Friday, February 13, 2009

trying to find out the secrets

as a full-time freelance artist, i find new york to be an oddly lonely place, full of folks who ride the subway out to their office jobs and also full of freelancers who move on independent tracks and don't seem to connect much with one another. i don't know many other folks like me here, the self-supporting, non-day-job kind of artist.

i realized that i missed the sort of camaraderie, support and advice that i got in San Francisco from a group of artists and cartoonists who met twice a month for Art Night. Art Night was the jam, a time to share tips about materials, the technical stuff stuff i never learned in my wimpy college art program. friends shared tips about their favorite pens, how they got jobs, gave advice on improving my wonky drawings and we could peek into each other's sketchbooks and see the newest latest greatest projects.

in a way i'm hoping this blog creates a space like Art Night. the plan is to interview as many talented and interesting full-time artists as i can find, hopefully once every week or two and get at those kinds of questions. this isn't so much an art appreciation blog (there's a lot of good ones out there) because i wont be asking much about themes and meanings within an artist's work. although this may be a lot less fun, hippogriff's paintbox is a place to discuss the crafting of art, the business of art, and how each artist makes it work uniquely for them. i want to know how other artists manage to stay afloat in this often competitive, corporate, visually conservative and homogenous culture.

Hippogriff's paintbox is an ongoing document of my quest to find the terribly elusive  self-supporting full-time, freelance artist and explore the mysterious alchemy of succeeding in the vocation of artist. i hope these interviews can turn the mythology of the starving artist inside out and upside down, shake it and see what spare change and magical trinkets fall out.

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