The Artist's Creative Vision: How to Create Art that Makes Change and Earns a Living

By Kamar Thomas

Anything and everything is now called art. The Art Market is global, and some people make millions while others never find their footing. With changing algorithms and a cryptic Art World, how do you stand out as an artist?

The Artist's Creative Vision: How to Create Art that Makes Change and Earns a Living teaches how

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9798885044707

Book preview

The Artist’s Creative Vision

The Artist’s Creative Vision

How to Make Art That Makes Change and Makes a Living

Kamar Thomas

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2023 Kamar Thomas

All rights reserved.

The Artist’s Creative Vision

How to Make Art That Makes Change and Makes a Living

ISBN 979-8-88504-447-9 Paperback

979-8-88504-470-7 Digital Ebook

To Althea Mowatt, Raymond Thomas, Therene Thomas, and Oxana Sidorova.

To Djet Layne, Michael Layne, and Titchfield High School. OneTitch.

To Wesleyan University and the faculty at the University of Connecticut.

Contents

Introduction

Mr. Market and the Monopoly Monster 

Art History I: Curiosi-Tea

Art History II: Con Women

Art History III: Big Money, Big Problems

Art History IV: Myth Busting 

Interests I: Cross-Pollinate

Interests II: Metaphor Be with You

Interests III: Canceled

Interests IV: Radical Interdisciplinarity

Your Biography Is Your Art

Fantasies, Fears, Failures, and Foes

Fear Well

Aspire to Inspire

Conclusion: The New Golden Age

Acknowledgments

Appendix: References

Introduction

I was a walking, talking bundle of quiet ambition. I wanted to be a rich and famous artist in America without self-consciousness. It was my twenty-sixth consecutive year remaining alive. My only problem was that I was born outside of the United States, where I was in school, and citizenship can be really hard to come by. As such, the usual path that involves moving to a major city, creating a body of work while scraping together a living from working odd jobs with my peers, was largely shut to me before I arrived. Therefore, I had to settle for being a professor of art and start building up my creative vision (CV). 

To fulfill that, I called a very kind artist named Pat. He helped me figure out how to become a professor. He told me I needed to apply to about thirty jobs, and most of the places I apply to would ignore my application. It was possible I might only interview with about five of them. I got lucky, and I did indeed interview with five schools. 

One of my very first interviews was with a small liberal arts college (called a SLAC) in North Carolina. One of the most famous basketball players today—who is not named Lebron James—went there. Anyway, I was tailor-made for this job. Having gone to a SLAC myself and receiving my MFA from a large research institution, I had the experience. 

As the interview date drew nigh, I prepared assiduously. I repurposed one of the suits I wore to church for the occasion. I picked out the table and a just-right chair. I arranged the five thousand Kelvin daylight-color bulbs from my studio before finding the right spot to place my laptop to give the right answers for the upcoming Skype interview. I checked all the sound equipment and camera, and I rehearsed the questions as I was supposed to do. I didn’t have an ounce of nervousness. I should have been nervous.

During the interview, I gave short, confident, to-the-point answers, just as I had rehearsed. The interview went as well as playing catch with a porcupine. The pauses were cavernous. The silences were long, and I revealed I did not think through very many questions. I was prepared for the interview but not so prepared for the job, which was reflected in my answers as soon as I was asked for more depth. The longer the interview continued, the more it dawned on me that I was not going to secure the job. 

The subsequent disappointment-filled email, where the search committee wishes you well in all of your future endeavors, came and I replied. I asked for some feedback. The response was so generous it changed me.

Me: Thank you, and I welcome any critical feedback that might help me improve my candidacy.

Interviewer: Concise answers in this kind of interview context end up feeling like everyone is pulling teeth. Instead, the interview context can be more of a stage/soapbox for the candidate.

There lay my problem: My answers were concise because I had neither soap nor box to stand on. One question stood out to me.

Interviewer: What will you do to mentor students into professionals?

Me: (long, arduous, silence)

I had no point of view. 

My answer has become a years-long obsession. The search for an answer has taken me on an intellectual journey across various fields, including psychology, leadership, economics, statistics, linguistics, sales, and marketing. Here is that answer: Make your own creative vision and execute it in such a way viewers will want to tell other people.

This book is a system and a process that solves a few problems. The first is everyone will not be able to go to graduate school in art, nor will they be able to learn things through the laborious method of only trial and error. Even when one is so inclined, the question of what exactly you should try and what sorts of errors are good errors has led many artists to paralysis by analysis and started the slow decline of production. 

The second problem is if you already have your own creative vision, how do you sustain it? As a working artist, this is of primary importance to you and me. This book presents a systematic method for an artist to follow that will result in a body of work coalescing around a few remarkable ideas.

Who am I to be writing this book? My name is Kamar Thomas. I am an artist and professor of art at Centennial College in Toronto, Canada. My job is to produce artists who can take care of themselves. I am from a seaport town called Stony Hill in Portland, Jamaica. Through a combination of buckets of luck, a good ounce of family, and a tablespoon of work, I went to a liberal arts college whose fame is only surpassed by its massive expense. 

After I received my bachelor’s degree in studio art, I went back home to teach art before going to graduate school. I have been paying for my education by selling paintings to strangers either full or part time the whole way. Ever since I turned twenty years old, my work has adorned homes, kitchens, cafeterias, office lounge areas, and living rooms in the United States, Jamaica, and Europe. I have sold through traditional means, and increasingly, through the internet. 

I have taught dozens of students how to do what I have done through drawing, painting, art history, and digital media. I’ve guided the development of theses and independent studies. My overarching goal is to have students develop their own vision and get money so they can make more work, which is the very subject of this book. These students are from every economic class, many countries—eastern and western—and have a wide range of artistic skill levels. I am writing this book as an answer to the emails and messages I regularly receive about how to make money with artwork after graduation. I am writing this to collect all that I have learned in the past nine years of teaching and the past ten years of making art. This book is a distillation of countless mistakes that were made and the lessons learned from them.

What is this book for?

This book is a system, guide, mental model, and method to develop your own sustainable and reliable creative vision for a lifetime. It is a formula in the same way that human sexual reproduction is a formula that reliably produces another human that is different from all the other humans. Your creative vision (CV) is the result of the unique combination of your biography, the history of art, and your interests meeting a marketplace. 

Who is this book for?

This book is for those of you who suspect you are an artist no matter the job or profession you do. It is for those looking to add structure to their artistic practice or those at the beginning of their artistic journey who are wondering what they should carve, draw, or paint. How will they connect with collectors and people to buy their work? 

It is for the amateur artist looking to slowly and steadily turn pro. This book is for students about to enter the professional world of artistic practice outside the warm blanket of academia who must now contend with the inconvenience of bills and obligations. It is for professional artists who feel stuck, or as if they hit a dead end, and feel like they are in a cycle of repeating themselves. It is for those who teach art and whose salary is based, at least in theory, on their ability to prepare students to enter the professional world. 

What this book is not: A guide to becoming a rich and famous artist overnight. I have tried to do this; sincerely, when I find out what works, I will let you know. Until then, the system presented in this book will help you maximize those chances and produce work that helps to pay but a small part of your rent and overall help you to create work you are proud of until that time comes. This book is not about how to use social media to get to a million followers or amass likes. It is about how to make things worth looking at and sharing on social media in the first place. 

The easiest way to make a million dollars is to be born with $2 million and lose $1 million. This book is for those who have no millions and are willing to learn to build connections one human at a time. If you have a biography and interests, and you are eager to absorb the history of your art and scan the current marketplace to offer your own creative vision, then the journey this book will take you on is for you.

* * * * *

We begin our journey by outlining how we have gotten to the current art market that we now possess, and why, at the turn of the twentieth century, the number of artistic styles and practices have skyrocketed and will continue to do so with our help. With that foundation, we get down to the business of the CV system. 

Much like a job curriculum vitae, which provides a summary of your experiences and skills and what you have contributed to those experiences and skills, your creative vision is a summary of your experiences, skills, and interests and what your point of view is because of those experiences and skills.

This book is divided into four sections. Each section represents an aspect of the CV formula: Art History, Interest, Personal Biography, and the Market. 

The Art History portion is an in-depth outline of how we can use methods of working and ideas from the history of art to position our practice or come up with new ideas once we understand the questions, conditions, and procedures across time and between different groups of people in another place. I am an oil painter, and my history will be heavily biased toward that. This section is designed to get us acquainted with what has come before us, on top of which we will build our practice. 

The Interests section is a method of researching and indulging our interests in different subject matters or fields. We look for areas of overlap between these fields, or we extract more fundamental principles, after which we produce novel questions and solutions as visual metaphors. 

The Personal Biography section outlines how to mine our life events, life stories, or identity to do work through exercises designed to develop a personal point of view. This section will personalize our work and provide the much-needed connection that helps define who our work is for and why we should keep making it.

Each of the three areas, Art History, Interests, and Personal Biography, heavily overlap with each other. You will find many things you are interested in as a result of guidance by the invisible force of art history, which cannot help but be influenced by what you care about or find impressive from your biography.

Actionable exercises follow each section, which include thought experiments or ways of working to put you to work immediately. This is a book of practical, actionable steps that are useful even without the necessary understanding. In the same way, one can drive a car without understanding how internal combustion works or what a spark plug is supposed to do. If in doubt, do the exercises.

This book can be read out of order. If your work is based more on your interests, then skip to that chapter. If you already have a creative vision, it is worth understanding the history of the market to find new ways of thinking about your work to get your work into the hands of the paying public. Read the chapter on the Art Market, ruminate, and then get back to work.

The heart of this book is the creative vision (CV) formula. The formula is made up of art history, interests, and your personal biography from which we can produce a creative vision. That vision will