Eric Maisel – How To Handle A Visual Artist’s Top 10 Challenges

Eric Maisel – How To Handle A Visual Artist’s Top 10 Challenges

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Eric Maisel – How To Handle A Visual Artist’s Top 10 Challenges [1 audio (MP4)]

As a visual artist, there are many things that get in the way of producing great work for our audiences. We must be aware of our challenges in order to move past them and create stunning works of art.

Your Professor

Dr. Eric Maisel is the author of 40+ books and is one of the world’s leading creativity coaches. His interests include the creative life, creativity coaching, and natural psychology, the new psychology of meaning.

How To Handle A Visual Artist’s Top 10 Challenges

How to Meet a Visual Artist’s Top Ten Challenges Visual artists face certain special challenges. Let’s look at 10 of them!

The Top 10 Big Ideas

1. You Are a Human Being

First of all a visual artist is a human being and faces all the of the challenges that human beings face, from needing to pay the rent to being drawn to idle and careless living to having to deal with a racing brain that comes with no off switch. In addition to, side-by-side with, and before all the special challenges that a visual artist faces come the challenges of living and the challenges of being human.

2. The Creative Personality

Then there are the challenges of the creative personality, which bring one set of problems (outsized appetites, difficulties with meaning, the need to retain one’s individuality in the face of herd mentality, and so on) and the challenges of the creative life, which include marketplace realities, chronic unemployment, the nature and difficulties of the work itself, and so on. Every creative person is obliged to deal with creative personality issue and creative life issues.

3. Endless Visual Data

A musician is not completely surrounded by music and an actor is not completely surrounded by theater. But a visual artist is completely surrounded by and immersed in visual data. If you decide to paint a landscape from nature and go into nature you are confronted by endless choices and endless stimuli. Every shape is a shape you might use, every line is a line you might use, and every shadow is a shadow you might use. This can be experienced as bounty—or as overwhelm.

4. One-Of-A-Kinds

An author expects to deal in multiples: his book comes out in thousands of copies and he is not confronted by the need to give up his “original.” But a visual artist has precious originals that he must “give up and sell” or else “hoard” in his “personal collection.” It is not so easy to give up a one-of-a-kind you love so that it can sit in a dentist’s office or in the corridor of a hospital, even if you are being paid to let it go. Each artist must make his personal peace with, and create strategies for, dealing with the reality of one-of-a-kinds.

5. Money

The actor would like to be in a stage play but is pulled to do commercials for the money. The writer would like to write her novel but is pulled to do commercial writing for the money. The visual artist would like to do fine art but is pulled to do graphic art for the money. Many visual artists think it sensible to build a graphic art business while trying to make it as a fine artist, only to find that locating customers, dealing with customers, and doing work that doesn’t hold much meaning wears them down over time.

6. Handling the Limits of Your Medium

How will you handle the limits of your medium? Every art form has its own natural limitations. For example, how much “work” can you really expect pigments on a rectangular canvas to do? Certainly, artists have done a lot with the medium! But its natural limitations have caused artists to paint right onto the frame, to paint monochromatically to highlight limitation, to adhere other materials like sand and glass onto the surface, and to try in other ways to “transcend” limitations. How will you arrive at your own “new take” on the issue of limits?

7. How Will You Personally Define “Originality”?

If originality is something you are after, how will you aim yourself in the direction of doing more original work? Does “original” have to mean outrageous, breathtaking or brilliant or are there other equally valid and personally relevant ways to define originality? If you were to handle atmospherics or plunging perspective in a way that you had never handled them before, might that count? Try to discern where you want to set the “originality” bar and why you are choosing that precise setting.

8. Mastery

Is there something that you still don’t handle well that you would like to master? Maybe it’s a piece of technology, maybe it’s capturing the energy of a waterfall or the flight of birds, maybe it’s making the eyes or hands you paint come more alive, maybe it’s mastering a certain style, maybe it’s mastering a certain subject matter. What have you put off mastering that you know you really want to “own”?

9. Cost of Art Materials

Art materials can be very expensive. Going to the art supply store or going to an art supply store online can feel like a trip to the candy store—one that also threatens to break the bank. How might you better meet the challenge of the expense of art materials? Change media? Change the size in which you work? Restrict your palette? Live with cheaper frames? Look for better prices? Reduce other expenses for the sake of art supplies? Or maybe better honor that you are worth the expense and “go for it”?

10. Marketplace Challenges

Then come all the special marketplace challenges, like brick-and-mortar galleries closing because of the difficult economic climate, the explosion of on-line “stores” that maybe serve artists and maybe don’t, the reality of fads, cliques, and insider information, the question of what constitutes “best practices” for your personal website, and everything else that comes with supply far outstripping demand. These difficulties are cruelly piled on top of all the others. An artist must address them—and strive to succeed nonetheless!