{"id":638,"date":"2020-01-17T06:38:47","date_gmt":"2020-01-17T06:38:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lauraboswell.co.uk\/studiodiary\/?p=638"},"modified":"2020-01-17T06:38:49","modified_gmt":"2020-01-17T06:38:49","slug":"you-are-lucky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lauraboswell.co.uk\/studiodiary\/?p=638","title":{"rendered":"You Are Lucky!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\u2018You\u2019re so lucky to be an artist, free to do just what you want.\u2019 It\u2019s a common enough remark, one most artists probably encounter as did I this week. Thinking about it, I quite like how this one sentence is both a manifesto for artistic success and a misunderstanding of how hard that success is to achieve.<\/p>\n<p>Doing just what you want is, by and large, exactly what an artist needs to do to succeed, but let\u2019s not confuse that with an easy ride. The \u2018doing just what you want\u2019 in question is not the soft focus dream of late mornings sipping coffee barefoot in a pretty studio. It\u2019s the hard graft of developing a personal viewpoint and using experience, practice, talent and time to turn that vision into a consistent flow of well-considered work.<\/p>\n<p>In this week\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.askanartistpodcast.com\">Ask an Artist podcast<\/a> you\u2019ll hear gallery owner Nick Bentley return to discuss artist\/gallery relationships and what galleries look for in their artists. Turns out that education, background and age are cheeringly unimportant. It is the body of work that matters, and that work must show passion, consistency and individuality. It is only by the artist doing just what they want and going their own way that this kind of work is made. But this is the freedom of hard work and focus, not the freedom of a fantasy bohemian lifestyle.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_657\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-657\" style=\"width: 300px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-657\" src=\"https:\/\/www.lauraboswell.co.uk\/studiodiary\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/IMG_1408-300x195.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"195\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.lauraboswell.co.uk\/studiodiary\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/IMG_1408-300x195.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.lauraboswell.co.uk\/studiodiary\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/IMG_1408-768x498.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.lauraboswell.co.uk\/studiodiary\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/IMG_1408.jpg 948w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 85vw, 300px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-657\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Living the dream, working on ideas in the studio<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>I don\u2019t say this to put anyone off wanting to be an artist. It is a brilliant job and sometimes it does indeed involve sipping coffee in a pretty studio (though bare feet are never a good idea in real studios). But it\u2019s not a job for the fainthearted. Doing just what you want is a great freedom, but holding your nerve and using that freedom to\u00a0pay the bills &#8211; that\u2019s not an easy life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u2018You\u2019re so lucky to be an artist, free to do just what you want.\u2019 It\u2019s a common enough remark, one most artists probably encounter as did I this week. Thinking about it, I quite like how this one sentence is both a manifesto for artistic success and a misunderstanding of how hard that success is &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lauraboswell.co.uk\/studiodiary\/?p=638\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;You Are Lucky!&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,18],"tags":[60,8],"class_list":["post-638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artist","category-printmaking","tag-art-advice-life-advice-linocutprintmaking-ask-an-artist","tag-art-gallery-applying"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lauraboswell.co.uk\/studiodiary\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lauraboswell.co.uk\/studiodiary\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lauraboswell.co.uk\/studiodiary\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lauraboswell.co.uk\/studiodiary\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lauraboswell.co.uk\/studiodiary\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=638"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.lauraboswell.co.uk\/studiodiary\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":671,"href":"https:\/\/www.lauraboswell.co.uk\/studiodiary\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638\/revisions\/671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lauraboswell.co.uk\/studiodiary\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lauraboswell.co.uk\/studiodiary\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lauraboswell.co.uk\/studiodiary\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}