Choices

New York City is a terrible place to live if you want to make a living as a painter.  Oh, there are a handful of superstars living in swell style, thanks to a lot of high-end gallery hype swallowed whole by wealthy art investors and collectors.  You read about them far too often.  Everybody else has to teach or work part-time to support their creative habit.

Most career-minded artists want to live off their art income after their student days.  Many quickly understand that will be impossible here, so they marry a fellow artist and move to the hinterlands, where housing is cheap and ordinary people still buy traditional paintings in sufficient quantity to allow them to live modestly off their art income alone.  Some have to advertise their services as painting instructors to make ends meet.   

A few towns that were popular destinations in the early 20^th Century are still swarming with artists, including Taos and Santa Fe, NM, and Rockport and Gloucester, MA.  Now the Internet and mail order art stores are shipping canvas, brushes and paints in large quantities to every state in the union to feed the fast-growing artist population.  It seems most art-school artists choose from the following menu: the New England states for green hills and coastal harbors, the Southeastern states (all those postbellum belles) and Connecticut for portrait painters; the Southwestern states for Cowboys and Indians and deserts, and the Rocky Mountain States for the rocky mountains.  Landscape painters have to decide whether they prefer painting greens or browns in warm or cold, dry or wet climates.  Still life painters can live anywhere.  Having a spouse with a steady income is the general rule of thumb for almost all working artists in America today.  Every year for 30 years or so, I’ve heard gallery owners and artists sing the refrain, “business is slow right now.  People just aren’t buying paintings.”  I wonder if plumbers ever say business is slow.

But New York City is the cultural capital of America, so you choose to stay for a variety of valid reasons, including:  you don’t have to own a car because public transportation is excellent, you are lucky to live in a rent-stabilized apartment, there are plenty of art schools to refresh your skills and you can see great art whenever you choose, except on Mondays, the Art World’s traditional Day of Rest.  

Most likely, though, it’s just inertia.  You are already here and don’t want to risk becoming isolated in unfamiliar territory, where museums are few and the malls rule.  So you wrangle a teaching job at one of the many art schools, senior citizen centers, YMCAs or other community organizations.  Otherwise, you work at art-related or non-art related part-time jobs to help pay the rent.   

Peter Paul Rubens, “The Meeting of Marie de Medici and

Henri IV at Lyons,”1622-25, The Louvre Museum

Jeff Koons,Balloon Dog,Versailles, Stainless Steel,2008

commons.wikimedia.org

Some celebrity artists like Jeff Koons hire dozens of well-trained but financially struggling artists to create the work they sign.  Nothing really wrong with that, is there?  Rubens did the same thing.  On at least one occasion we know about, he had to assure a client in a letter that everything in the promised painting would be done “by my own hand.”  Koons probably has to promise clients that nothing will be done by his own hand, except the signature.  There is plenty of part time work to be had in the city for waiters and waitresses, concert hall ushers and museum security guards; not so much in rural Montana or West Virginia, which you wish were only a short subway ride away so you could paint the scenery on weekends.

Selling your paintings within the city itself is nearly impossible now for the traditional painter.  You can spend a fortune to join a co-op gallery or pay for an exhibition at a “vanity gallery.”  The few sales you make to your friends and relatives at the wine and cheese reception in Chelsea are not nearly enough to live on, but the exhibit serves to pad your resume.  There are a couple of traditional art clubs that have a lot of juried exhibitions, but they are mostly ego-gratifying operations for the members, who pay high annual dues for the privilege and seldom sell any work, although the networking potential is not insignificant. 

The handful of successful commercial galleries that sell some form of traditional art in Manhattan have a certain “look” that they want, tending these days to photo-like realism, which isn’t to every painter’s liking or level of patience.  Besides, they aren’t looking at digital images of the work of thousands of artists who are out there, so don’t waste your time trying, unless you have a well-connected recommendation in hand.  And these galleries pay such high rents for their spaces that they have to take on artists whose work they can sell for thousands of dollars.   It’s “no representation without reputation” for most of the top galleries, especially for well-seasoned painters.   An old friend, Harry B., a retired illustrator who painted and sold quite a few landscapes and Westerns at reasonable prices, said the director of New York’s once-prestigious but now-defunct Grand Central Art Galleries told him, “Harry, we like your work, but we just can’t charge enough for it.”

If you are lucky, you can connect with one or two galleries in the metropolitan region to sell enough of your work to more than cover your expenses so you can identify yourself as an Artist to the world and Uncle Sam. 

As the years slip by, your options become even more limited.  You view New York City as one big assisted living facility.  You never have to mow the grass or shovel snow or fix a flat tire.  And the nearest park bench is waiting for you right around the corner from your apartment building.  Every year you say you are going to spend the summer in the country painting landscapes.  But every year you don’t because you can’t pay rent on two places at once.  Subletting your apartment could get you into trouble with the landlord, and you don’t like trouble in your life.  You also don’t have kindly relatives who own a cottage in the Berkshires that they would let you use for free.  And anyway, you don’t have a credit card to rent the car needed to get from one scenic spot to another in the country, or even to the country itself.  One of your proudest moments was receiving the letter now pinned up next to the telephone on a kitchen wall denying you credit to buy your computer because “no credit report found.”  Now that’s worth celebrating!

You think about relocating, but you can’t decide where.   A little paperback book describing the best small towns in America for artists is an inspirational read, but no more than that. 

Painters don’t usually settle in those little towns unless they have a strong family support system. So, you shrug your shoulders and just keep painting pictures right where you are, wishing the worlds of art and commerce would heed the closing message of the stirring gospel song written and recorded 60 years ago by Sister Wynona Carr: “Life is a ballgame, but you’ve got to play it fair.”