Art for Survival

In my late teens I had been in a situation where I found myself without a place to stay. I wasn’t working at the time so making ends meet was really kind of left to the flow of life. I found myself worried about where my next meals would come from and which friend I could perhaps bother to at least be able to stay inside somewhere. This situation happening to me at such a young age taught me a lot about the value of art in our current times. I eventually found a place to stay regularly, but it was far from a conventional way of living. For the next few years I found myself in a windowless storage closet that was part of my friend’s unit and it was just large enough to get a mattress on the floor.

I can’t speak on other artists’ experiences in this type of situation, but for me, I started to learn that the value of the work I was doing wasn’t really worth the trade off for the time I put into these pieces.

For a while I couldn’t figure out why this was the case, and then the more I thought about it, the more I started to see a pattern – that because I didn’t have a prestigious degree from an art institute or I just simply wasn’t in a good financial situation, that dictated how serious my artistic ability was taken. I’d often get people that wanted me to make their logo, draw them up a tattoo or make them a flier for an upcoming show and I always got financially shafted and taken advantage of.

“Expulsion

An introspection on the values of art in our modern world.

I had no real direction in my life at that stage, but I knew I wanted to do something creative.

I have been into the creation of all sorts of art for as long as I could remember, and I wanted to explore a way to apply this to my situation and help me get into a better personal space. There were many trials and tribulations that tested me along the way, but I feel that taking this path has gleaned a lot about how people consume and value art.

I started off selling tattoo designs to friends, and then on to friends of friends. This didn’t bring in a lot of money for me, but it got me by and a little noticed in the area. After a while, I started to establish myself in the art scene in southwest Colorado more and more. As I networked with more like-minded individuals, I started to see cracks in the foundations of my artistic endeavors.

Part of it was because I was embarrassed to be in a situation where I relied so heavily on those finances to make ends meet, but also because art itself is such a constant passion project for me. It is so close to my heart that I wanted to be taken seriously and be recognized for that effort.

That is what reignited my journey to this point where I am on the brink of graduating, and learning along the way that part of the reason that so little value was placed on my art was because I had almost no confidence in my own abilities, and for lack of a better way of saying it, I didn’t take myself seriously. This new renaissance of understanding opened up a flood gate on ideas of how to be creative, and still be fulfilled while also making a living off of it and not just surviving. I still can’t say that I know the key to placing value on art, but I do know that through the course of my education and my personal experiences, I’ve come to place a higher value on myself, which in turn reflects on those I share it with.