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The
Life of An Artist
Georgia was an artist but with her daughter's birth her creativity and studio
time came almost to a standstill. She dreaded the thought that her dreamed for
artist's life had all but dried up and blown away. Bill received his masters
in fine arts but was struggling to discern if his call to the life of an artist
could survive the financial insecurity of his first five years of virtual anonymity.
Sandy had received praise for her work among family and friends, had won several
awards and produced two positively reviewed gallery shows. She wondered, "Is
now the time to quit the job that had funded her art work or to admit that her
artistry was mostly a creative outlet for maintaining a balanced life and a
very sophisticated hobby which provided hours and hours of satisfaction?
Many of us dream of being artists, looking in from the outside, but consider the loss of dependable income too risky. Many others of us love being artists but are secretly envious of our nonartist friends with seemingly stable lives.
What does it take to be a successful artist?
The following conversation with jewelry designer and artist, Nancy Worden, gives voice and perspective to those of us trying to answer these questions. Worden's work recently was featured in the Oct/Nov 98 issue of American Craft and on its cover, as well as the Aug 96 issue of Ornament. She has won numerous awards and had solo shows in such cities as Seattle and San Francisco. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Seattle Art Museum, The American Craft Museum and the University of Georgia.
Passion and Skill
In many professions, but especially within art, a passion for one's work is vital, if not essential, to success - but so is skill and technique. Where and when Worden's passion to "make things" began is unclear because it began at such an early age. It was aided by the encouragement, opportunities and supplies provided by parents. She added that TV was not available as a child, and therefore, it was not a distraction. She has always derived great pleasure and joy from making things and her shop and jewelry has provided an outlet and focus for this lifelong inclination and childhood interest. Making art is so central to Worden that working in her studio can visibly improve her spirits and health.
She attributes the skills she has developed over the years to her teachers and mentors, her patience with the tedious hard work and discipline required to develop technique and the "vocabulary" of her profession so that it becomes second nature. Also vital in skills development is an ability to be a self-critic - to analyze and improve upon her work, and a love for the hours and hours of detail work needed to complete any piece. Worden makes a distinction about the meaning of being self-critical: referring to the quality of one's work, not to a kind of perfectionism that can stifle or even cripple an artist. She is speaking to a quality that has concern for both conceptual design and craftsmanship. Both are necessary to success. And, they are needed to learn any craft. Her words reminded me of a line from Michelangelo, "If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful after all." Taking a design from its first dawning as an idea, to sketch, to finished product can be a long, arduous process.
For twenty years Worden has been part of the Seattle art scene. Those who make it - professional recognition and financial reward, she says, are those who have made a long term commitment. Worden voiced that most aspiring artists aren't willing to stay with the learning process of their craft long enough to master its "vocabulary" - to reach the empowering moment when they no longer have to think of and agonize over every step. When that happens a flow and fluidity to one's work begins and more energy can go into the more creative aspects of producing one's art. One of her guiding principles for artists to their gaining both fame and finances is to show one's work as continuously as possible. This is parallel to the advice given writer Gregg LeVoy by a writer acquaintance in his eighties,"If you're determined to be a writer, just remember, the first sixty years are the hardest."
Money for both livelihood and art has not come easily to Worden and she's always needed to work. However, because of her drive and initiative to be an artist, she has always taken jobs related to what she's needed to learn to advance her art. She apprenticed to artists, worked for a tool company obtaining jewelry tools at discount, worked as a production artist learning the business side of art, been a gallery employee picking up ideas on display and self-promotion, been both curator and teacher. While Worden has been able to make money with her art she's the first to admit that her passion and joy in creating art were the original aims that kept her at her art.
Compromising, Selling Out
What jobs does an artist need to take to advance their career and which ones just to pay the bills? Everyone has to find their own balance, she says, it's a tricky thing to work out, and, that balance is changing, all the time. Worden says that every week requires a balancing act between the artist and the business person, between being creative and being self-employed, between self-reflection and self-promotion, between spending scheduled and disciplined time in the jewelry shop and being with family. Success - fame and/or fortune, for the artist has to be individually defined. Tax forms remind Worden that she's an artist in business. This reminder keeps the various facets of her life in their proper perspective. For Worden, finding a balance between meaning and money (a traditional tradeoff facing most working people) is to take on personal commissions, to teach, curate as needed. Worden estimates that most professional, visual artists make about half their income on commissions, some one hundred percent.
Worden is a disciplined pragmatist knowing that certain activities put bread on the table while others allow her to create more art. Life is one of tradeoffs. Her decisions move her toward, rather than away from her goals as artist/mother/wife/friend/peer/mentor.....and in what order? Her decisions are not for or against art, for or against family, but for each of these things, and more. Her decisions are supportive rather than destructive of the whole she seeks to create. Her art and life composes a complex necklace of metaphors for each other. They mutually inform and energize. For example: at one point she moved her studio out of her house because its proximity intruded too much on the family. She added lightly that housework has never been a distraction from her art or family. She also mentioned an artist friend who seeks balance by working on her art while her kids are at school, period.
Personal and Professional Support
Much of an artist's life is solitary so Worden maintains contact and involvement with artists, art groups and associations, as well as through broader civic commitments and a few political campaigns. Currently she devotes time to the school where her daughter attends and to children's concerns. All her activities enlarge her life, and, indirectly but not unimportantly, make her and her art more widely known outside of artist's circles in Seattle.
Her career actually began when she was a 17 year old high school student taking college classes from professor Ken Cory at Central Washington University. If it weren't for Cory who created opportunities and challenged her conceptually regarding jewelry design she expects she would have lost interest in her art because she'd been focusing primarily on the technical aspects of jewelry making. It's the intellectual part of jewelry work that now holds her attention. The mentoring/friendship/peer relationship grew over the years to the point that, after his death, Worden curated a major retrospective of Cory's work. She says that the show was a culmination of many events and experiences that renewed her interest in and propelled her to once again becoming more active in the jewelry profession and in the Seattle art community. Her teaching and contacts with artists has provided opportunities to advise and mentor a few younger artists.
Marketing and Schmoozing
"The Queen of the Thank You note" is the way Worden describes herself when it comes to self-promotion. For her, art is a business, but it needs to be done with a sense of mutual appreciation. She could not say enough during our conversation about the importance of courtesy and good manners for the artist, the business person and the artist-in-business. She makes sure to thank collectors, curators, writers...For her, good manners both establish and cement relationships. An asset to Worden's success is that she truly enjoys establishing relationships and derives great joy from the personal connections her jewelry foster's with those who buy her work. For her, that means spending time on her client relationships, keeping in touch with her personal and professional network, and being noticed in trade publications through ads. She takes to heart advice from her husband, a self-employed engineer, to be involved in weekly self-promotion. So, she's regularly and consistently speaking with collectors, museums, galleries... She mentions Dale Chihuly as an example - that inspite of his stature and recognition in the Northwest, and internationally, he is still out there promoting himself, his art, and other artists.
Grace and Luck
Worden once created a piece about creating your own luck. She says that grace and luck are part of every life and every artist. However, she goes on to add that discipline and learning one's craft are luck's necessary complements. Luck happens when the artist takes advantage of arising opportunities by using their innate abilities and craftsmanship. But, continued success as an artist goes beyond luck for it requires repeated and constant attention, and action, over time.
Universal Themes
What Worden and I both realized toward the end of our interview was the universal quality of the themes we had been addressing in the interview. Whether you are an artist, self-employed, or trying to move ahead in your chosen career or profession, the themes in this article also pertain. And, if you think and dream broadly enough, we're each one of us artists, or apprentices of our life - work's of art in progress. The poet, author and potter, M.C. Richards said:
Every person is a special kind of artist and every activity is a special art. An artist creates out of the materials of the moment, never again to be duplicated. This is true of the painter, the musician, the dancer, the actor; the teacher; the scientist; the businessman; the farmer - it is true of us all, whatever our work, that we are artists so long as we are alive to the concreteness of a moment and do not use it to some other purpose.
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