I was listening to an interview with someone who had a bad experience in AA; they fell into a culty high control spin-off group. The interviewer asked, “How do you know you have finished a step and can move on to the next step?” And the AA person said, “Oh that’s all clearly outlined in the literature. But in my case, my sponsor wanted to be the one to tell me when I was ready or not.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This isn’t an essay about AA, just to be clear. But this conversation made me think about how vague being an artist is. And how my<\/em> waypoints might not be the same as someone else’s. If you’re just freewheeling and being an artist on your own, how do you set goals, and how do you know you have completed the goals, and is moving forward really the goal? Do you really go from A to B to C and so on? Or are you move like a big blob, just oozing and spreading and constantly moving? Does the student in you wish for a syllabus, a midterm, and a final–with grades? People buy your art I was listening to an interview with someone who had a bad experience in AA; they fell into a culty high control spin-off group. The interviewer asked, “How do you know you have finished a step and can move on to the next step?” And the AA person said, “Oh that’s all clearly outlined in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/arleigh.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/arleigh.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/arleigh.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arleigh.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arleigh.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2009"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/arleigh.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2009\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2010,"href":"http:\/\/arleigh.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2009\/revisions\/2010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/arleigh.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arleigh.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arleigh.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
For example, here are some things that might mean you are progressing and succeeding as an artist. You could be all, some, one, none, and to varying degrees:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
People ask if they can buy your art but you’re not ready yet
You have sold one thing once for a lot of money
You have fans\/followers
You teach it
There was an article about you
You write about art
You do art challenges, and you complete them
You launch challenges, and others participate
You are invited to art related things
Other artists have heard of you
Your art was in a show
Your art was in a solo show
Everything inspires you to do art
You lose track of time when you do art
You know the lingo
You have a dedicated art space & garb
Your art has been stolen online
You have a set of colors that are “you”
People come to you to talk about art
People ask you to critique their art
Art is all you can think about
You can see progress over time
You have arranged your life so you have more time for art
You feel excited and at-home in an art store
You always carry art supplies with you
People can tell you’re an artist by the way you look
You know how to pronounce “quinacridone”
How do you define success as an artist? What are your gold stars?
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"