Starving Artists - Part Seven or How Not to Starve

   How Not To Be a Starving Artist
       


    Maria Mildenberger is a visual artist who has made money from her art. She creates wall coverings from her business base in Vancouver. It's called 'The Red Palette' and Milderberger who designs surface, textiles and wall paper, has plenty of clients. She said in effect to 'The West Ender's' Jennifer Scott, "If you want to be an artist you must work hard."
    This too is the underlying message of Chris Tyrell's books. Tyrell who's also based in B.C. has written two very fine books called 'Artist Survival Skills' and 'How To Make A Living As A Canadian Artist'.
   I recommend both books for any person who wants to succeed in the visual arts. Tyrell's books are  full of down-to-earth practical info on how to get your name and your art out into the world and make decent money doing this.
   At the beginning of this story I told about an encounter I had with a woman many years ago. "Oh you're a starving artist are you?" she told me years ago when she found out what I did. There's been enough impoverished artists . Read Tyrell's books to escape that fate and learn a lot too.
   

Starving Artists - Part Six by Dave Jaffe

          Starving Artists - 19th Century U.S. Artists Drew Money


        James Boggs who draws one side or two of currency bills has many imitators who copy his art work and try and pass their work off as something made by Boggs. Their art work is a version of a version of a dollar bill drawn by Boggs. How do the power structures deal with these people because they could be breaking the law at least twice?
    Then there's artists who lived long before Boggs and sort of did what he did. 19th century artists like William Harnett, John Peto and John Haberle painted pictures that included very realistic looking dollar bills.
    "Though their work never enjoyed intellectual prestige," writes Edward Lucie Smith in his book 'American Realism' "some had moments of popular success beyond the reach of more ambitious artists.
     One of these artists William Harnett was warned by U.S. Secret Service agents not to paint dollar bills. They told him he was a counterfeiter and could go to prison."Harnett", says Edward Lucie Smith, "accepted the warning, abandoned this kind of subject."  Yet when Secret Sevice agents warned John Haberle, he kept on painting pictures that included portraits or copies of dollar bills. Haberle painted a picture called 'Reproduction' that included a copy of a U.S. ten dollar bill.
     These paintings belong to a type of painting called 'trompe-l'oeile' or 'trick of the eye' paintings. They were painted to be so realistic that the person looking at them would think the objects in the painting were real.
     In Europe in the 19th century 'trompe-l'oeil' paintings were still filed under the heading of 'still life paintings'. About this time they disappeared in Europe as artists turned to other subjects. Yet at this time in the U.S., this type of art became very popular.
     To-day, the paintings of Harnett, Peto and Haberle could sell at auctions for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Their works were of course popular in their lifetimes too.
     Still, the careers of these men and the career of J.L.S. Boggs proves it's sometimes hard for a visual artist to make money no matter what he or she draws, sculpts or paints. Yet these days there are books that show visual artists. We'll look at them in the next part of this story.
     

Starving Artist - Part Five by Dave Jaffe

         Starving Artist - Part Five



     So far this story of poor artists has been a predictable one. It's message is very simple and sad: Most visual artists don't make much money, the message goes, and never will. Yet there are exceptions to this rule. One of them is the American visual artist named James Stephen George Boggs or 'Boggs' as he's known in the art world. Boggs makes money simply by drawing excellent copies of U.S. dollars.
     Boggs, as James Weschler points out in his book on Boggs,  makes money by drawing it. He has drawn one side of many U.S. dollar bills. Then Boggs tries to buy a meal or something else with his fake dollar bill.
    Sometimes at the beginning of his career, waiters, food servers, salespeople and others would say in effect, "Sorry. I can't accept this. You'll have to pay me real money."  Yet as Weschler goes on to say in his book on Boggs, called 'Boggs: A Comedy of Values' in the end Boggs made lots of money and became famous in several countries.
     And to-day, his U.S. dollar bills sell for thousands and thousands of dollars. Of course Boggs's road to fame and fortune did hit a few bumps along the way.
     In Great Britain where he drew a one-sided version of the British pound he was charged in the 1980's by the Bank of England for counterfeiting the British pound. After a juried trial in the famous Old Bailey court house, Boggs was pronounced 'Not guilty' and he was free, well sort of.
     Once back in the United States Secret Service agents raided his home. They seized piles of his art work and other things like the receipts he bought from art work sales. For Boggs keeps the receipts and other things like change he gets from buying things for his art work. Often he sells receipts, change and one of his bills as a complete work of art . The Secret Service people kept Boggs's works and materials but never charged him with anything.
    "But isn't this man a counterfeiter?" someone asked me when I told her about Boggs. "He's breaking the law."
    This of course was or is the reason that police and others have tried to stop Boggs from making art. Yet so far the law has failed to deter him from making his art. Boggs now uses a computer to do his work and no longer draws his work with a pen. Yet the police are still interested in him.
     In 2006 he was charged in Florida with having amphetamines, drug equipment and a concealed weapon in his possession. Yet he's still churning out versions of his currency. He's an artist who makes money by drawing money. In the art world that's a success story And Boggs isn't the first artist who drew a country's currency.
    We'll look at some of these artists in the next chapter.
     
   

Starving Artists : Part Four by Dave Jaffe

         Starving Artists - Part Four


    Emily Carr was just not unlucky being born in 1871 and dying just before the great consumer boom  started in North America in 1945. She also was unlucky by being born maybe in the wrong country, namely Canada instead of the United States.
      The U.S.'s Gross National Product is at least 12 times Canada's. By the early 20th century when Carr was in her 30's, magnates like the Harrimans, the Mellons, the Carnegies, J.P. Morgan and Leland Stanford, had amassed vast fortunes. A very small part of their money went to buy fine art. In Canada by 1900 there were some multimillionaires too, but nothing of the scale of the American very rich.
    So money spent on the visual arts in Canada has rarely come close to money spent on these things in the U.S. of A. Some present day Canadian artists have made some decent money. Yet their proceeds can't come close to the incomes of American artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol or Jeff Koons.
   In the 1950's, the Canadian government set up the Canada Council to aid visual artists and other creative people."I'm applying for a Canada Council grant," a musician who played modern music said in the 1970's. Yet these grants that are a good thing can't make any artist lots of money. 
      Then, too, after 1945 and the end of the Second World war thousands of men and quite a few women went to universities and colleges to study the visual artists. This was a big change in Canada. Yet there was a downside to this trend. Competition for grants and art sales became much more intense because there were many more artists than there were in say 1930. So many artists lost out in the struggle to earn a decent living from their work.
      "I can't afford to buy my own work," an artist with the Bau-Xi gallery said in Vancouver just before one of her exhibitions opened. Her paintings on the gallery's walls were priced from $5,000 to $12,000. "My work is for rich people and not for people like me."
     For whatever reason, artists of all sorts keep popping up in Canada. Yet most visual artists and probably many other creative people won't get rich or earn too much money from their work.
    That's just the way it is in Canada right now and will be for the foreseeable future.
     
 

Starving Artists: Part Three by Dave Jaffe

    Starving Artists - Part Three


    Emily Carr was just plain unlucky. She is one of British Columbia's most famous visual artists. Yet she lived most of her adult life in poverty. When she was born in Victoria, B.C, in 1871 into a middle class family, there were very few traditional visual artists in British Columbia.
    First Nations people had carved some magnificent totem poles. Artists in the British navy drew landscapes that could be used for military purposes and naval journeys. Yet elsewhere in B.C. there weren't too many visual artists around. Of course there weren't too many white people around either. And money for the visual arts was scarce too.
    By the time Carr died in 1945, the art world of North America was on the cusp of a great change. A new affluent world emerged after 1945 in the United States and then spread across the western world. It was based on the car, the suburban tract home, television, the jet plane and the credit card. And tax laws concerned with the visual arts changed too.
     "The American government passed a law," writes John Berger, "which allowed income tax relief to any citizen giving a work of art to an American museum. The relief was immediate." Yet the art didn't go to the museum until after the owner died.
     In Britain the government passed laws that tried to stop art works from leaving Britain as exports. A rich person's heirs could now pay the deceased's death duties with art not money. "Both pieces of legislation," adds Berger, "increased prices in sales rooms throughout the art loving world."
    Then, too, the massive spending by the governments of the United States and other western countries during the Cold War poured billions of dollars, pounds and other currencies into people's pockets. Some of this ended up in the art world, and also helped  push up prices in the art galleries.
    Visual art became a commodity like everything else.
   Yet Emily Carr and many others saw none of this new affluence. After the age of 40 she was poor and remained poor for the rest of her life. She became a landlord, a breeder of animals, a writer of books, and a worker at many other tasks. She had to do this to survive for she never made much money from her paintings.
     Flash forward to 2015. Charles Ray is an American sculptor, now based in Santa Monica, California. Ray's huge life like sculptures sell for two or three million dollars apiece. Ray doesn't get all of this money. His dealer Matthew Marks takes some of the money off the top for himself. Yet every year a museum or rich people snap up one of more of Ray's works.
     Ray is not a very rich man. He pours most of a lot of his proceeds from sales into his studio. Still, he lives on a privileged plateau that Emily Carr and many other artists of the past could only dream about. "Everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes," said Andy Warhol who died a very rich man and who was famous for a lot longer than fifteen minutes.
     Warhol, Charles Ray Jeff Koons and other  fortunate visual artists made or make millions of dollars from their work. Emily Carr never had their luck. She was just born too early.
      
   

    

'Starving Artists' Part Two by Dave Jaffe

              Starving Artists: Part Two


    The life of D.H. Lawrence mentioned in part one of this blog was an extreme life. Few novelists, painters, or poets have aroused so much anger from the powerful as Lawrence did. Lawrence  attacked in his novels the prudishness of Victorian England and paid a terrible price for doing so.
     Yet the poverty that Lawrence sometimes endured was also a burden to many other creative people, especially visual artists.
     Alberto Giacometti was born in Switzerland in the early part of the 20th century. One of his  sculptures was recently sold for nearly $120 million (U.S.). Yet Giacometti spent half of his adult life living in poverty in two tiny rooms in a house in Paris. His brother Diego lived down the hall in a space as cramped as his brother's living quarters.
    "Giacometti was a most extreme artist," wrote John Berger. "He based all his mature work on the proposition that no reality could ever be shared." Giacometti's sculptures are black in colour or grey. His figures are also very thin and look nearly anorectic. Giacometti became famous in the late 1940's. many people back then thought he was copying pictures of starving people who had just survived the recently closed Nazi death camps.
    Giacometti was soon flush with cash. By now he was in his mid-forties. He died 20 years later in 1966 from pneumonia. His smoking surely speeded up his death. Yet the 20 years of his adult life, living as a poor man, didn't help extend his life either.
     Giacometti wasn't the only one of the early 20th century's famous artists who spent a large part of his life in poverty. Piet Mondrian was another. Mondrian became one of the most famous abstract artists who's ever lived. Born in Holland, Mondrian was nearly 40 when he discovered cubist paintings in Paris.
     Mondrian then joined the Dutch art movement called 'de Stilj' or 'The Style'. Mondrian stopped painting the somewhat moody paintings of his youth and early middle age. He switched to abstraction. His paintings focused on the square, vertical and horizontal lines, and the colours black, white, red, yellow and blue.
     "We come to see that the principal problems in plastic art," Mondrian wrote," is not to avoid representation of objects, but to be as objective as possible." Mondrian died in New York City in the mid-1940's, having fled war torn Europe. His paintings like 'New York Boogie Woogie' and the unfinished 'Victory Boogie Woogie' are reproduced in most art history books and to-day are worth tens of millions of dollars.
      Yet in his lifetime he lived for the most part as a poor artist. So did others.

Starving Artists by Dave Jaffe Part One

                    Starving Artists Part One


    "Oh, you're a starving artist are you?" a sarcastic woman once said when I told her what I did. "How interesting." This woman aimed to hurt me and she did. Yet her comment wasn't far off-base. Most Canadian artists don't starve to death. Yet they don't make much money either.
     In 2014, 136,000 Canadians called themselves 'artists'. Their median income totalled as little less than $22,000 a year. The median income for all Canadians came in far higher at a little less than $38,000 annually.
     So most artists are or were poor. And when they are poor they're travelling a well-worn path. Take David Herbert Richard Lawrence for example. Known in the history books as D.H. Lawrence, he wrote some of the great English novels of the early 20th century. 'The Rainbow', 'Women In Love' and 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' are or used to be part of many English literature courses.
    Yet Lawrence never saw much money from these novels or from his poetry, criticism or travelogues. This son of a coal miner and a middle class mother, became a teacher in the English midlands. He wrote his first novel 'The White Peacock' before the First World War. In 1912 he eloped with the German wife of one of his former teachers. Lawrence then left teaching but never made much money after this.
    "'The Rainbow' and 'Women In Love'," says a biographical sketch of Lawrence, "were completed in 1915 and 1916." Yet "The Rainbow''s sexual frankness enraged the British government and no publisher would handle 'Women In Love'. Lawrence and his wife, the former Frieda von Richtoffen faced persecution in wartime England. The authorities had a particular disike to Frieda von Richtoffen because her brother was the famous German flying ace Baron von Richtoffen, who was shooting down English pilots in the skies above France during the First World War.
    The First World War ended in 1918. Four years later Lawrence and Frieda left their country England and travelled through large parts of the world. They had little money and Lawrence's last novel 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', was banned because of its frank language and its love making scenes. Lawrence died in 1929 from tubercolosis at the age of 44.
     "In his writing," wrote Frieda von Richtoffen," Lawrence gave us the splendour of living. It was a heroic and immeasurable gift." Yet from his mid-twenties on, Lawrence lived in poverty and exile. While he lived below the poverty level so did many other gifted, creative artists. But it's also fair to say that before 1945 most people in the world were also poor.