Artists’ careers are as unique as their fingerprints. We see artists licensing their images on products, teaching art to people with developmental disabilities, selling original paintings in major retail stores like Crate & Barrel, and holding their first solo museum exhibition in their eighties. How do these careers work?
Many artists resist the word “career,” thinking it means traveling a well-trodden path, with clearly marked signposts, calculated decisions, and a long-term business plan to guide every step.
Of course, artistic careers don’t look like that, but they happen anyway. They meander, detour and return, unfolding in unpredictable ways, often without conscious planning.
The three artists featured, Alice Burke, Chris Motley and Leah Cook, were chosen because their unusual careers could not be more different. One artist was a faculty member at a major art institution, another created a successful online business from her home in a small town on the Oregon coast, and yet another worked as a lawyer in the left hemisphere before forging her way into the art world. What can we learn from their success?
Alice Burke (alisaburke.com) is a painter and mixed media artist. She supports her family by running a multi-faceted art business. She offers online classes, sells books and DVDs, hosts workshops and retreats, sells her paintings, collages and adult coloring books, and has even launched a line of fashion accessories. Burke blogs daily and has 50,000 followers on Instagram. Her brand is Redefine Creativity.
Chris Motley (chrismotleyart.com) spent 30 years in the “left brain” as a lawyer in the public sector. She has no artistic credentials, although she has enjoyed art all her life. Her mother taught her to knit when she was 10 or 11 years old. After she retired from her legal career, she started knitting necks. Gradually, her work evolved until she was creating three-dimensional sculptures whose originality won her national recognition.
Leah Cook’s work (liacook.com) can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among many others. She works in a variety of media, combining weaving with painting, photography, video, and digital technologies. She is currently collaborating with neuroscientists to explore our emotional response to images by mapping these reactions in the brain. She was a professor of fine arts and textiles at the California College of the Arts for 40 years.
The careers of these artists were neither accidental nor carefully planned, but each recalls a moment of epiphany where they saw the future. Burke’s a-ha moment came when she taught at a nonprofit arts center for the first time. She had been making art for years. She found it difficult to make a living selling her paintings and drawings in galleries.