Dear Starving Artist,
Yes, we know you are talented, creative, and you work obsessively on your craft. If you had a trust fund all-of-the-above would be more than enough. Yet, you do not. Thus, you are “starving.” Or perhaps, thanks to the charity of your friends and the occasional meger sale you are merely, “hungry.”
Hungry for what? Food? Recognition? A generous grant? A deep pocket Patron? Public adoration?
Before I serve up some viable solutions to your situation allow me to tell you something urgent. It is unlikely that anyone is going to buy art from (yet another) starving artist. Most people feel they have no extra money. “The cost of living,” is at an “all-time-high,” they say. Humans are plagued by egoistic and actual needs which make it so that most people don’t have feel worthy of owning “Original ART,” by a real living artist. In other words, they rather buy a poster. They might, “love,” your work but when it comes down to forking over the actual cash for a painting… few have the means or will to do so. I speak from experience, from watching the art world and from having studied who buys art, when, and how.
That said, the majority of Art Collectors, are driven by established brand names of known dealers and very few (predominantly white male) artists who are more business and public relations minded than your average painter/sculptors. These slick individuals, and we ALL know who they are, wear suits, eat caviar, and pay for whatever they want with the big money they make selling their brands, their image, which is of wealth, effortless living, and causal opulence (the giant art lofts, private jets, and sexy public scandals with peppered matching lawsuits) not of poverty and “starvation,” neediness and eternal WANT.
That said, we (your fellow talented and creative beings) are sympathetic to your needs because we all have needs. Yet, how you go about addressing those needs will either make your situation more dire, less comic, and even deadly or you could change your course and arrive at a place beyond urgent NEED, odious WANT, and potential “starvation.” Are you interested?
Can you image a life in which you had ALL the materials to make whatever kind of art you crave to make? Can you see yourself RICH? If not… can you imagine yourself (even better) satisfied, healthily fed, and professionally fulfilled?
Well, allow yourself to visualize what it would be like to have your needs met. What would it take for you to feel satisfied?
Some people fail to realize that as soon as they have one need met another (larger) one is sure to crop up.
How do you deal with the fact that you will be hungry again tomorrow, after you digest the food you secure and scarf down today? Will you just let tomorrow be a replay of today and thus go through your life eating and defecating and forgetting about tomorrow because you are too busy worrying today away to think about what will be of you in advance?
Yes… that is the key. You must somehow step out of worry about today and allow yourself to picture and plan a life that is not based on worry and fear.
Who would you be IF you had no needs?
Would you even be an artist? Or are you an artist because you think it is “cool.”
If you had all the money in the world how/where/why would you live?
Allow yourself to make a plan based on who you really are beyond need/want/fear. Plan your life and if money is an issue, face it. Deal with it!
If you have, “money problems,” you must make peace with money. You must. You owe it to yourself. You owe it to your future self to be financially secure. Yet, if you do not make peace with money there is no way you will arrive at the harbor of financial freedom.
Most people claim that they need money. They feel that IF only they made ten percent more than what they do now they could relax. Yet the target is always slightly out of reach because humans tend to not be satisfied with what they have. The moment they have this, then they want that, and that! So they continue striving, wishing, pushing, crushing, fighting, forcing, and so on — until they die.
Yet, is that really living? I don’t think so. I’m not alone. I’ve learned what I know from spiritual teachers such as Dr. Wayne Dyer, Eckhart Tolle, Dale Carnegie, Louise Haye, and they in turn quote others like Carlos Castaneda as masters teachers in the art of making life work for you so that you can enjoy being rather than waste away in never ceasing hunger.
Furthermore, if you have never taken a moment to study money, appreciate it, and thank goodness for all you already have; well it isn’t surprising that you do not have enough. Money has its own rhythm, music, and melody. You can learn to sign along. Yet, if money is not your bag than don’t complain when you don’t have enough. Enjoy your status as free of it and learn to live on the fridge or jungles or wherever it is that money grows on trees and people can just throw dollars at you to provide for your existence, but please don’t expect others who have and do focus on saving, investing, and honoring the spirit of abundance to enable your stance as ONE that need not face the realities of how money works. Please don’t complain when the customary bills rain in and you have no way to pay, accept it that you haven’t made a plan, that you haven’t made the right friends, that you have chosen to isolate yourself from sources of income and that you live in the outcome of those choices. Also don’t think that because others have bank accounts, mortgages, credit cards, and automobiles that they are not without their own financial concerns, remember the more you have the more you are likely to want/need so that those that seem “well off,” to you are often immersed in a cycle of desire very similar and, from their perspective just as urgent, as your own.
The BREAD you crave demands that you bake or make it yourself.
Lastly, we live in an incredibly rich society and there are public libraries in every city. YOU can become an expert on dollars and cents, budgeting, and money management. Please don’t tell me that you don’t have time. I don’t believe you. I am sure that if you take a break from Facebook or from fiddling around with the worthless, wasteful, company which you have cultivated, you would discover that you have plenty of time to improve your personal panorama and tweak the image of yourself you project into the world based on your warped understanding of what matters and how reality works. Also be aware that the BEST way to stay hungry is to make public announcements about how needy you are, even private statements of this kind are toxic to your financial health. IF you are going to live on charity you might conceive of a system by which you benefit others in the process, start a campaign to help “the needy,” manage it well and you might find yourself rolling in dough.
Yours truly,
Frau Kolb
