Professionalism in practice…setting the stage

Being a pro is a mind­set, a way of see­ing life and the world. Because it is a mind­set that can be learned, prac­ticed and improved it lives in con­stant change and is not the exclu­sive domain of super stars or any other elite class. A part time artists pos­sess­ing the desire to grow and will­ing­ness to do the work entailed can be a pro.

The con­cept of being a pro is a way of pro­vid­ing a visual and rec­og­niz­able ideal, one that defines all the aspects of prac­tic­ing what­ever it is we have cho­sen to prac­tice. It includes a con­tin­uum of skill refine­ment, a way of behav­ing, as in hon­esty, integrity, and com­mit­ment. The con­tin­uum never stays the same because change is always hap­pen­ing, new tech­niques, new ways of per­form­ing tasks, new ways of grow­ing are con­tin­u­ally show­ing up. The pro in this generic form uses that con­tin­uum to con­stantly grow by improv­ing her skills both of her trade and her busi­ness prac­tices all the while expand­ing the way she sees and lives in the world.

In short, being a pro is really about Mas­tery. Not a fixed mas­tery, but a con­tin­u­ally grow­ing and improv­ing mas­tery of every thing related to her life from work, home, fam­ily and  com­mu­nity. It is a holis­tic and sus­tain­able mastery.

REMEMBER:

Whether it is arti­sans, crafters, bak­ers, sew­ers or any other form of cre­ative mak­ing,  this same process of embody­ing a con­cept can be used.

So how does this look in real life?

The best way to visu­al­ize how the con­cepts of pro­fes­sional artist would be embod­ied is through case stud­ies. I’ve devel­oped fic­tion­al­ized artists from a com­pos­ite of the artists I know so we can fol­low them as they con­front some of the key prob­lems and deci­sions every artist is faced with. The artists each cre­ate dif­fer­ently and each have a dif­fer­ent venue focus for sell­ing their work. To make mat­ters more inter­est­ing we’ll also see how an artists with pro­fes­sional and non-professional mind­sets respond to the same dilemmas.

Finally, each of the case stud­ies will uti­lize recent research on mind­sets and their effect on behav­ior. The research is the result of decades long stud­ies on the rela­tion­ship between brain growth and mind­set indi­cat­ing that the way we think, live and work can be changed and improved through prac­tice and open­ness to learn­ing. I’ll be dis­cussing these points in later posts that will look at how artists can suc­cess­fully move from see­ing them­selves as starv­ing artists to see­ing them­selves as suc­cess­ful artists.

Each case will con­tain some com­bi­na­tion of busi­ness, mind­set, mas­tery and mar­ket­ing issues com­mon to work­ing artists. Let’s take a look at some of them in more detail.

Busi­ness

Issues asso­ci­ated with the busi­ness end of being an artist include:

• Time man­age­ment and pri­or­ity setting
• Self invest­ment
• Money man­age­ment and opti­miz­ing income
• Def­i­n­i­tions of success
• Learn­ing how to use the tools of business

Mind­set

Issues related to mind­set include:

• Iden­tity… how you see your­self and how that image trans­fers to your business
• Defin­ing suc­cess and com­mit­ment to it
• Open­ness to growth and change
• Hon­esty and self responsibility
• Atti­tudes toward failure

Mas­tery

Issues related to mas­tery include:

• Com­mit­ment to com­mu­nity and its growth
• Shar­ing  and helping
• Con­nec­tion with the market
• Knowl­edge of the work process
• Accep­tance of the role of process
• Plan­ning, goal set­ting and strategies
• Under­stand­ing the role of business
• Know­ing the game, what it takes to play and your role in it

Mar­ket­ing

Issues related to mar­ket­ing include:

• The role of mar­ket­ing in deter­min­ing success
• Net­work­ing and net­work development
• Main­tain­ing an artis­tic identity
• Dis­cov­er­ing and learn­ing about your mar­ket niche’
• Devel­op­ing a vis­i­bil­ity strategy
• Design­ing a path for ownership
• Edu­cat­ing buy­ers and poten­tial buyers

The Play­ers

Before I end this seg­ment let’s take a brief look at three of the artists I’ll be using in the “case stud­ies”. Other char­ac­ters may be added as needed to illus­trate par­tic­u­larly impor­tant points.

Alice

Alice is a young painter who has just received her BFA in paint­ing from a pres­ti­gious school, she grad­u­ated at the top of her class and is cur­rently weigh­ing her options as a painter. Her school focused on tech­nique, clas­si­cal use of mate­ri­als and brush work, there was lit­tle or no instruc­tion or help for devel­op­ing a voice or on  devel­op­ing a career as a painter. Alice, grad­u­ated feel­ing that art was not meant to be sold and that painters should focus more on tech­nique and less on expres­sion, when she described her work she did so in terms of its’ adher­ence to the clas­si­cal stan­dards she learned.

While in school Alice received con­stant praise for her work and she was highly encour­aged to con­tinue on to grad­u­ate school for an MFA. Alice had lit­tle inter­est in busi­ness and only slight tech­ni­cal skills, she lim­ited her com­puter use to e-mail, and web based research.

Robert

Robert worked with clay, he always liked the hands on feel of either throw­ing a pot off a wheel or sculpt­ing clay by hand. He was largely self taught, start­ing while in col­lege when he would accom­pany his girl­friend to the her art stu­dio to work on her projects. Robert dis­cov­ered the clay stu­dio on one of his trips, he got help from the stu­dio man­ager, to help him with cen­ter­ing a large ball of clay on a wheel. Once he learned the trick of cen­ter­ing he took off, he con­tin­u­ally exper­i­mented in order to learn more.

After col­lege, he set up a stu­dio and built a reduc­tion gas kiln and a wood kiln in an out build­ing on his prop­erty. He played with glaze and soon devel­oped his own glazes that fit his loose yet pleas­ing style. Each time a glaze failed or he lost work in a fir­ing, he took time to under­stand  the fail­ure and worked at devel­op­ing corrections.

Because he majored in busi­ness, Robert had a basic under­stand­ing of busi­ness with a bent towards the entrepreneurial.

Susan

Susan was mar­ried and had three small chil­dren, she and her hus­band Dave had agreed she would stay at home with the kids until they reached high school. Dave was an engi­neer with the state depart­ment of trans­porta­tion, mak­ing enough for the fam­ily to get by. One day Susan remem­bered her love for cre­at­ing and decided to take a jew­elry class offered through her cities’ com­mu­nity edu­ca­tion pro­gram. After com­plet­ing the pro­gram sev­eral friends were so impressed with her work they sug­gested she sell it, if for no other rea­son than to help pay for the materials.

Susan was intrigued with the thought of being able to work from home and make a sup­ple­men­tary income, so she started buy­ing mate­ri­als and worked on her jew­elry while her kids were in school.

Because of her husband’s tech­ni­cal exper­tise she was devel­op­ing both her on line skills and com­puter skills.

Review past install­ments of this series

• The Art of Going Pro: an iden­tity crisis

• The Miss­ing Piece

• Liv­ing Pro­fes­sion­ally part I

• Liv­ing Pro­fes­sion­ally part II

• Four Key Ele­ments that Define a Pro