Visual Artist - As a career option
Are you enchanted by colors? When you look around the world, does your mind revolve around ways to re-create scenes, faces, emotions, and ideas on paper?
…Perhaps it doesn’t make sense to ask you these questions because when it comes to a career in visual arts, no young artist needs help deciding what they want.
By its intrinsic nature, art appeals to our deepest emotions, and those who venture into it fall in love with it easily. You’re either dying to get there, or you haven’t taken it seriously.
No, if you’re thinking of a career in visual arts and are here on our website, chances are that you want to know if following your dreams will at all make you successful.
By the time they reach high school, most potential visual artists get numbed by the knowledge that the world is benignly indifferent to their aspirations: only famous visual artists make money, and people only need so many famous names to be satisfied.
There are already way too many great people out there for you to be too confident about success, and you’re probably wondering if you should pursue a “safe” career such as engineering or law instead. Let’s take the possibilities down to pieces.
Eligibility Criteria to Become a Visual Artist
- +2: No Restrictions. However, high school experience with humanities and painting is favored.
- Bachelor’s Degree: Bachelor of Fine Arts, not compulsory but helps
- Master’s Degree: Not compulsory
What are the possible career paths with a Visual Arts degree?
Many people believe that artists are created at a very young age – before they have the chance to acquire formal training or gain experience. This is only half-true: being a visual artist is a lifelong learning process, but it is indeed a well-known fact that most people who have a penchant for the arts show their proclivity for it early in life.
If this statement fits you, then it is likely that you have acquired a certain amount of experience and/or training in your field of interest already. Naturally, it is fundamentally important to keep bettering yourself right through college and thereafter.
The actual degree you pursue, however, can vary widely. While a Bachelor’s degree in liberal arts or fine arts is always a possibility, it’s also a decent idea to start off in a peripheral stream such as Fashion Design, Printmaking, Graphic Design, or even architecture.
Once you’re done with your bachelor’s, a master’s degree can narrow down your goals and allow you to zero-in closer to where you wanted to be. That or you’ll eventually learn to compartmentalize.
Career as a Visual Artist
Visual arts is an umbrella term for a host of different techniques that revolve around old-school drawing and painting. Graphic design, fashion design, interior decoration, photography, digital arts, and a host of other professions come under its grasp, and each of these come with different career prospects even though all of them fundamentally require the same creative process.
Two ways to kick-start a Visual Arts Career
- The direct way is to go to college and university to acquire and liberal or a fine arts degree.
- The indirect way is to major in a discipline that is related to visual arts and allows you to be in the proximity of artists, while at the same time being financially promising.
In either case, what is important is to have a secondary skill or talent that you can use to sustain yourself in case your career practising l’art pour l’art doesn’t set off.
Read into the lives of your favourite artists, and you’ll see that all of them had a secondary profession before they made their breakthroughs: Andy Warhol did advertisements for a shoe company. M F Hussein designed children’s toys.
A Day in the Life of a Visual Artist
Hello there! Let’s fast-forward your life for a day and see what it’ll be like if you pursue visual arts as a career. I’m X, and I lead two lives. In one, I am an entrepreneur: I design and sell thermoformed glass articles. In another, I am a painter...well, hold onto your curiosity, the day has just begun.
10:00 AM: It’s time to rise and shine! The best thing about being a self-employed artist is that I don’t have to join the rat race every morning at half eight. I wake up when I will it. Take that, establishment! Hey, care to join me for some breakfast?
11:00 AM: I may be a late riser, but my aide Y – he helps me make with my glassware molding – arrived bang on time. In fact, he has already made the necessary arrangements and I can dig right in. We’re going to make a series of crockery today, and possibly a few showpiece.
Here’s how we roll: Y brings me the glass and cuts it into the plate- and spoon-like pieces (but flat!). I paint a unique picture on each of them using these special heat-resistant colours, and give them back to Y once they’re dry.
Y takes them to a furnace and molds them so that they become… what they were meant to be. Anyway, pay close attention – I’m going to paint right on glass!
12:00 AM: I experiment heavily with my glass art, and even though I’m just going to put down a few delicate line drawings today, the medium is perfect for expressionist concepts. I love Edvard Munch, you see, and this is somewhat liberating.
Think: the people I sell these to will have no idea that the colours on their cups and saucers – much like their dangling conversations and their superficial sighs – signify serenity on the borders of their lives. Sigh. I digress. Today’s glass work is done. Why don’t you skip along with Y and see how beautiful the paintings look when they’re melted?
1:00 PM: Ha, I bet you enjoyed that! Sadly, that’s all the painting I’m going to be doing on art today. Right now, I’m at my study furiously drawing elbows. Yes, elbows. Don’t laugh! I take advanced painting classes for three hours every day, and for the past several months, my teacher is putting me through an intensive study of the human anatomy.
Do you know how different the inner bone structure of elbows are in women and men? I do, as good as any doctor.
5:00 PM: Hey, you’re still here, then? I’m back from my lessons. Those are always the three most frantic hours of my life! But now that they’re done with, would you like to come with me to a photography exhibit in town?
6:00 PM: They’re showing a few originals by Dora Maar at the exhibit, and I couldn’t miss it for the life of me: I’m planning to try my hand at professional photography next year.
The thing about my life is that there are no timely promotions: if I don’t actively try to take myself to the next level I’ll be where I am forever, and that won’t be pretty so I push myself.
Fortunately, the journey itself towards the heights is enough to fill my heart. You must imagine me happy!
Did you find this to be a very interesting field? Do you think you have the requisite skill set to be called as a visual artist? Do you want to ask us something? Have your say in the comment box below! Enjoy Reading!