The conversation that killed my ambition to be a career painter

I was at a gallery opening in Santa Fe 3 years back, and a retired art handler told me flat out that most successful painters spend 70% of their time on networking, not painting. I argued with him for 20 minutes about how talent wins out, but he just laughed. After tracking my own hours for 6 months, I saw he was right. My art improved way less once I stopped believing in that romantic idea of the starving genius. Anybody else run into a piece of advice that ruined a dream you believed in?

3 comments

3 Comments

holly_reed557d ago

The gallery guy might have a point, but taking it as gospel is a trap. If you let someone else's career path kill your ambition, maybe painting wasn't the real draw for you. Plenty of artists like Wayne Thiebaud or Andrew Wyeth built their whole careers on just making good paintings and letting the work speak for itself. The 70% networking guy probably just wasn't good enough to make it on talent alone, so he had to sell that story to feel better.

william_harris6d agoMost Upvoted

@holly_reed55 you make good points about Thiebaud and Wyeth, but here's what I wonder. Don't those two artists represent a different era where the gatekeepers were galleries and museums themselves and not social media algorithms? The landscape has shifted so dramatically that maybe the 70% networking guy isn't wrong for today's world, even if his numbers are off. How do you think someone starting out today should balance pure craft against building connections and online presence?

phoenixw116d ago

Wow, @holly_reed55 you really cut to the heart of it. That last bit hit me - maybe the dream wasn't about painting at all, but about the fantasy of being the lone genius. Lots of artists hide behind the "talent alone" thing because it feels noble. But most of the greats had help. Connections. People who talked them up. Thiebaud and Wyeth had patrons and dealers working for them behind the scenes. The gallery guy's numbers might be off but his point stands. Art world runs on who you know. Always has. The difference now is you have to do the networking yourself instead of some gallery handler doing it for you.