Two weeks ago I had the incredible opportunity to participate in the Creative Capital Professional Development Weekend, sponsored by The Field. The weekend is designed to give artists the tools they need to turn their art into a viable business and to dispel our beliefs that artists cannot live a financially rewarding life. As an artist who has long worshipped at the alter of scarcity and lack of entitlement it was almost counter-intuitive to hear words like Rewards, More, Strategic Planning, and Success. I experienced a huge waterfall of relief every time the weekend leader, the marvelous, kind, inspiring, enlightened Colleen Keegan insisted ”If it is punitive it is not working” – her most oft repeated refrain. As both a woman and an artist I have long had a profound lack of self-entitlement, a deep seated belief that if I was going to live an unconventional life I must then struggle and not expect happiness. No success could ever feel like a success, but instead more proof that no matter how hard I worked I would always be poor, creatively unfulfilled, unrecognized and struggling.
The takeaways from the weekend were innumerable, from info on writing business plans and mission statements, to learning to how to budget a project and figure out my personal hourly rate, to learning how to talk about and promote my work Read Post…
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