Life After Art School: Five Years to An Illustration Career

This is an article i came across by illustrator Chris Moeller, in a week where i was feeling a little uncertain about my career path this article has reassured and inspired me to keep going!! 

-By Chris Moeller

The one emotion every newly-minted art school graduate experiences is anxiety. Can I really make it?  What do I do now?  All my friends are getting jobs making $50,000 a year.  Where does that leave me?  I’ll be lucky to get a job delivering pizza.

I graduated from the University of Michigan School of Art back in 1985, ready to take the illustration world by storm.  Until that moment, my life had been mapped out for me.  I had put in my hours painting, drawing from the model, and showing up  at crit time.  Suddenly, I was out in the real world with no more crits, no summer vacation, no spring break, no class-mates.  I wasn’t an upperclassman or a fraternity brother.  I was one of millions of adults, expected to make my way in the world.  Worse, unlike those folks with the $50,000 jobs, I had no clear idea what to expect.  What faced me,  what faces every student who graduates with a degree in the arts, is an undiscovered country that appears shadowy and frightening.

As the years went by, I realized that there was indeed a path through the wilderness, as clear and as straightforward as any law-student’s.  I hadn’t seen it as a terrified graduate, but looking back now it seems obvious.  The first thing to understand is that you’re going to have to pay your dues.  Every starting profession demands this step, even those seemingly wonderful jobs your friends are embarking on.  The hottest law student doesn’t leap right into a partnership, he’s expected to start at the bottom and work his way up.  And prepare yourself, because, for an artist, this step can take time. Embrace the notion that it will take five years before you’re working full time.

FIVE YEARS
I can hear you laughing.  Laughing nervously, perhaps, but, honestly, five years?  When I graduated, I would have laughed right along with you.  I may have felt intimidated by the challenges ahead, but I also felt ready.  I was confident in my skills.  I had been taught what I needed to do to get work as a freelance illustrator.  So, when a successful illustrator named Richard Williams cautioned me that it could take a long time to break in to the business, maybe as long as  five years, I nodded and thought to myself:  “maybe for you, old man, but not for me.”  Over the coming months and years, I had ample time to reflect on his words, and it helped me keep things in perspective.  Five years later, literally, I got my first graphic novel commission, and my career took off.  For those few of you who will get snapped up by a game studio right out of school, give yourself a hand!  Everyone else, take a deep breath and consider the notion that this could take time.  The years immediately after graduation aren’t some horrible purgatory.  They can be some of the most fruitful years of your artistic life.  Give them room to unfold.  Have patience.  Use the time to push hard for what you want, to refine your work and build your confidence.

THE RIGHT KIND OF JOB
First, you’ll need a particular kind of job.  Remember, you’re looking for a JOB not a CAREER.  Keep that distinction clear in your mind.  Optimally, a job should be both part-time, and career related.  The importance of your work being part-time can’t be overstated.  If you’re working full-time, you won’t have the time and flexibility you need for portfolio-building, self-promotion, networking, all of the things you need to do build your career.  There are obviously secondary points to be made here, the most important of which is to live inexpensively.  Think carefully about taking on difficult financial obligations like large student loans, a house, or children.  The leaner you can keep your life during this critical time, the easier it will be to get your career going.  It can be frustrating to see your former school-mates driving expensive cars and living in big houses a few years after graduation, but keep your eye on the prize.  Your path leads to you making a living doing what you love most.

The idea of finding work that builds career-related skills can encompass a broad range of possibilities.  During my 5-years, I did some freelance spot illustrations, painted portraits, and worked in a textile design studio in Manhatten.  In their own way, all of these jobs helped me hone my skills.  The textile design studio was the least directly associated with what I wanted to do, but I was using paint, and I learned everything I know about color-mixing during my years there.  So, if you can get work at a gallery, in a comic-book store, or in a museum, that time is serving a dual-purpose.  If you find yourself working as a waitress or a garbage collector, don’t worry about it.  Every job will teach you important life-lessons, and your job is fundamentally a means to help launch your career.

CAUTIONARY TALE
A friend of mine just graduated with a degree in film-making, and is facing the same uncertainty about the future that you all are.  Rather than get a part-time job, however, he’s chosen to start working full-time as a salesman for an internet company.  He told me that he will feel much more comfortable looking for film work with a year’s earnings in his savings account.  It would have driven me crazy to “take off a year” after graduation.  To my friend, the idea of having no money in the bank is equally unthinkable.  He’s doing what feels he needs to do to move forward with confidence and security.  Though it wouldn’t have worked for me, I support his decision, because I know his strength of character, and because he has a clearly formulated plan.  My warning to him, and to all of you, is that money anxiety is notoriously persistent, no matter how much you have saved.  Odds are, the same anxiety you feel now will still be there a year from now, demanding an extension of the “year off” by one more, and then one more, until you're looking back and wondering when exactly you fell off the train. 

SAYING YES
I’m not going to go into the mechanics of looking for illustration jobs.  Hopefully it’s something you learned in school, and if not, the internet is full of helpful advice on building a portfolio, submitting work to editors, etc...  What I want to emphasize is this:  while you’re on your five year plan, look for opportunities, and be prepared to act on them when they appear.  As master illustrator Michael Kaluta told me when I met him at a comic convention in back in 1989: “When you are where I am, you can say no.  Until then, you say yes.”  Prepare yourself to say yes at every moment.  Don’t worry about protecting yourself from unscrupulous publishers, take any job that comes your way.  I know that sounds odd, but unscrupulous publishers are as likely to be your pathway to the promised land as they are to take advantage of you. I started my career painting comics for $60 a page!  In exchange for working nearly for free, I demanded 100 copies of the printed comic to give out as samples (I still have some in my studio).  Carry business cards wherever you go.  Build a web-site and keep it up to date.  Talk to people.  That may seem obvious, but I learned as much from talking to artists during my five years as I did in school.  Go to conventions, and when you’re at them, don’t forget to talk to the artists!  It can be intimidating, but they are some of the friendliest, most helpful people you’ll ever meet.  Trust me, they all walked the path you’re walking right now and they remember how scary it was. Ask them to look at your work.  Ask them about their artwork, and their experiences breaking into the business.  You’ll be surprised how generous they can be.

THE PAYOFF
Twenty-five years ago, I was in school with some incredibly talented students.  I'm only aware of a few that are working as professional artists now.  I’m convinced that most graduates drop out during the years immediately following graduation.  They're stressful years.   It's easy to feel forced by financial necessity into the full-time workplace, putting your dreams on hold.  If you’re serious about wanting to become a professional artist, don’t let that happen to you!  Keep your financial obligations low.  Give yourself time to build your career.  Look for ways to open the door to opportunity, and be ready to jump when that door opens.  In the days ahead, remind yourself that you really are on a path, just like your engineer and lawyer friends.  Their path is eased by fat paychecks and fancy cars.  What you’re aiming for lies farther down the road, but is better than the most expensive car or the biggest house:  a career doing what you love most.  Be brave, be persistent, trust in the process.  Every one of my illustrator friends will tell you:  it’s a life worth fighting for.

Artists On The Dole In Ireland

An interesting article which i came across during the week in the Irish Times, regarding the role which the dole plays for struggling artists, although highly educated does their education get them anywhere?!. A depressing read for any art graduate but  i feel this information should be available for students who are thinking about a career in the arts.


Role of the dole: How benefits benefit artists
The Irish Times 
Sat 4th Aug

Without ‘the other arts council’, almost a quarter of artists would earn nothing while – and sometimes after – spending years on a body of work. The artist is alive and well in the garret, writes PATRICK FREYNE

IT HAS LONG been seen as “the other arts council”. Generations of musicians, artists, film-makers, actors and writers – including this journalist, in a former life as a musician – have spent time working on their art unpaid and with the help of the Department of Social Protection. Those in the culture industries generally recognise this as a necessary fact of life. In order for Ireland to develop a clutch of James Joyces, Riverdances and U2s to cement its arts reputation internationally, thousands of committed artists must toil for little or no reward.
Before the welfare state, the options for artists were: have rich relatives, find a wealthy patron or starve in a garret. After the welfare state those who might never have had the option to create could do so while on the dole. There are high-profile examples. JK Rowling wrote the first instalment of the Harry Potter sequence while living on benefits. Many of the punk, post-punk and pop bands of the 1970s and 1980s were formed in the dole queue.
“Without the [dole] you wouldn’t have had The Specials. You wouldn’t have had UB40. You wouldn’t have had The Clash,” says Peter Murphy, the writer of acclaimed novel John the Revelator and, a long time ago, a musician on the dole. “Now, it’s worth arguing that these kinds of bands were so ambitious and resourceful they might have figured it out one way or another . . . But the reality is that if you dedicate your life to the arts you’re essentially taking a vow of, if not poverty, then extremely menial living.
“If you work for four years on a book and someone gives you 50 grand it sounds like a lot of money, but if you break that up over four years of writing, and four years of learning how to write in the first place, that’s a very menial wage. Some newspapers like to portray artists as hookah-smoking Oscar Wilde dandy types sitting by a turf fire, but the reality is, I’m afraid, far more North of England kitchen-sink drama.”
In The Living and Working Conditions of Artists, a report published by the Arts Council in 2010, 23 per cent of the artists surveyed had registered as unemployed in the previous year. In 2008, according to the report, artists earned less than €15,000 from their art. Noel Kelly, the director of Visual Artists Ireland, says 37.5 per cent of the visual artists it surveyed last year had received assistance during the past five years. “Most depend on other sources of income, on the income of spouses or on the dole.”
The current economic conditions mean artists are particularly dependent on that very meagre latter option. “We have graduates getting out of college now who would traditionally have subsidised an art career [with a job] in academia, but all those jobs have gone,” says Kelly. He stresses that these people work very hard and do not want to receive the dole. “Artists are constantly asked to do stuff for nothing. Some exhibitions are great and pay artists a small stipend, but there are many organisations that just don’t have any money and artists are so willing to show their work that they work for them anyway. Artists often work for two or three years on a body of work with no money until the end.”
Frank Buckley, the artist behind the Billion Euro House in Smithfield, in Dublin’s north city, a construction made of decommissioned bank notes, is on the dole. “Over the past eight months my work has been seen in 113 countries and featured in national newspapers all over the world. People just presume you’re making money when they see that. When you tell them about the reality, they say, ‘Ah sure, it’s only a matter of time . . . you’re famous.’ But I live on €188 a week. My mortgage is in arrears, and only for the guy giving me [an empty office building on Coke Lane] to use, I wouldn’t be able to do this.”
This perception of success can lead to problems when artists turn up at the dole office, and Kelly says the way the system deals with artists is inconsistent. “Of those we surveyed who had sought social welfare, 23 per cent were told to apply for alternative jobs, 14 per cent were threatened with the removal of benefits and 27 per cent noted variations between social-welfare officers. A lot of them are encouraged to get out of the arts.”
This is a shame, because art needs time. Jinx Lennon, Dundalk’s fine political songwriter and punk poet, who is playing at the Liss Ard festival today, says his own artistic development benefited greatly from an involuntary spell of unemployment a decade ago. “At the moment I have a sort of a night job,” he says. “About 10 or 11 years ago I wasn’t working. I didn’t have much money but I found something that was worth a lot more – the ability to create. I was on the dole and I could have used that time vegetating or getting stoned or watching TV, but I decided I had a lot to write about and I needed to get it out. It was about finding my art, if you like. The anger or the energy I had from being on the dole: I found that if I could just get the thoughts down on paper that was really, really good. And now I’m really grateful for that time because I was able to start and give myself a kick.”
Julian Gough, a novelist, musician and playwright (see Culture Shock, below), who also left the dole queue a long time ago, agrees that when it comes to art, time is of the essence. “Samuel Beckett had a very modest private income, James Joyce had hand-outs from Sylvia Beach and my generation had the dole,” he says. “It’s how most artists I know bought the time to become good at what they do. Without it I don’t think we’d have had any of the great artists, stand-ups, writers or actors we’ve seen in recent decades . . . You have to immerse yourself completely in your art to become good at it and the dole is one of the only ways a lot of people can achieve that.”
Obviously, this subject raises questions about the role of welfare. Many feel that unless artists make their art work economically in the short term, they should change profession. However, most successful artists did not start their careers with economic success, or even solvency, and nobody wants art to be the province of the independently wealthy. “It would be really interesting if there was someone in every social-welfare office who was at least trained in or had some facility with the arts and could engage with artists coming in to claim the dole,” says Murphy. “It would be very forward thinking and progressive if artists could come in and sit down and honestly say, ‘Here’s what I’m doing. Here’s my work and here’s what the Arts Council says. I’m not taking the mick.’”
Kelly has been trying to arrange a meeting between Visual Artists Ireland and the Minister for Social Protection to discuss the problems struggling artists have with the system. He is also advocating a version of the New Deal of the Mind that operates in the UK. The scheme references the original New Deal in the US in the 1930s, which included unprecedented levels of state funding to the arts during the Great Depression. “The New Deal of the Mind takes the deficit of staff in the culture sector and matches it with artists registered as unemployed and looking for additional employment,” says Kelly. “There are all these cultural institutions around the country that can’t deliver the programmes they have because they don’t have the staff. This could address that and give artists work.”
Gough thinks it’s important to make explicit something that’s usually just a whisper: that the actors, writers, artists and film-makers who enrich our culture often need to claim benefits. “The dole is incredibly significant for the arts in Ireland, and that’s not well acknowledged,” he says. “It’s not a luxurious life, by any means. It might be nice if artists could get a modest income to acknowledge that what they’re doing is culturally useful. It would have to be less than the dole, though, to stop people pretending to be artists to get it.” He laughs. “Maybe just a symbolic euro less.”