environment. I hope and pray that I will be able to be a TD full time, but we shall see what life throw at me.
These three statements are pretty much the statement of purpose that I wrote for a professional practice class that I took at CMU some time ago. I think that a lot of artists go through this process during the middle stages of their careers. The trick is when it turns it to axiom 4. . . “I am an artist and I deserve to be paid for my art because it is a necessary part of our culturally relevance and if you do not pay me them I am an underrepresented artisan that deserves public support.” Making a living doing art is a wonderful thing but because you choose do art does not mean that you will be paid for it.
Another analogy, when you are young you can handle being on the swing set all day. . . even after you eat three packaged of Nibs. When you get older you can only handle a little bit of swinging. Then you need to sit down for a bit. Young people do not understand this. Old people do.
P.S. This is the kind of article I hope 20 people should comment on.
As a young student, I find very often that I am more thinking "these are my dreams, and I will make them happen, and that is what is important to me." I find that I am not thinking as much about what I will get paid for pursuing art as a living, and the swings I will have to ride in order to get there. This is something my parents remind me of often, and I'm glad they do. While having goals is important, I ultimately will need to make money one day to provide for myself and possibly a family far down in the future. That is where this article comes into play, and although it is usually "older" people who understand and think about this idea, I think it's really important for young people to understand this as well. In my opinion, the School of Drama does a great job at educating us on this swing, and the challenges we will face as artists (or not) in the "real world."
I agree with Jess, that I think the majority of us here are doing this because it is something that we love and something that we are determined to make happen so we can continue to have this important part of ourselves. But I do find it a little disconcerting that a lot of people here really seem to not get this so called 'swing'. I grew up having to be very careful and being concerned about this swing all the time, and many people that have not had to do that in the past seem to have a skewed idea of what it's going to be like. I hear "I'll just make it work" a lot, and it doesn't seem like the gravity of what that means is really present. While I don't think that anyone should give up on what they want to do just because it may be difficult, I do think that it is important to realize what it may be like and prepare for that.
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