Keeping Yourself in Mind

Being an artist can be very hard and trying. You have to work diligently to get exposure for yourself and your art. You have to be able to deal with rejection. And you have to be self-motivated. While doing all of this you have to stay true to yourself and keep yourself in mind, though. You cannot measure success based on others' successes - to do so will limit your outlook in ways that you may be ill-suited for and thus bring you great unhappiness. You are the best judge of your own success or failure because you are the most aware of your goals and what measures you have taken in order to attain them.

It is absolutely necessary to keep your goals and ideals in mind as you work and approach venues. What are you trying to accomplish in your art? Where do you want it to lead you? What sort of exhibitions do you want to pursue and how do you want to get your art out there where it can be seen, or is this even in keeping with what you want from your art? Do you want to sell your work? Do you think it important to get your work seen by as many people as possible or can it be more exclusive?

It can be hard not to see yourself as a failure when you do not attain your goals, but you have to keep trying and set goals that you can do something towards. You should not say, "I will have a prestigious show in a nationally-renowned art museum within the next year" and not expect to be disappointed, but you can say, "I will research twenty nationally-renowned art museums and submit ten solo show proposals to those that my work is best-suited to within the next year" in the hopes of perhaps getting such an exhibition. And your goals should be realistic in keeping with where you are in your career. If you are just starting out, you are not as well-known and thus are less likely to get awarded such an exhibition. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try if that is something that you want, but you should not base your success as an artist on whether or not you get it.

Long-term goals are also good. Perhaps you want to set such a goal of having a solo show in a nationally-renowned museum without putting an unrealistic time restriction on yourself. I was guilty of this when I first started out after graduating with my BFA. I was trying very hard to get a solo show during that first year and was rejected from numerous venues. I applied to a vast number of galleries and alternative spaces to little avail despite my having researched most of them beforehand. It was very disconcerting and I felt as though I had failed, as if I would never be able to amount to anything as an artist. But I was doomed to fail because I set up a very rigid goal that I didn't have enough control over. Sure, I could try to meet that goal by submitting to as many venues as possible, but there was no guarantee that I would be offered such a show despite my having done so. It took a lot more time than anticipated, along with doing as much else as possible to build up my resume, before I secured that exhibition.

Sometimes it can take longer than you expect to attain your goals due to factors over which you have little control, so you should be flexible in working with what you can do and not see yourself as a failure for not accomplishing everything you had hoped to do in the time frame you allotted yourself. (Perhaps you had set an unrealistic deadline.) Just because you didn't make something happen in that time frame doesn't mean that you should give up and stop pursuing it. You need to be able to reassess and reevaluate yourself so that you can strive to be the best that you can be while not judging yourself harshly based upon what other artists are doing and your ability to meet your own inflexible goals.