How much sacrafices should someone do to achieve their goals? I keep hearing about these great artists that works so damn much and don't do much else in life. When I hear someone say you need to work hard to make art for a living, it always sounds like you have to become a hermit. I want to live off my art but I also want to travel the world, meet new people, go on crazy adventures and etc too. I always feel that I have to choose between art and life but isn't there a way to reconcile both?
Of course there is. But maybe not all things right at the beginning. Before your art is good enough to support yourself then your priority has to be to hone those skills (and network/self-promote) until you are getting work regularly. Once you have established a bit of a reputation, and work starts coming to you instead of you having to chase it so hard, then you have more freedom.
Two good examples pop to mind: Tara McPherson who has talked about her choice to delay having children and a family until her reputation was secure enough to take the foot off the gas and coast a bit. In comparison, many of her peers from art school had chosen family before art, then picked up their heads 10 years later and found it very hard to try to restart a career from scratch.
Then Adam Paquette and Noah Bradley are good examples of a very large contingent of artists who live nomadically. They can freelance from anywhere so they are either traveling constantly, or spend months in some places, then move on and spend a few months somewhere else.
Ideally you don’t have to give up anything forever to be an artist. HOWEVER you do have to delay some things strategically. You only have so many hours in the day. Stack your priorities in the order that they will build on each other.
Sacrifice in the short term? ABSOLUTELY. Sacrifice forever? Not Necessarily.
—Agent KillFee
PS: Remember, no one owes you a fulfilling life. It doesn’t just happen to you automatically. Without hard work fighting society’s expectations, the currents will force you back into the herd, and you will have a default life, full of work that is not creatively stimulating, and probably a lot of TV or maybe artsy hobbies. You might get married, have a few kids, work a boring job, go on a few vacations. If you’re lucky random tragedy won’t find you, and you’ll wake up one day having a mid-life crisis about how you feel completely unfulfilled. Or not. Having a creative life is hard work. It is a goal some people strive for. It is not for everyone. I’m not going to judge people who enjoy simple pleasures and choose not to bash their head against the altar of creativity all day chasing some idea of fulfillment none of us lunatic creative types can actually articulate.
Really it comes down to this: there’s not really a choice to make. Either you can be happy with a life in the herd, or you can’t. Some people think they can and wake up 20 years later miserable. Some people know from the outset that they’ll never be happy in the herd and all the hard work pushing against the current is just what they need to do to be happy. Some people think they’re happy outside the herd, but eventually realize it’s not worth the struggle and rejoin the flow. Choose the path you think you can best live with, and try that. Reassess in a few years. Choose again. Repeat.
