The Art of going Pro: the missing piece

Last week’s col­umn ended with a chal­lenge for clar­ity, to begin to look closer at what you do and how you do it. Clar­ity is impor­tant to iden­tity and iden­tity helps oth­ers when they are sort­ing out where you belong in their minds.  When poten­tial buy­ers are in need of some­thing they auto­mat­i­cally thumb through their men­tal files in search of all infor­ma­tion per­tain­ing to ful­fill­ing their cur­rent need. Their final choice more often than not depends on any num­ber of fac­tors but top most among them is who ( com­pany etc.) can help, who can fill the need and resolve the prob­lem they are facing.

The buyer’s final choice, is depen­dent on the rel­a­tive posi­tion of each poten­tial solu­tion provider in the  buyer’s mind. The clos­est to the top of their con­scious­ness t are sought out first. Since, we try to boil infor­ma­tion down for eas­ier stor­age  by using labels and men­tal images, those with the most clar­ity float up to the top.

The iden­tity cri­sis hinted at last week was about this process, if we can’t get clear about who and what we are then it is no won­der that we are seen as a com­mod­ity and our work is often com­pared to Wal­Mart or other dis­count retail­ers. More impor­tantly, whether poten­tial buy­ers come with their com­mod­ity or value glasses on is deter­mined by how you see and label your­self and the con­no­ta­tion that label holds in the minds of your poten­tial buyers.

How do you know?

The def­i­n­i­tions used last week are a start­ing point but by no means rep­re­sent any­thing final. Clar­i­fy­ing the dual issues of  the mean­ings of art and who an artist is, is both time­less and  crit­i­cal to chang­ing our posi­tion in the soci­etal scheme of things and our abil­ity to suc­cess­fully make a liv­ing from our art.

So, for brevity sake, I’ll use the def­i­n­i­tions from last week and say that  both the pres­ence and con­sis­tency of imag­i­na­tion and aes­thetic value in hand made work the the core dif­fer­ence between hand­made and artis­ti­cally hand­made. So, a pot­ter, a wood­worker, a metal smith and a fiber worker can all be artists if their work comes from their imag­i­na­tion, and sense of aes­thetic value which com­bine to form their indi­vid­ual voices. In other words artists make their own maps, define their own path and so long as they do so they can be con­sid­ered artists.

This dis­tinc­tion is impor­tant, because a per­son can cre­ate an ini­tial body of work that reflects both their pas­sion and their voice at the time the body of work was cre­ated. How­ever, if the pas­sion and voice stop and do not evolve into a con­tin­ual appli­ca­tion and explo­ration of the pos­si­bil­i­ties with in the person’s medium, by def­i­n­i­tion that per­son has stopped being an artist and moved to being a crafts person.

Being an artist is not enough

Call­ing our­selves artists is not enough, while it cer­tainly pro­vides a label for what we do it does lit­tle to describe an atti­tude, an approach to life and work. Stop­ping with the artist label  gives us to much wig­gle room, room to make excuses and ratio­nal­iza­tions to jus­tify why we aren’t sell­ing, or why peo­ple don’t like our work, or why we can’t get accepted into a show or by a gallery. How often have you heard the phrase “ I’m an artist what do you expect?” as an excuse for not tak­ing care of details that would seal the deal about said artist’s seriousness.

On the other hand, how often do you hear a doc­tor, a den­tist, an engi­neer, a car­pen­ter, an exec­u­tive assis­tant or an archi­tect respond with a sim­i­lar response in a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion? Not very often, because, peo­ple who wear the cloths of doc­tors, lawyers,etc. posses a qual­ity that takes their role to a whole other level. Granted, there are quite a few within all cat­e­gories that stop at the label, but it’s the ones who go beyond, who find and use the one key ignored by the oth­ers, who make it in the end.

The impor­tant quality

Before we go any fur­ther, let’s take a look at one more thing…using the def­i­n­i­tion and descrip­tions pre­sented so far we could safely say that every­body can be an artist so long as the core of their voice comes from a mix of their imag­i­na­tion and aes­thetic vision. While I firmly believe that every sin­gle per­son has the abil­ity to be an artist not every­one will chose to sanc­tify their gift by pur­su­ing it as a fill time income pro­duc­ing activ­ity. Does that make them less of an artist? Does it make them an ama­teur? I say no to both because the pri­mary dis­tin­guish­ing fac­tor has noth­ing to do with the amount of “time” they put in and every­thing to do with their approach to life.

Steven Press­field argues in his book The War of Art:Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Cre­ative Bat­tles that an ama­teur plays for fun, is not seri­ous about what she is doing because she doesn’t love what she does enough to do it full time. I would argue, that an “ama­teur” can really be a pro­fes­sional in dis­guise for no more sim­ple rea­son than sit­u­a­tional lim­its.  It is pos­si­ble that Press­field con­sid­ers any­one who doesn’t use the gift they have and instead dab­bles out of fear, to be the real ama­teur. Pressfield’s def­i­n­i­tion is more global, it is  about how deeply we engage life and in the process develop our gifts. That engage­ment, is impor­tant because it comes from a place yet named and owned by hand­made workers.

The miss­ing piece

That deep engage­ment is the one thing that clinches the image of all the other cat­e­gories of work men­tioned above, it is found in the for­mal or infor­mal code of per­for­mance and belief that give form to those who do the work of each cat­e­gory. Adher­ence to that code or per­for­mance frame­work is what dis­tin­guishes  dab­blers from seri­ous prac­ti­tion­ers of the work. The code pro­vides an iden­tity for both the artist and her poten­tial buyers.

There is one word that frames the of  mean­ing of the code, that word is Pro­fes­sional. How­ever, pro­fes­sional does not describe the behav­ior, out­look or atti­tude of peo­ple defined as pro­fes­sional. That descrip­tion comes from the word Pro­fes­sion­al­ism, which is the prac­tice and demon­stra­tion of work prac­tices and atti­tudes man­i­fested in the code that directs the work of a professional.

When we step back and look at the pro­fes­sion of being an artist we don’t really see a uni­fied code or vision that solid­i­fies an image of  a Pro­fes­sional Artist. Con­se­quently, it is hard for an artist’s per­fect buy­ers to decode any poten­tial match when they come in con­tact with a per­son who makes stuff by hand. The miss­ing piece is a rec­og­niz­able code that allows perfect/ideal buy­ers to find their match. This code is the key­stone to attract­ing buy­ers who are look­ing for artists, arti­sans or crafters, it clar­i­fies the iden­tity of each, improv­ing the poten­tial for an ideal match. More impor­tantly, the code gives the artist iden­tity, it frames per­for­mance, qual­ity, pas­sion, clar­ity and focus,  in turn giv­ing artists prac­tic­ing the code of pro­fes­sion­al­ism, cred­i­bil­ity and authority.

Dis­cov­er­ing and begin­ning to frame that code is what the rest of this series will be about. What do you think? How would you describe a pro­fes­sional artist? Since this dis­cus­sion is about you please leave your com­ments below.