Toxic Blood: Artists Always Starve
Chapter 4
“Artists always starve.”
That sentence will probably echo in my head in Father’s voice for the rest of my life.
“Artists always starve.”
It was like a mantra, omnipresent in my youth, uttered in my ears as far back as I can remember, since I was so small I could barely hold a pencil and first showed an inclination to enjoy art, when my greatest works were finger painted stick figures.
Then there were those lovely times when Father decided to expound, perhaps in some sort of attempt to not completely crush one of my very few joys in life.
“Artists always starve. Enjoy your art, but don’t ever try to make a living at it. No one is interested in buying art from living artists. They only want art from dead artists.”
Art supplies were expensive and framed as frivolous, so I remember having a big box of crayons and coloring books as a child, but not much else. My first real art supplies were purchased by Father’s father when I was still young enough to be enjoying the crayons. He went to a local art store and purchased a few cheap canvases, some basic brushes, and a starter box of student grade acrylic paints. He then gave them “to the family”, winking at me because we both knew I was probably the only person in the family who would have any interest in using them.
To my surprise, immediately following the gifting Father used one of the larger canvases and the paints. I was fascinated watching him work on his painting, which was a pyramid of stone-like medieval arched windows, each with a different scene in it. I had no idea he was artistically inclined, and I loved watching what he was creating. He admitted he preferred oil paints, and said he used to paint when he was a teen, but stopped painting before he married Mother. I do not remember him saying more than that about it, even though I was vocally curious.
Father never finished the painting. I never saw what he did with it, so I suspect he threw it out when I was not looking. When he first worked on it, it seemed to help assuage his depression, but after he stopped he fell into such a deep pit of depression he barely came out of his and Mother’s room. He refused to talk about it except to say that it was not turning out the way he wanted.
After that, the art supplies were indeed mine alone. Sadly, I quickly discovered that I did not enjoy painting with acrylics. I tried creating a number of paintings, including a couple directly inspired by Bob Ross, but I was not happy with any of them. I was aiming for realism, and what I achieved looked clunky and awkward. The paint always dried on the canvas before I was done moving it around to my satisfaction, leaving me feeling like I did not have time to really figure anything out.
I did a lot of fabric painting in my tween years. I think I spent a lot of my meager allowance on the paints, and Mother chipped in for supplies from time to time, at least in part because she loved bragging on my art and showing it off. I painted a number of shirts and sweatshirts for her, which she wore in a rare genuine show of parental support. The fabric painting was easier than the acrylics because I could purchase transfers that I liked and paint cartoony stuff that turned out looking as intended. Towards the end of my fabric painting days I experimented with higher quality fabric paints and semi-successful attempts at realism, but my interest was moving elsewhere, and the higher quality materials required for realism were correspondingly more expensive.
After that I delved into painting models, especially Japanese mech models and tabletop RPG miniatures, along with the occasional pewter dragon. The smell of two-part epoxy will be forever burned into my memory. I did not actually play wargames or role play with miniatures (that would have required friends and socializing), but I greatly enjoyed the challenge of painting the figures realistically. My miniatures had shadows and dirt stains on their clothes, and bright tiny details and jewels on their glistening swords and other weapons. My mech models were painted with often intricate designs, and then always finished off with weathering and battle scars. I learned about how to paint low lights and high lights on models to create the feeling of more depth than actually existed.
When I was still very young, Mother and Father were able to purchase a computer for the family. The fact that we had a computer in the house meant we had a printer in the house, and a printer meant we had blank paper in ample supply. Most schoolwork at the time was required to be done in pencil, so I also had an abundance of No2 pencils, and even had a mechanical pencil most of the time. That meant I always had the bare minimum supplies to draw, and I used them. I also used just about any art medium that is inexpensive and frequently given to children, like generic watercolor palettes and cheap colored pencils. The easy availability of printer paper was particularly useful to me, because my parents had instilled a neurotic level of guilt even thinking about spending money on art quality paper, let alone art quality pencils and other media.
Looking back, it astounds me the things my parents were willing to throw money at, while being anxiety-inducing in their reluctance to spend money on other things. For example, when I was a tween and would have benefited greatly from higher quality art supplies, I also had an interest in spending money on other things, and some of those other things were granted. I had always wanted curly hair like Mother’s, so after a botched attempt at a home perm, Mother paid for me to have a spiral perm done at a salon (twice even!). Older Brother got a calculator watch, and I wanted one too, so to avoid any obvious unfairness they also bought one for me.
Professional quality art supplies never came up in my spending requests because I knew the answer would be no, and I would have felt guilty and selfish for asking. Also, Mother and Father were undoubtedly well aware I wanted better art supplies without me specifically asking. I knew art supplies were seen as frivolous, a drain, a waste of money. If they had asked me if I would rather have a calculator watch or a bunch of art supplies, my answer would have been art supplies. Same money, different value, but one was an acceptable request, and the other implicitly was not. Also, I could have accepted the disappointment of them refusing the calculator watch, but I would have been crushed by hoping for better art supplies and then being denied. It would have been a tremendous emotional risk to ask for art supplies at a time when I was already more miserable than I could bare.
I also believed the fact that I had barely used the acrylic paint gift would be held up as a reason not to buy something new. What if I did not like or use new supplies? They were expensive. I also had a large set of used professional quality pastels (I honestly do not remember where those came from – maybe a garage sale?). I barely used them because I could not achieve the fine detail I wanted in my art, and without proper storage and fixative, what few pieces I did create ended up quickly smudged and ruined. The children’s grade watercolor pallet was similarly ignored because I did not have proper paper (watercolors do not work on printer paper), my brushes were cheap and of the wrong type to create clean details (plastic children’s brushes), and the paints lacked the pigment load necessary to achieve any real contrast or vibrancy. As a youth I genuinely did not understand how set up for failure I was, or how much my lack of quality brushes, media, and grounds affected my enjoyment of different media.
So, throughout my teen years I worked with what I had that I enjoyed and did what I wanted it to, mostly printer paper, a mechanical pencil, and the cheapest colored pencils that could be thrown at a child.
The art segment in grade school was always something I looked forward to, and in fourth grade I was introduced to watercolors and sumi painting. I loved the style and materials, but without decent supplies at home it could not continue. The arts and crafts elective in junior high was always in high demand, so no student was allowed to take it more than once in all three years at that school. The semester I had that class it was the highlight of my day, and the teacher was beyond supportive. He even steered me towards a summer art retreat for teenagers, but you had to submit a portfolio and compete for a spot.
The competition was even tougher if you wanted one of the scholarships to pay for the entire thing, and that was the only way I had any chance of going. I was excited and nervous, but also confident I could get a spot. All the adults in my life were always telling me how amazing my art was, and Mother had proudly put many pieces on the livingroom wall. I always took high ribbons in the county fair, although shows were non-competitive in my age group. My art was always met with high praise in school art displays. I had easily won the couple youth art competitions I had participated in (again, at the county fair). I sometimes garnered jealousy and spite from other youths in arts and crafts class, and during my brief membership in the Girl Scouts.
Father felt obliged to inform me that I probably would not succeed. He told me that when he was a child, he knew a boy who could paint realistic naval scenes of astounding quality, and people with that kind of talent were my competition. I think he was trying to not get my hopes up in his typical fatalistic way, but I was undeterred. Father was always negative about everything and excused that negativity by claiming he was a realist.
Despite his misgivings, Father insisted on helping me by photographing what I thought were some of my best pieces. He also helped me fill out the application, and then made sure everything was in order before mailing it off for me. He never showed me the photographs he took, so I do not know if they helped or hurt my chances. All I had to go on was his assurance that the photos were good, a statement he doubtless would have made whether it was true or not.
He mailed the application for me, and a couple months later I received the rejection letter. It was a crushing disappointment, and brought me back to Father’s mantra, driving it home with tangible reality. I was not as good as I thought I was, and I could easily fail in a competitive or professional setting.
“Artists always starve.”
Looking back at the art I was doing at the time, I completely understand why I did not get in. Some of my pieces were decent, and most of them were well rendered enough to have potential, but I was clueless about composition and framing, dynamic layout, color theory, and so many other fundamentals to creating objectively good art, especially since my driving interest was realism. At least a couple submitted pieces were graphite drawings, but they looked washed out since I only had a couple hardnesses of pencil and could not layer down real contrast in an accurate way. Other pieces were flat for other reasons, or lacked proper anatomy. The junior high arts and crafts class helped me on the technical end, and a tiny bit with color theory, but there was nothing offered to help with composition, framing, and layout. It was simply outside the scope of the class and the interests of the majority of the students, who were only there because it was the goof-off fun time class.
While I was in junior high, I took as many other electives as I could which were creative in nature, including a woodworking class and a pottery class. I enjoyed them as well, although they did not hold as much pull for me as drawing did. They also required materials and equipment that made drawing and painting supplies look cheap, so continuing outside of class was impossible.
When I started junior college, one of the classes I signed up for, naturally, was a drawing class. My excitement quickly turned to disappointment when on the first day of class we were given the syllabus, and in that was a list of required materials. The junior high arts and crafts class had provided many of the materials we used because we did almost all of our work in class. Of course, the college class did not provide materials because you were expected to do most of it outside of class. The materials add up in cost, and if you want to genuinely learn how to do art, you need the materials at home to practice and work with. Just using them in class is not enough.
I went to the art store, looked at the costs of the materials, and dropped the class.
“Artists always starve.”
It echoed in my head, mocking me, reminding me that it was a frivolous waste of money to buy even a single $0.50 art grade graphite pencil, or spend $2.50 on a pad of sketch paper. On the rare occasions I did so, I always felt dirty, like I was doing something reprehensible.
I followed the example set by my parents. I lied to myself, with the hope that if I lied to myself long enough, maybe the lie would become true. It was too painful to face with the honesty of critical introspection.
It was just a hobby. I did not need those things. I could make do with my mechanical pencil and printer paper. I did not want to make a living as an artist. I convinced myself I did not want to make art on commission or do class assignments. I wanted to do my own thing, and I could do that by making do. It would have been one thing to pursue art for a career if I was already rich, but I was working part time as a tutor on campus, and it had long been established that my parents were never going to buy professional quality art supplies for me. They were always broke anyway, so it would have been selfish of me to even think of asking.
“It’s only a hobby.”
That became my new mantra, so maybe it would not hurt so much. I could keep doing what I wanted. I could keep creating. I could keep drawing.
Except I do not remember doing much art the next couple years. I suspect I still made drawings from time to time, and at the beginning of my college career I was painting a lot of miniatures and mech models. Somewhere along the way, though, I pretty much stopped. It was not enough to console myself with my mantra.
“It’s only a hobby.”
I know American society is enamored of the image of the Tortured Artist, who expresses their pain through their art, creating thought provoking pieces of their inner torment that cause the viewer to question themselves and the world around them.
I am not one of those artists. Art for me is a joyful endeavor. It becomes extremely difficult for me to conceptualize or create a piece of art when I am depressed, especially art based on drawing. Creative endeavors that lean more towards the typical definition of crafting are not affected as much, so in my more depressed periods I tend to do more sewing, embroidery, and other crafty activities. I need something creative in my life to feel whole. If I am not doing enough creative activity, it easily becomes a downward spiral where the depression prevents creation, and the lack of creation breeds more depression.
I was lying to myself that I could be content with my art as it was, and I knew it, but I also did not know what else to do. So, my art languished and I created very little.
Diana was the person who turned me around. After she dropped out of college, she decided to start a business making garb for historic reenactment. Since I was interested in sewing and my life was directionless, she invited me to partner with her. Older Brother (her husband at the time) would use his computer skills to create the website and write a business plan, and she and I could start working out patterns and making samples. Older Brother made like he was busy, but did not actually do anything except take personal possession of the URL we wanted for the business. She and I did get busy, and had a number of patterns worked out before the realities of inadequate investment capital set in and we had to set it on the back burner.
From there we switched our focus to making and selling beaded jewelry. I had never thought about making jewelry, so she showed me how to do it and we were off and running. The first summer was astoundingly successful even though we were woefully underprepared and only sold at a local farmer’s market and a couple small Scottish games and Celtic music festivals.
As soon as Diana and I were working together towards a creative goal, I felt inspired to start drawing again. I picked up Celtic style knotwork and started creating some new pieces. Diana encouraged me to purchase professional quality art paper, Copic markers, and Micron pens, and it was incredibly freeing to work with materials that actually did what I wanted them to.
I made a few originals and offered them for sale alongside our jewelry, but they never sold and I gave them to friends years later. No one who saw them wanted to pay the money I wanted in exchange for the intensive hours of work required to make even a small piece. We had note cards printed from about a dozen of the smaller designs. Some of them sold well. Others barely sold at all. After we had to shutter the jewelry business, we were left with a huge amount of those cards still in hand, and lugged the extras around for a long time. We had spent too much money having them printed to just throw them away. About a decade later, I finally gave most of what was left to the SCA as largesse and only kept a few boxes for personal use.
During the entire time we had the jewelry business, I always had a day job. Initially it was because we wanted to reinvest everything we made. Later it was because our sales had dropped too much, and we were lucky if we covered all our expenses for each event. It did not help that much of our jewelry incorporated silver, and the price of silver started to skyrocket, resulting in diminished profit margins.
I do not regret a moment of the time Diana and I spent traveling, making, and selling jewelry. It was a very sad day when we faced the music and decided we needed to try for other careers, that it was not going to work after all. We were still breaking even on most events, so we decided to finish out the season and do a couple events the next year to sell down our stock and keep making things until we ran out of essential jewelry findings. There was no blame game to be played, just a sad change of plans.
During my time vending at Celtic festivals, I did have a couple different people commission knotwork designs for tattoos. I have always loved tattoos. I also realized the small knotwork designs I used for the note cards would potentially make excellent tattoo flash art. So, I endeavored to expand my designs and create enough flash-worthy knotwork designs for an entire tattoo flash set. I researched the typical format, and the fact that I would need to print a line version and a fully colored version of each. The line version was for making the stencil, and the fully colored version for customers to peruse on the wall or in a design binder.
I did not have much money, so I went around to every tattoo shop I could physically reach and asked if they would be interested in buying my flash art if I had it printed. A number of them said they probably would, so I made a few prints of each sheet. On returning to the various shops, only one artist purchased my flash. Most of the others grinned at me, smugly amused by this little girl who thought she could make art for tattoos and had wasted money on a promise.
I had already figured out that tattoo artists will not normally take a prospective apprentice seriously unless they have tattoos, so I did not even ask about that. I could not have borne the disappointment of asking and being declined. I went back several times and hung out at the shop with the one tattoo artist who was kind to me. I never met his apprentice, but one day he was simultaneously laughing and frustrated that the apprentice had not bothered to show up yet again. He was frustrated because he was expecting the kid to be there and help in the shop. He was laughing because the apprentice was paying him $7,000 for the apprenticeship, so if the kid did not show up, it was his own money he was wasting.
That cinched it. My attempts to sell tattoo flash art fell flat, I could not afford tattoos of the quality I wanted, and I definitely could not afford to buy a tattoo apprenticeship, so tattoo artist was not a viable option.
“It’s just a hobby anyway.”
Diana decided to go to culinary school after the jewelry business failed. She had always loved cooking and thought that would be a viable career for her. I had always enjoyed baking, so she suggested I go as well, but for the baking and pastry certificate. I had long ago been soured on working in an office, vastly preferring work that kept me on my feet and moving. I also figured I would always be able to find work in the food industry, and I would not be at risk of going hungry. The school promised the moon. I did not believe their lofty claims of easy fame and fortune, but I did expect it would lead to a stable career.
I could not have been more wrong. The culinary school had recently sold out to a for-profit educational corporation, and they were coasting on the old reputation while happily jacking up the fees and talking students into loading down on private student loans to make up the difference. They promised that their graduates would be perfectly positioned for glamorous celebrity chef jobs and high paid executive chef positions. They were so deceitful that down the road I was part of successful a class action suit asserting that they misled and essentially swindled students into attending and racking up debt. It was nice to have the validation of a win, but my meager portion of the award nowhere near covered the outright cost of the school, let alone the compounded interest on the loans.
I would have been better off if instead of going to culinary school I had just moved with Diana into San Francisco and taken whatever service industry jobs I could find. It is one of the few regrets I have.
The first food industry job I got was working for a bread bakery. I liked the work, but clashed with management. I worked there for about a year before taking a job as a pastry chef at a fine dining restaurant in the Financial District. I liked the head chef, but did not like the work. When I moved out of San Francisco I attempted to get another job baking, but had no luck finding a job in the local area and gave it up entirely. As it turned out, I did not enjoy baking enough to want to do it day in and day out, let alone put in the massive amount of effort required to be genuinely successful in the industry.
The one class in culinary school that I loved the most was Candies, Confections, and Centerpieces, especially the centerpieces part, because it was all about art in edible media. We made marzipan figures, chocolate centerpieces, and pulled sugar sculptures. I created a bundle of pulled sugar flowers, and a large blown sugar phoenix centerpiece with wings outspread and crystalized sugar flames around and behind it. I created a chocolate clock with a fancy face and gears you could see through a window in the back, a chocolate box with a wilderness scene wrapping around all the sides and on the top, and a chocolate fantasy bird of paradise sitting on a chocolate branch with its wings outspread and tail feathers cascading onto the base. The bird of paradise was the hardest because I had a difficult time securing it to the branch and it fell multiple times before I finally rigged a stable foundation that did not look out of place.
When I finally finished the chocolate bird, I remember a couple of my classmates telling me how amazed they were that each time it fell I would just sigh and try again. They said that if they had experienced those problems, they would have scrapped the idea and started over with something else. One classmate even told me she probably would have broken down crying. I think I just shrugged and said something to the effect that setbacks are part of life, and it did not help anything to get worked up over it. The only way to get it done was to fix the problem and try again.
That exchange stuck with me because it spoke volumes to me about why so many people try art and then stop before they get good. So many people get frustrated and just throw it out rather than persevering and figuring out how to make it work. Western society loves to equate artistic skill with talent. Maybe talent is a factor because it makes the learning curve easier, but talent is a very small factor. When talent and ability are equated as one and the same, it implies that if you cannot make something amazing on the first try, you do not have sufficient “talent” for the task and there is no need bothering further. It sets people up for failure by framing unsuccessful pieces as the best you are inherently capable of achieving, and that is never the case. Falling birds are part of the process, because it is trial and error and experience that teaches us how any media works to create the desired outcome, even when you have a good teacher to help show you the way. In that context, chocolate was not food, it was a medium I was using to create art, so art logic applied.
That is one thing Mother got right about me and my interest in art. No matter how bad a piece was that I made as a child, it was amazing. Mother had no end of praise for how talented I was at art. She always had something encouraging to say about what I was creating and loved showing off my works. The rest I think was a result of my natural stubbornness and passion for what I was doing. I have always been critical of my art and usually knew my pieces were not quite right, even when I did not know how to fix them, but that did not stop me from trying again. Good art is built on failure and experimentation.
My dream culinary job would have been making centerpieces and showpieces, but such jobs are incredibly rare and when they do become available require a far more extensive portfolio than I could produce in class or at home on limited funds. It was my dream culinary job, and that was because it was art.
In a life that was characterized by dramatic changes every year or two, I always came back to art. It was the only constant, my driving passion, no matter what form it took.
The last year I was living in San Francisco was a very important year in my personal development. I had come to the realization that my latest attempt at a “normal” career was a failure and attending culinary school was a mistake, even though at the time I was still working in the industry. Diana and I were both struggling to make ends meet and did not have enough money left over after rent and bills and food to pay our ballooning student loan payments, let alone do anything fun out in the city. So far in my adult life, while trying to find a “real career” or otherwise make a living in a conventional way, I had flirted with homelessness, been unemployed, been employed with jobs I hated, and would have gone hungry many times were it not for Diana and her parents. For the most part trying to make a living had been, and still was, rather miserable. The only time I had been happy was doing the jewelry business with Diana, even though we never really “made it”.
Literally every single thing Father had said to me as a child, his prophecies for how my life would go if I tried to be a professional artist, had happened to me anyway, and then some.
“Artists always starve.”
Given my history with food and hunger growing up in my parent’s home, I should not be surprised that particular threat was so powerful in my life. Food deprivation is one of the more awful things I have experienced, and it will probably haunt me to my dying day. It is not surprising I was so scared, despite knowing intellectually that many people do financially succeed at being freelance artists, some spectacularly so. I also knew that there was no shortage of salaried artist careers. I had known for a long time that Father was objectively wrong and speaking entirely from a place of negativity and crippling fear, but the full reality of how much of that fear I had internalized did not sink in completely until that last year in San Francisco.
I finally discarded Father’s imposed fearmongering and decided that I might as well try to be a professional artist. Even if I continued to struggle, at least I had a chance of being happy despite the struggle. I had made a deal with myself when I was still a teen that if I was unhappy, I would change my life so I had a new chance at finding happiness. I certainly was not happy when my life was focused on non-artistic career possibilities, and so I never stuck with any of them long enough to establish a career. If making art was something that could genuinely help me be happy, I was actively sabotaging myself by not striving towards it.
I might regret culinary school, but the fallout of that choice did give me a lot of perspective on how badly I had been sabotaging myself and restricting my career choices. For about the same price as culinary school, I could have gone to art school, also on student loans, and received an education I was genuinely interested in that could have led to one of those mainstream art jobs or given me a better foundation for freelance work.
That is not to say your typical art school is any less predatory than the typical culinary school, but I was in that boat anyway. If I had focused on art from the start I could have researched and attended a reputable art school that was entirely worth the money and time. If I did not want the debt, I could have returned to community college, but focused on art. Culinary work was not any more stable than being an artist, and typical starting pay in kitchens is usually lower than starting wages for corporate artist jobs.
In trying to heed Father’s warnings, I had completely screwed myself over.
But that is not the end of the story. Just like with the chocolate bird, I took my epiphany to heart, investigated what I had to work with and what had gone wrong, and set about trying to rebuild my life into what I wanted.
What I wanted was to be a professional artist.
Art school was not a viable option because of the debt from culinary school. But no matter how much I was sure I would have enjoyed that path, I did not need art school to be a professional freelance artist. I was self-taught, and yet I was finally achieving the levels of realism I had always aimed for, and I was creating pieces that are still in my portfolios today.
I knew it would help with building a career if I focused on a particular area of expertise, and the animals I loved drawing were easily just as well rendered as any established pet portrait artist out there, so it was a natural choice to start. I solicited a couple friends for photos of their pets, and got to work creating a portfolio, mostly in graphite and colored pencil. My background in web design meant I could create and maintain my own website, so sidneyeileen.com version 1 was born. Diana helped me create my business cards and promotional materials.
“Artists always starve.”
Every time I spent money or worked on something related to being a professional artist, Father’s words still echoed in my head. But instead of inspiring fear, they evoked anger, anger at all the years I had wasted avoiding my central joy in life, at all the power I had given him over my life and happiness even though I always knew he was a perfect example of how to make yourself miserable. I was mad at him for ever saying it, for ever imposing his fears on me. I was mad at myself for listening to and believing him. I was mad at myself for trusting him, even after I had realized he was untrustworthy.
I opened an account on DeviantArt and started a LiveJournal blog in addition to creating a portfolio website. I put up homemade prints of my art and promotional materials in every pet store and veterinary office that was willing to have it. I bought professional art supplies I had been pining after for years. I primarily focused on pet portrait style art, but continued developing my knotwork and other styles. I did not spend much money on advertising, yet I did have a slow stream of commissions. It was just nowhere near enough to pay the bills.
I knew it was not going to be easy. Growing up, my Baby Boomer parents taught me that a “good” job was something you got at a corporation or other company, followed by promotions and building up to something that would put you comfortably in the middle class. My experience, and the experiences of others my age, were quite different. Those “good” corporate jobs were usually out of reach, and the achievable corporate jobs rarely carried with them the possibility of promotion and good benefits, a trend that has only gotten worse in the decades since. I was promised that a “good” job would be an easy, predictable path to success, and that was a lie.
I know absolutely no one around my age and younger who had an easy, predictable path to financial success. Sure, some areas of employment, especially those that involve freelance or entrepreneurial work, are harder than others, but none of them are “easy”. All of them require dedication and perseverance, even when things are not working out. Just like the jewelry business, I knew my success was not guaranteed, but as long as I was doing what I loved, it was worth it to keep trying. I just had to periodically examine what was and was not working and readjust my approach until I figured out something that worked.
It was incredibly liberating, even if I did still need a day job to make ends meet.
The pace of pet portrait commissions stayed painfully slow, so after moving out of San Francisco I looked into other areas of expertise in art. I certainly had plenty of styles I worked in to choose from. Most of my art is very detail intensive, and correspondingly time consuming, so things like my realistic drawings and knotwork have always been on the “expensive” end of non-gallery art, even though I was a complete unknown. I was strongly of the opinion that I would rather give away my art than sell it for less than I felt it was worth. I also knew that if I wanted to succeed in a financial sense, I needed to charge for my time, materials, and overhead, so I set my prices accordingly and was not willing to budge. If my art pieces did not sell at those prices, I could not sell them at all, because underselling myself was a guarantee of financial failure.
For a couple years I marketed to the anthropomorphic community and vended at a furry convention. I flirted with getting my minimalist and realistic animal art into galleries and a couple times it was displayed on the walls of cafes, but the framing costs were prohibitive, and you cannot just throw an unframed drawing up on a gallery wall the way you can some paintings. I dabbled in prints, both limited giclee prints and on-demand printing, but neither sold consistently enough to pay for more prints. I investigated vending at festivals and events like Diana and I had with the jewelry, but events that were likely to draw my target audience as an artist were significantly more expensive than the ones we had done before, and I did not have the money to recreate a proper booth setup anyway. I investigated magazine and internet advertising, but again, it was prohibitively expensive if it was aggressive enough to be effective.
I must give Mother credit for her small attempts to be supportive of my efforts at that time, financially as well as emotionally. When I told her I was interested in trying encaustic painting, she sent me a couple hundred dollars to buy the supplies with, but it was not quite enough to get everything I needed and I was short money for bills, so it went to bills instead. When I admitted to her that I could not afford to frame my drawings, she pulled together enough money for me to frame about a dozen pieces. My hope was that they would be easier to display, quickly sell, and help fund framing costs for more pieces. Unfortunately, they did not sell immediately, and I needed a rotation of fresh pieces to display publicly, so their total time in the public eye was only a couple months. A couple years later I ended up giving many away to good friends at the holidays, and others have stayed on my own walls. She also purchased a couple of my pieces at full price, and never asked for anything for free.
Looking back, I suspect that if Father had not been so vehemently opposed to art as anything other than an idle hobby, she might have given me more support and encouragement beyond just praise. I think she did genuinely love my art and wanted to encourage it. It was just far too little in the face of Father’s poisonous fatalism. Since they had a declared policy of not contradicting each other in front of their children, she never contradicted anything he said, and as a consequence never gave me the support his words forbade.
My lack of success kept coming back to a lack of investment capital, and it was frustrating. I knew I had the skills, and I knew I was creating art that was capable of selling, but I was constantly stonewalled for the ability to advertise it or present it in an easily sellable way to a broad enough audience for long enough to achieve the volume of sales I needed to make a living as an artist.
Had I mentioned I am stubborn?
I kept at it, because if I could not invest money to get my art out there quickly and effectively, I would have to do it the slow way, building an audience organically online. I continued developing my art and experimenting with new styles. Back in San Francisco I had finally achieved that level of realism where it is hard to tell the drawing is not the photo. I was momentarily elated, and then hit with the sinking feeling of, “Now What?” I had achieved my goal. It was done. Now such pieces were going to be an exercise in technical ability, rather than a creative, artistic pursuit. But with that solid foundation of technical skill, it stood to reason that I could apply it to new things that were creative.
When I decided to draw on black paper, it opened up the world for me. I had new technical skills to develop: lighting and composition. My pet portrait drawings were usually very static, just a rendering of the head or complete animal with no background. I do not like drawing backgrounds, but the lack of background sometimes left the pieces looking unfinished. On black paper I was inspired to make visually dynamic pieces from the same sort of static photos. I loved playing with lighting to show a black animal on black paper. I loved incorporating aspects of my minimalist art, fully rendering only the lit parts of the animal and leaving the rest of the paper black. It looked complete with no background. I still love this style of art.
I was still reluctant to invest in genuinely expensive art supplies, especially if I was unfamiliar with the medium and the investment might turn out to be a bust, but that reluctance came more from a place of careful consideration than ingrained fear. I still wanted to learn how to paint with oils, so I made a deal with myself. If I took a class in painting at the local community college, I would buy the materials I wanted. So, that is what I did, and I loved it. It usually took several months to make each painting, but it opened up my world every bit as much as the black paper did, and I hoped that I could create a body of work large enough for gallery display without needing to frame every piece.
Following on the heels of that success, the next semester I took a class on pen and ink-based art, and I was just as delighted. I had dabbled a bit in calligraphy as a child, and I used Micron pens and Copic markers for most of my knotwork, but this was something else entirely. I learned how to use bottled ink and dip pens, and found a love for creating pieces that were a combination of ink drawing and ink wash.
I started vending my art at the nearest steampunk conventions, and my art was gaining traction online, enough so that I often had at least one commission going. Some of my smaller drawings were snatched up rather quickly after offering them for sale online. Most of my freelance sales were on the sewing end of things (I was making bespoke corsets and custom costuming pieces), but the art was gaining traction too.
It was working.
But I was getting sick, and I did not know why or what was wrong with me.
I started missing sewing commission due dates. I missed art commission due dates. I rarely worked on non-commission pieces. My body would not let me do the work. I was sick, in pain, and exhausted all the time, so what little I had went to the day job instead of art. I developed neuropathy and tremors in my hands that entirely prevented the detail-oriented art pieces I loved so much.
I had no choice but to close up shop, hoping against hope that I would be able to continue doing some art, that someday I would figure out what was wrong with me, get it fixed, and be able to open up shop again. I had been prepared to weather whatever the world threw at me, but I was not able to defy my own body.
Disability is horrible that way.
I did finally find a doctor who could diagnose my problems and treat my illness, but by that point I had been sick so many years that my body stayed in an autoimmune state, and recovery became a seemingly neverending road. I could no longer hold down a day job, so I had a lot of time on my hands, but my symptoms made drawing and painting difficult to impossible most of the time, so I created very few art pieces the next few years.
It is very depressing to be afflicted with chronic illness, especially when you do not have the financial resources for ideal treatment. Like every previous time in my life, I knew if I did not have something creative in my life that depression would be compounded. So, I stood back, looked at my life and my capabilities, and instead of focusing on what I could not do, I carefully considered what kind of creative endeavor I was still capable of. The main requirements were that it be something I could do sitting on the couch, and that it be tolerant of the tremors I now had in my hands. The answer turned out to be embroidery. If the tremors caused me to place the needle in the wrong spot, I could just pull it back out and try again, so the final product was completely unaffected.
I had dabbled in needlepoint along with Mother when I was a child, but I did not stick with it at the time. Freehand embroidery was a hobby of Diana’s since she was a toddler, so back when we were first friends, she taught me. I enjoyed freehand embroidery far more than I ever did counted needlepoint. Still, there is only so much time in the day, and I had a tendency to keep myself very busy, so until I became horribly ill embroidery was fairly low down my artistic medium priority list.
At the same time, Diana got us involved in the local branch of the Society for Creative Anachronism, so historic embroidery styles were a natural choice for inspiration. I researched historic pieces, created documentation as I created pieces, and even gave a few free one-hour workshops at various events. It was not much, but it felt good to be working, sharing, and teaching again. I also made hand sewn garb for myself and Diana, something I never expected to have the time for.
Recovery from chronic illness is never a straight road. There are good days and bad days, and good spells of time and bad spells of time. As I worked on my recovery, initially I tried to take advantage of the good spells of time to work on drawings and paintings, but I found I was out of practice on my technical skills, and the bad spells were usually long enough to undo whatever progress I made regaining my skills. To say it was frustrating and discouraging would be a massive understatement. I am positive it had a profound impact on my depression, and as a result I found myself completely uninspired when my symptoms were less severe.
I stopped creating art altogether.
The majority of my symptoms made art creation slow and sporadic. The tremors prevented drawing and painting altogether. I decided I needed to wait until the tremors were gone most of the time before I could embark on efforts to refresh my technical skills, because the on again off again cycle was only making the depression worse. When the tremors had finally abated enough to allow the creation of art, I was so depressed that I could not think of what to draw, and drawing exercises held no real joy. I sketched for a few weeks, but it was frustrating in a different way. It also did not happen consistently because I had very limited energy for all the tasks life requires, and very often I could not manage the basics of keeping my home and myself clean, let alone create art. That opportunity proved limited anyway, and I still have months of time when the tremors return and prevent the creation of art, no matter my mood.
When I have been able to create art, I have found that my focus has shifted again, moving towards sigils and other metaphysical pieces, although I do still very much enjoy drawing animals. It is very slow, but slow is still progress, and as long as I have art in my life, I know I am still working towards living a happy, fulfilled life, no matter how other people might measure my success.