We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Rick Wright a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Rick thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Have you been able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen? Was it like that from day one? If not, what were some of the major steps and milestones and do you think you could have sped up the process somehow knowing what you know now?

I feel pretty fortunate to say I am able to earn a full-time time living from my creative work today. It’s certainly not something that happened overnight. It took years, really, and it has become an aggregate of a lot of gained experiences.

I was pretty clueless right out of art school. I graduated with a BFA in illustration way back in the mid-nineties and had a naive misconception that I would somehow get a 9-5 job right out of college. Someone was supposed to just pay me to make art for 40 hours a week. I had no clue what a freelance illustration career would entail and found myself desiring a path with a little more certainty or stability. I eventually went to graduate school to become an art educator and taught in public and private schools for several years afterward. Though it was a path that utilized some my creative skills and helped me develop a great deal of instructional experience, it did put my own artistic production on the back burner.

With the limited time I did have for my personal creative pursuits, I slowly began working on a body of work I felt had a direction and worthiness of exhibition. In hindsight, I wish I would have had more faith in my abilities to have made that move much earlier. In the back of my mind, like so many artists, I’ve always had a fear of rejection and a case of imposter syndrome…where I am somehow fooling people to think my work is better than it truly is. I’ve never been a big risk taker either, so my journey evolved more slowly than anticipated.

I stepped away from teaching. My love for figurative drawing and painting began to re-emerge from my past and fueled my desire to create a direction in my work. I began taking advantage of smaller opportunities for exhibition locally, then branched out into participating in more regional art fairs, and occasional gallery showings. I still had to string together odd jobs for a while, but I learned a lot by being around other practicing artists in terms of both craft and the business of being an artist. It was also apparent that the more I put my work out there, the more momentum it gathered. In fact, the very first juried art festival I attended more than a decade ago, invited me to be a featured artists for this year’s event. So many future opportunities for artists are the result of prior investments. The work you do years before will come back around and benefit you. It’s an investment.

I identify largely with my figurative studio work. It’s still the lion’s share of what I like to do, but I’ve been dabbling in a number of other painting worlds in the last several years. Plein air festivals have become a bit of a side hustle, along with the occasional mural, and a handful of corporate live painting events. They all kind of add up to become additional revenue streams in this life as a creative. I also have a day job as art director for a non-profit agency where I have the privilege of guiding youth in a wide variety of projects from mural commissions to one-of-a-kind fabricated park benches. I’ve come to the realization that being a full time artist doesn’t mean you just have one job and you make your art and that’s it. It’s a balancing act of a bunch of spinning plates with varying degrees of difficulty and reward. It’s okay to break a few along the way as long as you keep throwing up new ones and keep things moving.

Rick, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m a visual artist, primarily a painter. I’ve always had an affinity for using my hands to create. From Tinkertoys, to Lincoln Logs, and Lego, I learned how to put things together from an early age. I also think that same kind of spatial thinking translated two dimensionally for me as I became an avid drawer. Unlike a lot of my friends growing up, I never really had to find the thing I wanted to do. I’d already been doing it since I was a kid. I just needed to refine my trajectory. Little did I know that refining one’s trajectory is an artist’s entire career.

I’m amazed by the human body and what it’s capable of expressing. Since my first figure drawing class in college, I’ve always been intrigued by capturing the essence of its form. I can still recall how those endless number of gesture drawings in charcoal had a life that no heavily refined painting could ever retain. That has become my challenge as a painter now. Terpsichore, in Greek mythology, was one the nine Muses of the arts. Her traditional domain of dance and song, along with more contemporary cirque nouveau and burlesque performers have influenced my most recent figurative explorations. Dancers, contortionists, aerialists, and musicians who use their bodies as vehicles for their own art are fascinating to me. The problems I attempt to solve with these subjects often involve the grace, strength, dynamism of the human form, and gravity through aggressive brushwork and expressive color.

I’m pretty proud that I’ve found a way to make a living from a practice I enjoyed as a child. Maybe I didn’t end up being an astronaut or a professional baseball player like I also desired, but I feel pretty rewarded to be on this journey after this many decades of life. I also feel like my work continues to mature with age. As happy as I am with my current body of paintings, I continue to think that my best work is yet to come.

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

I wish that I was more prepared for the business of being an artist once I graduated college. I feel like I developed a solid skill set with a wide variety of media, learned to think like an artist, and churned out a bunch of work, but never really learned the practical skills required to leverage my art into a business practice. I was the first in my family to ever finish college, so I kind of lacked anyone with a shared experience there, and other college friends were looking for more traditional routes of employment. I knew nothing about how to gain exposure with my work through galleries, juried festivals, or otherwise. Then there were things like grant opportunities, residencies, taxes, and artists statements. This was well before social media and the internet made everything so accessible, so things were much more analog. Connections weren’t easy and I was largely on my own to figure it all out.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

I had a roommate in college who was a biology major. At the end of the semester he was preparing for finals, and I was reworking a number of pieces for a portfolio review. He kind of laughed at what I was doing and made some comment about only having to finger paint in order to pass an art class. He was joking, of course, but I knew there was a pretty drastic difference between his understanding of the creative work process and my lived experience. I think that misconception still holds true for most professional creatives today. The general public is typically only responsive to the end products we create and has little understanding of the process that brought it to fruition. A true collector who invests in an artists work will likely seek to understand their process better, but the casual passer by may make unreasonable assumptions about how easy a process is or how quickly something should be completed. I think in order to make a living as a creative, there is a fair amount of educating the public about what we do and how we do it…which is no small task.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.rickwrightart.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/rickwrightfineart
• Facebook: Facebook.com/rickwrightfineart.com
• Twitter: twitter.com/rickwrightart