Last night our newest group of artists gathered again at the Lichtenstein Center for the Arts in Pittsfield, and this time they had the good fortune to share several hours with an amazing artist and financial trainer, Esther Robinson.
One of these days I will actually record one of Esther’s presentations because a blog post can’t do justice to it, so instead I’ll just quickly reproduce some of the notes I jotted down to capture a little of the flavor of the evening (apologies in advance for paraphrasing):
“Over 70,000 newly minted MFAs are graduating every year, year after year, looking for the same opportunities you are.”
“We should be thinking not only about our short-term projects but also how to assure that we have the resources to produce a lifetime of work. That should be the goal.”
“Artists are adept at using tools, so think of money as just another tool that you can master to improve your work.”
“The worst thing about having a fear of money and avoiding financial tasks is that it ends up being a huge time-suck — time which you need to make your work fearlessly.”
“Credit is just money that costs money.”
“Really think about what you’re putting into your art practice financially and whether it’s building your capacity, because you should know whether you’re making an investment in your art practice or whether you’re actually giving a gift to yourself…to be creative. It’s OK if not everything is an investment, but you should be clear about the difference.”
On being an artist in this recession (paraphrasing for our group what she had articulated in a terrific article she wrote for Filmmaker magazine: “The news may be bad, but we started adapting to murky economic realities long before most people ever dreamed of a financial crisis. We’ve evolved for this extreme environment, like those crazy deep-sea fish — the glow-in-the dark ones with lamps on their heads. We may not be pretty, but we know how to survive in dark waters — and now the whole ocean’s gone dark. Everyone else is panicking. They don’t know how to live like this. But those of us used to late-night edit rooms, 20-hour days, Red Bull, ramen and shoebox apartments… we already know how to swim in these waters. We’ve already developed our weird adaptations in order to find work, food and friends, and now we’re at an advantage. While everyone else slows down or stops, we can see clearly and keep creating. While others are blind in the dark, we can be proactive and fearless, and by taking some pretty simple steps we can make major leaps in our work and our careers.”
“Sometimes you spend to buy peace of mind, which is OK, because in the peace of mind state is often where creativity happens. But there’s a difference between buying peace of mind and medicating yourself through spending.”
How Esther looks at the old “Wants” vs. “Needs” divide: “If I need it, I buy it. If I want it, I barter for it.”
“If you’re pessimistic by nature, force yourself to really accept a 50/50 possibility as an even chance: don’t let yourself presume that 50/50 means its likely to turn out bad.”
“Don’t create a paradigm where it’s all or nothing — either you’re a full-time artist or not an artist at all. If you have a day job, cultivate your gratefulness for it. That job is allowing you to do your art. Don’t tax yourself by feeling bad about the job.”
“Progress with money, as with so many things, is about incremental change. Let that incremental change happen rather than throwing up your hands if you’re not an entirely new person overnight.”
