My love of art began when I was 13. I was an ugly, beast-like, plague-infested, patchy-haired, sweaty-palmed, anti-social teenage boy who'd spend most his time yearning after cherub-like, strawberry-eyed, daisy-haired, pink-ribboned, peachy-skinned girls. Unfortunately I never quite learned how to interact with these creatures. Instead I decided to drag my hairy knuckles in angst and alienation back to my bedroom and watch through my window as god-like, pin-striped, teethy-grinned, spunk-filled, smug-faced macho men would effortlessly charm them for me. But all was not lost. In my bedroom I discovered something else; [not that!] One day, rummaging around the dark recesses of my cupboard I found a dusty old 4-track tape recorder. Unbeknownst to me at the time, but she would become the closest friend I ever had. My 4-track was always there for me, always willing to listen to my problems. I could explain things to her that I couldn't explain to anybody else. There was something magical about our relationship. It was like an awakening. She opened up something inside of me, a whole universe right inside my own soul, all there, ready to be explored. For the first time I had tasted the potential of art and I've been hooked ever since.
Over the next few years art and I would flirt with each other more and more; I bought my first multitrack keyboard, she taught me how to bring flickerbook stickmen to life. To the world my face would rarely reveal the true story, but behind my bedroom door we were deep sea divers, exploring the secret chasms of my soul. Until one sunny day in 2005 we finally decided to tie the knot! I was 22, just finished university and wondering what to do with the rest of my life. So I got down on my knee's and asked God. The next few months I experienced the most euphorically creative period of my life, I wrote tons of music, I won Thom Yorkes guitar in a competition, and I also discovered that my ability to see music is apparently quite rare and has a name - synaesthesia. These things, to me, were signs that a life devoted to art was the right path for me. Now all I had to do was figure out how to navigate this path!
  THE ART-COMMITTED LIFE
This was when the questions started. What is an artists life supposed to look like? How do artists make money? What career ladders do they climb? What options are available to me? Should I join a band? Should I play my music live? Should I be looking to get signed by a label? Should I start charging people to listen to my music? Should I start behaving more professionally now that I've declared myself an "artist"?! What does it even mean to be an "artist"? Who am I really? What am I doing here? What is the purpose of my life? What is the purpose of all our lives? Is there even a purpose?!?!.....and on and on.....
As I began my journey in search of answers, it didn't take long before the darkness descended and I became totally overwhelmed, completly lost in a vast, unsympathetic ocean. My life became almost like a cliche story as I began to lose all that was most dear to me. My parents divorced, we sold the family home and I had to move out and fend for myself, my Dad almost lost his lifelong battle with depression, I almost lost my faith in God. I also suffered a debilitating writers block after concluding that all my motivations were fundamentally selfish and found that I could no longer bear the canvas without feeling like a disgusting blotch on the face of humanity. I was working a dead end cleaning job and feeling very far away from the dreams I had envisioned just a few years ago. (Now I know why so few artists make it past the age of 24!)
But as time passed, slowly but surely, I kept fighting, and with the help of some special people that I met along the way, I began to piece my life back together again and find answers to questions. Amidst all the chaos my goal was simple. All I wanted to do was create as much art as I could manage, of the highest standard I could manage, for the longest amount of time I could manage. And it was clear that the most vital thing I would need to make this happen was money. So what were my options?
My first thought was to join a band. That's the way I'd seen it done on those VH1 documentaries. You find a gang to jam with, turn up drunk to a few rehersals, grow a beard, start wearing leather, and next thing you know you're riding in limo's with Lady Gaga and Jay Leno! That's how it works right? In my imagination being in a band is still one of the greatest things ever, but in reality it's never quite worked out like that for me. The main reason for this is because I have the social skills of a teapot. I've always found teamwork difficult. But there are other reasons too;
Firstly, I have this problem with compromise. They say that when a team works together they're able to produce results greater than the sum of the parts, but in my experience I've never found this to be the case. Instead, what usually happens when several visions collide is that each party will dillute their vision until a happy medium is reached. And I HATE this! Maybe I'm just an uncompromising bastard, but I feel like my vision is one of the most powerful forces inside of me. It's crystal clear, and when I hit it, I know it. I feel like the whole purpose of my existence is to bring this vision into reality. I've been entrusted with it. I am its guardian and it is my mission. So to water it down for the sake of civility just drives me bonkers! It feels like walking backwards down an escalator! And so I've come to the conclusion that it's better to preserve the purity of a vision alone, than to compromise it in a group.Â
But a second reason was that, thanks to multitrack software and home recording technology, frankly, I didn't really need a band. I could play all the parts myself, and, to be honest, I preferred it this way. Imagine a band being so united in vision and purpose that every single note played by every single member felt like it was coming from the same heart. Well, surely you can't get much more united than playing all the parts yourself? This is how I feel about recording alone. Every single decision I make in the studio is drawn from the same well of emotional memories, so that hopefully, I'd like to believe, you're left with a far purer creation.Â
So if I wasn't gonna join a band, what about playing live? Surely I'd have to play live somehow, because that's what musicians do, right? EVERY self-respecting artist plays their music live! In fact, as I scroll down my itunes artist list, I can't find one artist who doesn't play their music live. So I'd best get rehearsing, right?.....Well, I had a problem with this assumption. I couldn't see why it was presumed that if an artist makes music in a studio, they're automatically expected to play that music live aswell. To me the studio recording and the live experience are two totally different monsters. There are strengths in the studio that are weaknesses on the stage, and vice versa. To tackle both I'd have to sacrifice many of those strengths in order to create music that was effective cross-platform, and, again, it's this idea of compromise that I hate. I would rather devote myself to one or the other so that I can truly master one monster, rather than spread myself out more thinly over two.Â
So I chose the studio, and here are my reasons. For starters, I have to be honest, my extreme awkwardness around people effectively chose for me. The live path was always going to be a bad match for a personality like mine. But I had other reasons that I believe are still valid. A second reason was that, with the advent of iPods, walkmen and other personal audio players, music has now become a much more private experience and I think this makes a massive difference to the ways that artists can present their messages. People behave very differently in groups than when alone. A person is much more likely to let their guard down and be themselves when there's no-one watching, and it's in this state that I'd most like to communicate with people. A simple, honest, heart to heart, with no peer-pressure manipulating our responses. This is the way that I've grown up listening to music, in my bedroom or through my headphones, with my heroes feeling more like old friends, I know them so intimately. And so this is the manner I'd like to mould my own music; with the deliberate intention to be consumed privately. This means that many topics and moods that would never work in a public setting, I'm now liberated to explore.Â
And my third reason was that I believe the limits of what can be created in a studio far outreach the limits on the stage. In the studio, thanks to multitrack software, you're able to add layers into the hundreds and beyond, whereas on the stage you're largely confined by the head count. Also, in the studio you have the added gift of time which allows you to perfect a piece to an extent that would be impossible on the stage. For instance, a highly complex guitar part that would produce far too many mistakes if attempted live, can be chopped up into more managable chunks and edited together, where each chunk can be attempted countless times until it's nailed. There are also tools and effects in the studio that are difficult to recreate on the stage, and what I love about all these things is that they make it easier to hide the strings and create something of true magic, and it's this magic that I search for in all of my creations. The moment when a piece comes alive, and it becomes something beyond what you put in the pot, like a message from another world. It's these moments that I strive to find, and they're moments that I believe are more readily found in the studio, and are sadly, too commonly lost on the stage.Â
So if I wasn't gonna play live, what other options were available to me? How about getting signed to a label? That seemed to be another common consensus of what an artist ought to pursue. In fact it was usually suggested that to be unsigned was inferior and a mark of failure. But, again, I had a problem with this assumption. The more I thought about it, the less sense it made for me to try to get signed. Other than a raised platform, there was very little a record company could offer me that I actually wanted or needed. I had my own equipment and was capable of recording music of a descent standard. With the internet I had an audience and a tool to distribute my work, plus the potential to promote and sell my work if I wished. If there was anything I wanted to learn about music, I could find that on the internet too. I had total control of my art, with no outside pressures and no reason to compromise at all. Why would I want to risk losing this?Â
A record company could offer me fame and attention, which may have its benefits, but financially, from what I've researched, it can be a very risky deal. You could lose the rights to your music and get tied up in lengthy contracts that could waste years of your life. You'll be burdened with added pressures to conform your work to the labels wishes, and from what I've read, very few artists even make any money. So for me it really didn't seem worth the risk, especially when the future of independent music was looking so bright and hopeful.Â
So if I wasn't going to sign to a record company, I'd have to try to make money elsewhere and the next option was to consider selling my art myself. Again, the common consensus seemed to be that an artist ought to get paid for their work but for some reason this idea sat really uncomfortably for me too. I hated the idea of charging people to listen to my music and there were several reasons for this.Â
For starters, whenever I created anything, I was usually so proud and excited that I just couldn't wait to show as many people as possible what I had made. But if I had put price tags on my work I think this would have discouraged more potential listeners than it was worth. To me the greatest desire I have for my work is that it will connect with people in the same way that my artistic heroes have connected with me. The love and the gratitude I have for those artists whose work has so utterly changed my life, is just immense. So the thought that I may discourage potential connections just for the sake of a few pounds makes me feel a bit ill to be honest.
And secondly, I feel that a price tag gives the customer a degree of entitlement to expect a certain level of quality from their purchase and I don't like that pressure. I need the freedom to suck! Writing from a purely intrinsically motivated place is the ideal, and I fear price tags will compromise this.Â
WHAT IS THE VALUE OF ART?
But the thing is, giving my art away for free doesn't mean that I don't believe it has value. In truth, I believe that my art is the most valuable thing I've contributed to the world since being alive! But do I believe I ought to be paid for my work? It's difficult to say when my "work" feels so much like play! Plus, don't they say the best things in life are free? Is music in that same category as love and kindness and nature? I'm not sure, but I guess one difference is that love and kindness won't have to hang up their boots without financial support. And I know, so long as I have free time I'll always create art, but the bottom line is the less money I make the less time I'll have to spend on my art. But I really don't know what the value of art is. It's such a subjective thing. One man's Mozart is another mans Marky Mark! So who am I to claim that my art has value? I feel as though I'm not the one who should decide. It's the recipient who determines how valuable a piece is to them.Â
So with this in mind, I figured a donation type of system was the best solution for now. Kind of like a cyber-busker! I'll continue to upload all my work for free because my main desire is for as many people as possible to be able to see and hear my work, but then I'll leave it up to the audience to decide if my work is worth anything. It may be a bit utopian and I may not earn as much as I could have if I'd have charged for my art, but I think [I hope] it'll work.Â
Another solution is to sell merchandise; CD's, prints and posters, t-shirts, mugs, postcards, whatever. A small part of me feels a little bit like a sell-out for having to do this, but when I think about it I can't see anything drastically wrong with it. It's nice to have memorabilia of the things you like, isn't it? My walls are plastered with my favourite artists! Plus there's still lots of creative potential to play with so I think this is an avenue I'm open to exploring more in the future.
Other money-making solutions include, advertising, teaching and live concerts. Advertising I hate with a passion and would feel heart-broken to see my website plastered in ads, so this is an avenue I'm very unlikely to go down. Although there may be ways to exploit the system, like how they've done over at the hunger site. They've crammed a page full of ads, then simply ask you to click one button. This creates page views and the advertisers pay the hunger site money for this, even though nobody ever pays any attention to the ads. Live concerts, as I've mentioned earlier, is a thought I'm not really entertaining at the moment, but there's still a good chance I may explore it at some point in the future. And teaching, I don't know much about but it seems like a harmless enough venture, so who knows. Â
WHY DON'T YOU GET A PROPER JOB?
So there are methods out there for making money from your art, but are they enough to earn a living from? Potentially yes, but realistically for me, so far I've earnt very little from these avenues. So I've had to turn to my final option which is to get a "proper" job and I figured there were two directions I could take. I could go the two-job route and try to squeeze my art into my free time, keeping work and art seperate, or I could go the organic route and try to squeeze my art into the job itself, combining work and art together.Â
The organic route, again, seemed to be the most popular suggestion from most of my family and friends. I'm a creative person so why not get a creative job, like a graphic design artist or animator, or a musical therapist or teacher? But for some reason I absolutely revolted at the idea of working in the creative industries. I think this was because every job I could think of basically involved somebody telling me what to create, and just the thought of that I found emotionally draining. I already knew what I wanted to create. I had ideas to last a lifetime and I felt that working on somebody elses vision would actually be counterproductive because I feel like I only have so much creative energy and I didn't want to use it all up at work, then be creatively exhausted by the time I get around to working on my own art.Â
I know this sounds pretentious but I've come to realise that my creative flame is an incredibly fragile thing and in a world of fire extinguishers, it needs to be tenaciously protected from all outside pressures and influences. I think, for this reason, I, instead, found myself drawn more to the two-job route. Inparticularly, simple, low responsibility jobs like cleaning, because these jobs posed no threat to my flame. There were no great demands on my character, no pressure to compromise my vision. I could just do the job, get paid, and leave it all at the office. In fact, if anything, I've found that cleaning jobs sometimes help to fan the flames, because there is always plenty of thinking time, and I can listen to my mp3 player and fill my head with inspiration while I work.Â
And so this is where I'm currently at. I didn't join a band, I don't play my music live, I didn't try to get signed by a label, I don't charge for my art and I don't have a "proper" job. Instead, right now, I work two part time cleaning jobs that just about pay the bills, leaving a chunk of time everyday where I'm totally free to create as I please, and I'm really enjoying this routine at the moment. Although it's not absolutely problem free yet. Money is still extremely tight and I've had to make a lot of cut backs to live this way. Plus I'm constantly yearning for more time to work on my art, but I've gotta be grateful for having any time at all really. I also have a couple of freelance jobs, CAD engineering and knitting jumpers, that can provide a bit of bonus money when needed, and I occasionally do temp work if money's really tight. But my hope is that, if I can start making money from my art I may be able to drop some of the other work I'm having to do which, in turn, will give me more time to work on more art. But for now, I'm happy! :)
The reason I'm telling my story is because I want to present a possible model for any aspiring artists out there. I don't know if it's the most ideal model and I don't know what models will be necessary in the future, but I'd just like people to know that it's possible. You don't have to give up on your dreams just because you didn't get picked by some fat cat major label bosses. There's still a place for independent artists in this world. You don't have to sell out or compromise either. You can still make art the way you did when you first fell in love with it, when you'd create for no other reason than the pure fascination of it. The weight of this world needn't suffocate our imaginations. And who knows what technology will bring tomorrow. I've got a sneaky feeling life will get a lot easier for artists over the coming years. Â Watch this space!Â
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