END MIDDLE BEGINNING
A Blog About Creativity
Search
How To Be an Artist With a Day Job
There are fifty thousand articles online about turning your creative passion into a full-time career (that's an exact number I counted myself, so no need to check if it’s accurate). Many of said fifty thousand articles include very good advice. You should read them and maybe take what they say to heart. But there aren’t many articles tackling the far more common situation: being an artist and having a—*gulp*—day job.
Is Art For the Artist or the Consumer?
During a recent recording session, I had a conversation about creating music and art for yourself vs. creating it for others. In some ways you create art for yourself, because it is a fulfilling thing that expresses a part of you. In other ways, the moment you have created something, it is no longer yours and suddenly becomes the emotional property of someone else.
So which is it? How can art be both for ourselves and for others’ enjoyment?