Starving Artist

My price theory students are learning about "smoothing consumption" in two states of the world. Unless you save when you are in a good state, you'll starve in the bad state. Those that rely on painting as their sole income are subject to this model. They can either sell a painting and eat, or fail to sell and starve if they have not saved.

You never want to HAVE to paint for financial security. Darin

Darin (left) helping Kelly (right) with his painting :)

works at BeachBody (makers of P90x) so he never has to worry about feeding his family. It's almost impossible to paint when you're stressed about the painting, when you feel like to you have to produce. During those times, your work suffers because your mind is no longer on the details of the painting, and it becomes impossible to get lost in the work.

I felt a little bit of that this weekend. I was anxious about school, but mostly I was anxious to get the color done, which in retrospect is so silly, because there's no point in rushing. I had made so much headway on the verdaccio so quickly and had such good intuition that I was expecting that same result with color. Darin reassured me that the intuition would come, you'll learn to see what you need to see. Sometimes it's hard to see what's right in front of us:

Some people devote all their time to their art, and that's incredible, and many of them are consistently successful. When you have a family, you have to have derive financial security in some way, which is what Darin is doing. That being said he wishes he had more time to paint.

Love // Christelle