Billable Hours

Is it art if I sell it? Is it art if I don't?

Drawing from Friday’s Sketcher meet-up; watercolor in my sketchbook

As of this past January (3684 years ago, in ICE Barbie’s dog years) it’s been 38 years since I’ve been supporting myself through artwork. I’m not bragging, or at least I don’t mean to. It’s a choice I got to make because of various circumstances and other choices I’ve made over the years.

None of those circumstances include being independently wealthy, in case you were wondering.

I love painting. I mostly love drawing, even when it makes me want to tear my eyeballs out. I love mixing colors and having drawers and drawers of colors to chose from and mix further. I love buying art supplies. I love when I move paint around in a way that something three dimensional rises up from the painting surface.

Considering Vermeer; egg tempera; 2014, private collection

I love when I see something that I just know will make a great painting (like the image above) and I take a photo, bring that photo home, and make a painting that makes me feel like Alysa Liu leaping through the air and landing perfectly on the ice, except with a brush and some pigment and I’m probably wearing paint splattered jeans, a t-shirt with a hole in it that I’ve been wearing for a week, instead of a sparkly gold thing that twinkles with every spin.

Making money from art is a subject that’s been talked to death by all the artists I’ve known and yet it is an inescapable topic among creative folks of all disciplines.

I jokingly call my hours in the studio billable hours, because the paintings I make there are intended to go to the galleries that show (and sell) my work to be sold and pay for my food, my housing, healthcare, and gas in the car, and, oh yeah, the car.

A couple years ago I decided to join the group of (mostly) women (and Tim) who have organized themselves to go somewhere each week all year long, to spend a couple hours drawing or painting, and then an hour or so, of eating and tipping a glass or two. We are organized into groups that have the responsibility finding places to paint, and a place for Happy Hour if we’re not painting at a private home where we can bring our own goodies.

I’ve written before about how this provides company and companionship, a community of people who share an interest in studying and drawing our world. Through my adventures in higher art education, (and working in restaurants) that community was always close at hand, although finding and enjoying community in one’s twenties is kind of a different beast than in one’s later decades. Now it’s takes some effort to find it, and maybe it’s a more satisfying dish than the fast food relationships of our twenties.

In joining the local Sketchers group, I made the decision that not all my hours of art making need to be billable hours. I love following the writers and artists here who share their sketchbooks ( Sue Clancy Amy Stewart Wendy Wolf Lorene Edwards Forkner among others). A sketchbook, at least to me, is a more personal, not exactly private, but to be shared with a select audience. It’s more this is where I was; this is what I’m thinking and feeling; I was HERE; than I made this thing and you should buy it.

Sketchbooks are something that I want to keep as a record, or a journal. I don‘t much write things in them, although I don’t rule that out, particularly for travel journals. It’s not that more formal paintings aren’t those things too, but they are more extended periods of study and refinement than a two hour sketch.

There are many reasons to make art, to move paint around on a surface and not all of them — or maybe very few of them— have to do with making money. The great and certified genius Lynda Barry has said that the very act of moving a pencil across paper stimulates our memories and emotions, and I believe it.

The not-so-Great-Recession closed a number of money making doors in my professional life. But it opened other doors (panda satire!) and now heading out with my sketchbook and some watercolors and far too many pens and pencils. I don’t always know why I decide to do something, but if it calls to me loudly enough, I figure that I should do it and sort out the “whys” later.

What are your favorite sketching materials? Paints? pens? sketchbooks? Do you have a regular sketching practice and people to sketch with? Do you make your own books or have favorite ones you buy? Spill the beans! Provide sources!