From hobby to profession? not quite my story.

Making Art as a Hobby, a Practice, a Profession… Where Is the Line, Really?

"How wonderful that you've turned your hobby into your profession."

I know it's usually meant as a compliment. And yet I sometimes find myself getting stuck on that word: hobby. Not because I dislike the word. But because, for me, art has never really been a hobby.

It is closer to what artist Tracey Emin so aptly calls a "vocation." Something that exists beyond career or money, but comes from a deep inner necessity.

Video: Artificial Milieu — —excerpt from On The Road With… Tracey Emin, BBC News (2011) • In this excerpt, she talks about how becoming an artist was not a conscious choice for her.

I have always needed to do something with images. Drawing, painting, making, experimenting, searching. Getting things out of my head that are wandering around in there and giving them a form. Sometimes to tell something, sometimes to understand something, sometimes simply because I don't know yet what it will become. My mind is almost never still. There are constantly ideas, images, questions, possibilities and things I want to try. For me, that is not something I do in my spare time. It is simply part of how I move through the world.

Maybe that is also why, throughout my life, I have so often felt the need to explain my work. Or even defend it. As if I had to keep proving that what I was doing was actually work. 

When I worked as a female painter in the construction industry, for example, I would sometimes hear:

• "Nice and neatly inside the lines, eh?"
• "I paint everything myself too, you know."

While I was painting five days a week, at a professional pace. Of course you can paint your own house. But that is something very different from painting as a profession for years. Or someone once stood there explaining to me how to say in English that a door had just been painted, while I was standing there with my master's degree and years of experience as a painter and decorator. Maybe these seem like small things. But they are the kind of moments that make you think: you don't see it…

Later, in education, there was the familiar:

• "But you get so many holidays, don't you?"

There too, you only saw part of the picture from the outside. The work simply came home with me: preparing lessons, marking, administration, meetings, thinking, starting over.

And now that I am a self-employed artist, I notice the same mechanism again:

• "You don't have children and Luc has an income."

Yes. That's true. But how much or how little I need financially actually tells you nothing about what I do. Sometimes it feels as though, because people only see a small part of your life, they fill in the rest themselves. As if a painting, a print or a card simply appears somehow. While behind that one visible result lies an entire world: an idea, searching, failing, trying again, choosing materials, experimenting, learning, making, photographing, writing, administration, contacts, sales. Most of an artist's practice is invisible.

No one sees the idea you carry around for weeks that may ultimately never become a finished work. No one sees what you throw away, start over, or are not yet ready to show. No one sees how much comes before that one image, that one print or that one card eventually ends up on a table somewhere. You see the result. Not everything that was needed to make it happen.

And perhaps that is what affects me most: that I so often feel I have to explain what I do, while almost no one sees what comes before it. As if I first have to prove that it is serious enough. That I am doing enough. While I have long known that this is my work.

And yet, I still sometimes find it difficult to call myself an artist.

When are you actually an artist? Who decides? Is it when you have studied it? When you work at it every day? When you can make a living from it? When you exhibit or sell your work? When other people call you an artist? Or is it something you simply dare to say about yourself at some point?

Honestly, I don't completely know. Maybe that is also why the word artist feels so big to me. Maybe I don't need to have a definitive answer. Maybe I can simply say: this is my work. This is what I am working on. This is how I look at the world and what I make. And to me, that is fundamentally different from a hobby.

For myself, it doesn't really matter whether people call me an artist or not. I do what I do. And today, that also includes the business side of being an artist. I think about pricing, sales, customers, a webshop, prints, cards, commissions and ways of getting my work into people's hands. Sometimes that commercial side can feel a little uncomfortable, as if art and commerce don't quite belong together. But to me, the two are simply connected. I want to make my work, and I also want to be able to build an income from it. Because, ultimately, you have to be able to make a living. And at this point in my life, it no longer feels right to have another job on the side to support my life while at the same time feeling so strongly that this is what I need to be doing. Not because money determines what I make, but because I want the space to do what I need to do.

And perhaps that is where it differs from a hobby. A hobby can of course be incredibly important. You can become completely absorbed in it, spend years doing it and get enormous pleasure from it. But art has never stood alongside my life. It is a way of living, looking and thinking.

I studied it. I have experience. My work has taken many different forms. Sometimes it was more present in my life, sometimes less. But it was always there. That is why it doesn't quite feel right to say that I turned my hobby into my profession. It feels more like I made space again for something that had been there all along. An artistic practice can exist for years before anyone sees it. When you keep making while no one is watching. When you keep searching for what your work can be, without knowing whether anyone will ever see it or buy it.

Perhaps that is exactly what I love about art: that it can be work and play at the same time. Craft and curiosity. Control and freedom. So yes, I am happy that I can call this my work today. But I wouldn't say that I turned my hobby into my profession. I simply made space again for the work that had always been there.

It was already there when no one was looking.