When Did Being An Artist Become So Much Work
On what has accumulated around the creative life, and what it means to build your practice on your own terms (Part 2 of my Substack Series: The Self Determined Artist)
There has always been a practical side to being an artist that many of us don’t love. Finding collectors, exhibiting, showcasing, sending epks, applying for grants, festival applications, approaching galleries and publishers, getting (and organizing) the gigs, maintaining relationships - none of these responsibilities are new. Artists have always had to think about the business of their practice alongside the making of it.
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What has changed is the sheer scale of what is now expected. And how that scale has crept up on us in the last few years.
The internet transformed the creative landscape in ways that were genuinely exciting. It removed many of the traditional gatekeepers. A painter in a small northern community could suddenly reach collectors across the world. A jeweller no longer needed to rely solely on local markets. A musician could build a real audience without the backing of a label. For many artists, this felt like a profound shift toward independence - and in many ways, it was. What nobody told us was what that independence was going to cost.
It's fair to say the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated all of this beyond anything we could have anticipated. When physical galleries, art fairs, and festivals closed overnight, artists were forced to build their entire commercial infrastructure online - in weeks, not years. What might have been a decade of gradual ‘digital adoption’ happened in a matter of months. While some of that shift created new possibilities, it also permanently changed what artists are expected to manage just to stay visible - let alone viable.
Building a website, an online shop. Photography became part of the job – the photography that documented and packaged it. Then came social media, email marketing, newsletters, video production, SEO, analytics, online advertising, and the relentless need to adapt to platforms that keep change their rules whenever they feel like it. Each development arrived with the promise of greater opportunity. Each one also required another investment of time, energy, attention, skills development and money.
And none of them replaced what came before. They just accumulated.
What that accumulation actually costs
Today, you are expected to be makers, marketers, photographers, videographers, copywriters, customer service representatives, shipping departments, and social media managers - often while holding down another source of income simply to keep your practice alive.
This expansion of the artist’s role has happened so gradually that it has started to feel normal. Normalizing this has moved the art itself to the edges of the artist’s day instead of where it should be – at the centre.
Creative practice requires conditions that are genuinely difficult to protect inside this reality. We require sustained attention, experimentation, patience, the freedom to fail, and the willingness to sit with uncertainty long enough for something to emerge. Those conditions do not coexist easily with the demand for constant output and continuous visibility. It is frankly, exhausting.
I see this all the time - artists who are becoming increasingly skilled at producing content while struggling to find uninterrupted time in the studio, building a body of work. Artists who spend more hours documenting and setting up systems for the work than making it. Who are exhausted not from creating, but from everything that has wrapped itself around creating and slowly squeezed the life out of it. My head spins just thinking about this.
And here is what troubles me most about that: the support available to artists has focused on helping us navigate these new demands more efficiently. That just feels so wrong to me. We are encouraged (pushed) to do ALL of the things. But comparatively little attention has been given to protecting the conditions that allow artists to make meaningful work - time, space, financial stability, creative community, and the freedom to develop ideas before they have to prove their commercial value.
That is the conversation I believe we most urgently need to be having.
And now, layered on top of all of it, we are being actively pushed toward AI tools - just to keep up. An easy example I see is when an artists posts their work, it is clear AI wrote the caption. Immediate disconnect for me. This is not convenience, its compromise.
The very technology being positioned as the solution to our overwhelm is the same technology threatening to replace the creative intelligence we have spent our lives developing. There is something deeply troubling about this.
Skills matter - the right ones, for the right reasons
Professional practice is everything. Financial sustainability – also everything, but not often attained, or obtained at the detriment of your art. Understanding how to communicate the value of your work, how to price it, how to find the people who need it - these are very necessary parts of a creative life. I teach both the inner work and the practical work, because I do not think you can build a sustainable creative life without both.
What I want to emphasize is which skills, and why. The skills worth developing are the ones that align with why you are making your art in the first place - that grow out of your values, your aspirations, and the specific creative life you are trying to build. Skills in service of your work, rather than skills that slowly pull you away from it (like feeding the algorithm). That distinction sounds simple, and it changes everything about how you make decisions about where to put your energy.
The difficulty arises when the practical demands become the foundation of an artist’s practice, rather than the structures that support it. When strategy comes before identity. When visibility comes before clarity. When the business of being an artist starts happening at the expense of actually being one.
The artists whose practices endure
In more than twenty-five years of working with artists - in galleries, studios, festivals, remote communities and in the real day-to-day of building a creative life - I have noticed something consistent about the artists whose practices endure over time.
They are rarely the ones who chased every opportunity or new way of doing things. They are the ones who understood themselves deeply enough to make discerning decisions. Who knew what belonged in their practice and what didn’t. Who understood what they were trying to contribute through their work, and let that understanding guide their choices on where and how their work is offered, and how they grow.
In other words, they were self-determined.
Self-determination, as I use it, is not a mindset you layer on top of a difficult situation and suddenly feel better. It means knowing your why – deeply (not superficially) - not the one that sounds good in your bio. It means understanding your values clearly enough that they can function as an actual compass when things get hard. It means building your creative and business life around how you actually work, not how you think you should work.
When artists are genuinely self-determined, something shifts. Decisions become precise. Pricing feels less emotional and more practical. The work itself tends to deepen, because you have more clarity, and more confidence.
That is the foundation of everything I do. And it is what The Artists Well is built around - not helping you do more, but helping you build the kind of foundation that allows you to keep making meaningful work over the course of a lifetime.
The art at the centre. Everything else in its rightful place around it.
To read the full series, head over to my Substack,
