These core ideas are divided into six steps starting with the fundamental preparation before even getting started to becoming an artist: “don’t be embarrassed”; trust “your own imagination”; focussing on your own story; doing and experiencing art rather than understanding and mastering it; developing forms of practice, losing yourself in what you are going to do, to just doing it.
Step two provides an instrumental manual of setting up a studio or workspace, acquainting yourself with different materials; follow your own intuition; exploring your own preferences and finish what you have started. Enter step three: there Saltz describes the process of learning to think like an artist as the fun part, discovering that art is subjective and not everyone will like or understand it. Looking at as much art as possible and finding its textures, ingredients, gestures and accidents, and in the process, discovering guilty pleasures to which you keep returning.
Step four is entering the art world and the act of showing your work publicly. Beyond that actively asking others for guidance, submitting art to galleries, grants and residencies thereby building up a network of likeminded people. Step five provides psychic strategies to survive the art world. Persistence, determination and obstinacy is Saltz’s suggested mix to outwit doubts that you may harbour yourself or are projected onto you from others looking at your work. Rejection plays a big part in this process and it is important to learn to deal with it and recover from critical injuries arriving unharmed at step seven to an outer worldly experience of an audience looking and talking about your work, associating and connecting with it in their own way and making it part of an art history in the long run.
This book is part of the collection of literature provided by our own University’s Career Service. Find more here.
1 Jerry Saltz : How to be an artist. London : Ilex, 2020, p. VIII
