If the painting is good or not has nothing to do with the decision to pursue art as a career. Time, drive, desire, and creative thinking, are what matters. Technique can be taught.

Most people think being an artist is about producing product, but there's actually much more. An artist also needs to find funding, address marketing, and invest time in building networks. Selling your work at a Saturday street market or online is futile. Getting your work in local galleries, featured in local upscale publications, and hung in fine restaurants is a better start.

FWIW, I wanted to be an artist when I was young. Unfortunately, I was also fond of eating, so I went into software. After all one never hears the adjitive, starving, proceeding programmer. Still, I've sold many works through local galleries. Not enough to support myself in the manner I'm accustomed, but enough to be nice.

^^^ +1

Technique can be taught but it takes a long time and lots of practice. You either grew up drawing or you didn't. To get proficient takes years and hundreds/thousands of drawings. Once you have that proficiency, you can learn to paint.

It would be like trying to learn baseball in college and then expecting to have a career in the majors. You'd be competing against thousands of kids that played it every day since they were five. Not likely...

Only a relative handful of people make a good living in painting. You can do other things with an art degree, such as teach the next generation, but its not a great living. Given the current outrageous cost of college, I wouldn't pursue it.

It can make for a fun hobby. Doing it for a living can take the fun out of it.

I appreciate all of the thoughtful advice.
I am with the majority, in that I don't see it as a way to make a living for most people even with a great college degree. He does mostly drawing and has just started with painting in the last month or so. I want to be supportive, but not spent that kind of money for in my mind an unemployable degree.
I guess what I need is to find art related fields that can interest him to make a living and the painting and drawing can be more of a hobby.

I appreciate all of the thoughtful advice.
I am with the majority, in that I don't see it as a way to make a living for most people even with a great college degree. He does mostly drawing and has just started with painting in the last month or so. I want to be supportive, but not spent that kind of money for in my mind an unemployable degree.
I guess what I need is to find art related fields that can interest him to make a living and the painting and drawing can be more of a hobby.

You need to have the natural talent in the first place. My mother did amazing paintings as a kid then went on to do a fine arts degree to learn the techniques of the masters.

As a kid we hung out with her fellow art school grads and I can tell you one thing; they are certainly wired differently.

I had to have a similar chat with my son, who is a complete and utter history dweeb: Minor, don't major.

Minor, don't major! Got it. That is geat

An ex, lets call her Fiona Sutherland, was a very good sketch artist and she got an architect's degree. She said it worked out well as a client would come in, blah blah blah, and she would sketch something up and say "Something like this?", and they would love the pic and say "Yes, YES, exactly like that." And she got the job.

As far as giving your friend advice, I got nothing.

I can, however, describe the choices I’ve made.

I discovered drums in junior high, age 10. At age 18 I was teaching with about 40 students some of whom were in competition at the national level on the snare. I was gigging in a jazz combo, a wedding band and jamming when I had the time. I lived everything you’ve ever seen and read about the drummer in the band. Then all of a sudden, everybody, including the National Merit Scholars people, my high school counselor and my dad who was a bricklayer (who also inadvertently taught me that I did not want to be a bricklayer, much to his disappointment) was telling me that I needed to go to college.

Adios music career.

Then, many years later in retirement came painting. I had sketched my whole life and decided to take a year of life drawing and art history at community college. I put down the pencils and picked up the brushes. After retirement I became, let’s say, obsessed. An intervention became necessary. I was not taking care of myself, not eating right, hardly sleeping, my comprehension of time went away and my thinking began to make not so much sense.

So long painting. My art room sits, to this very day, untouched.

But, I am alive to tell the tale and thankful that I survived. Twice.

Choices.

I disagree, the entire post above was riveting.

Wow.

I think art is something that must be internally driven to succeed, in a similar way to being an entrepreneur. You should lust to create. Which is my problem. There are times when I have that lust. Other times just ideas. And other times when I should lust more for the ideas I have. They go on and off with no control over them.

Lust.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1744976055.jpg




Idea. I love this piece of sculpture but it's not really art.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1744976116.jpg



Idea I should lust more to create.

Derivative of Richard Serra's steel sculptures but using carbon fiber. But in a completely different way that would be both massive and delicate at the same time, and would include light and wind for an interactive and immersive experience of the sculpture. This one I really need to work on.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1744976538.jpg

Did Dixie paint this? I'm thinking yes, as I remember Dixie had a Shih Tzu. It's interesting- I like it. What's the thing on the dog's mouth?

Shaun, those are impressive. What I like about "Lust" is that there's depth and texture in the darkest darks, the red shapes down the center draw the eye and make me try and discern familiarity and the bright oranges balance the dark without adding unneeded tension. (the tension is in the bright red)

I immediately thought of "Wake" at the Seattle Olympic park when I saw the c/f installation idea. It's fun to think about how those people squeezed into the center of the foreground walls. Is it kinetic? Are those people contortionists? Am I overthinking?

Anyway, another layer of the onion that is your creativity.

I really like Lust, Shaun.

I have never been able to loosen up enough to paint in the abstract. I’ve been forever stuck in making representational images. The more precise, the better.

It’s a sickness.

Campeche, Yucatán, Mexico: It’s a study in geometry. There is an intersection of diagonals almost exact center, multiple horizons, circles, rectangles and squares everywhere. Almost 100% straight lines.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1744991312.jpg

Me too. Liked it for years...

I have dibs on it, if he ever gets it back from the ex-girlfriend who now has it.

Thanks Mike, everyone see's something different in that painting. I'm drawn to the inferno on the left, myself. The red slashes were critical in the work's evolution, the final expression to separate the two sides which were muddy when I was first done and you are spot on, it had no tension and wasn't very interesting. Your had no where to go. The red was a gamble, a necessary one, and it paid off.

Richard Serra's brilliant work is the least kinetic works of art imaginable. You just walk among and inside it like the exhibitionists in the pic. What I want to do is take what he did in steel and make it wispy, but still massive, but it would move with a gentle breeze. It would take me 2 months of doing nothing else to create my vision. So it's not going to be realized any time soon.

Thanks CB, we are polar opposites in terms of creativity. And where I just make something up, you have real talent, I wish I could do what you can. My slave to precision is used in my work. Creating, I want no rules

I'm with Crowbob here, creativity is harder for most people.