The Daily Grind: The Daily Grind

Chapter 3: (Rhythm/Time)—The Daily Grind

I remember transitioning from high school to college and thinking, “Now I will get to do whatever I want. I can eat when I want, play when I want, and make whatever kind of art I want.” I was naïve, of course, and I learned on the very first day of classes that it was going to take a great deal of discipline if I wanted to become an artist. In high school, I was one of a small handful of the “art kids,” the talented ones who could draw, paint, or sculpt, but now I was surrounded by a lot of talented individuals, most of whom were far more talented than I was. I looked at the upper classmen and their work and thought, wow, I’ll never be that good. How can I ever be that good?

Classes during my first few

There will be new pressures on your time, and you will have new responsibilities. Where you found some predictability in your schedule in college, you will now found chaos. For the past few years, you’ve been busy working to hone your skills as an artist. Your life had a structure and routine that was framed around your course schedule. If you are like I was in art school, your number one priority is spending time in the studio. Up to now, of your schedule has been imposed on you. Your professors give you an assignment—you complete it by the deadline. Now, as you step into the art world outside of school, you will find that this routine and structure is gone or at least very different. You have new obligations and new demands on your time, and finding the time to make your art will become increasingly challenging. There’s rent to pay, food to make, and relationships to maintain.

How will you find balance, time to make art, and time to manage the business of being an artist? Stop reading for a moment, and take out your sketchbook. Think in detail about what you want your life as an artist to look like. What is your lifetime goal as an artist? How will you get there? What will it take to accomplish that goal, and what are you willing to sacrifice to achieve

I knew that I wanted to be a working artist and that I wanted to teach art at a college. I knew that I wanted to find a wife start a family. I knew that I wanted to be active in my community. But I did not know how I was going to achieve my most ambitious goals. Recognizing that life’s journey is a marathon and not a sprint will help make obtaining your goals more manageable. In order to become a professor, I would need to get a Master of Fine Arts degree; in order to get an MFA, I would need to get into graduate school; in order to get into graduate school, I would need to make art, strengthen my portfolio, and build my resume; in order to have the time and money to do that, I would need to have a day job that did not zap my creative energy and paid well enough that I could afford to make art. So I took a job, made art at night and on weekends, entered art competitions, put on exhibits with friends, strengthened my portfolio, applied to graduate school, got that MFA, took every adjunct teaching job I could find, worked in a gallery, made art, exhibited, until I eventually landed a full-time teaching position and realized my goal of becoming a working artist and