Are you struggling to be taken seriously as a professional artist?
In this episode of Art Crush, Canadian art mentor Paula Telizyn and UK artist Fi Marks dive deep into the mindset shifts and professional habits you need to build a sustainable career.
We explore how intentional positioning, self-confidence, and clear communication can transform how the art world perceives you. Stop waiting for validation and start building a business that commands respect.
00:00:00 Speaker 1: Welcome to Art Crush with artist Fi Marks and Paula Telizyn where we talk about art, being an artist, existing in the art world, feminism, creativity and more.
00:00:24 Speaker 1: So today we wanted to talk about a couple of topics, that we’ve sort of chatted about in the background. because it affects it affects us as artists. It affects a lot of artists, not just women as artists or women of a certain age as artists, but artists in general. And so what the topic is, is how do we get people to take us seriously as artists? And then the secondary topic is how do we get people to take us seriously as women and women who are artists? So let’s start with the artists in general topic, because, I think that that will lead us really nicely into the deeper topic, the nuanced topics.
00:01:02 Speaker 3: this topic is quite an interesting one because until we started exploring it, I, I hadn’t actually thought about it. I didn’t realize that I felt that people didn’t take me seriously. And, you know, I wonder why that is, which I think does tie in to the women thing as well as the art thing. and I’d had a conversation with a friend of mine, and we were talking about our university days. And when we looked back, bearing in mind this was in the nineteen eighties, when we looked back, we didn’t feel that any of the girls were taken or women were taken seriously. the people that we always thought were going to get the good grades and be praised or whatever were the boys. And that was a follow on from my experience in school as well. So I think it’s almost it goes back to that societal view of we men get taken more seriously than women. And one way as an artist, you’ve you combat that is making yourself very colorful, very like nice, very whoop dee doo. And so by creating this artistic or creative persona, you end up still not being taken seriously.
00:02:46 Speaker 1: I think playing further on that we go into being professional artists with that almost instinctive understanding. If you’re not fully aware of it, there is a resistance almost to calling oneself an artist as you start heading down that path. I went through it myself, and I know that I’ve talked to so many artists who are like, I don’t know if I can call myself an artist, or I should call myself an artist for that very reason that that artists are not necessarily taken seriously. And so you either embrace it and show up or you try to, you know, be a little bit embarrassed about it.
00:03:23 Speaker 4: So and I think, I.
00:03:25 Speaker 3: Think that might be as well. Going back to I know we discussed last week, I think it was about fine art. Um, and I think that people often feel more comfortable describing themselves as illustrators or designers not using the A word. And that is weird. in fact, it hit me when I was watching Landscape Artist of the year this week that the way they describe the artist in that competition is very bizarre. And I don’t know who decides, but one of them was described as an illustrator and I was like, but that is an artist. Illustrators are artists in my opinion anyway, but it was almost like they felt that it was more acceptable, or whoever felt it was more acceptable to be described as an illustrator, someone who is trained, working in the art industry, and yet they couldn’t call themselves an artist.
00:04:34 Speaker 1: Yeah, I worked with an artist like that who took a full year to switch over from calling herself an illustrator to an artist. and when she did finally accept it, her art obviously expanded because as an illustrator, you’re sort of mentally pigeonholed into a certain style of art, a certain way of doing descriptive works and all that visually. but I think that there’s this, this underlying. I’m trying to think of the word because discrimination isn’t the right word. But attitude, I think probably is towards visual artists that we don’t have towards actors and towards musicians. Even though they are a part of the arts themselves, visual artists seem to have this, this real campaign against them. I remember growing up and, uh, and I was told because my mother liked to declare who each of me and my siblings would be when we grew up. Um, I would be the artist because I was too stupid to do anything else. Like that attitude in a family that had artists in it. It wasn’t her family that was the artist. It was the, um, my dad’s side of the family. But in a family that had artists, that’s what she told me. That’s what stuck. And I really resisted calling myself an artist because it was like, okay, I guess I’m accepting this mantle of stupidity. and even when I was switching over, when I had my, uh, my midlife crisis that didn’t net me a muscle car or a motorcycle, which, like, I’m bitter about, um. Even when I, when I had that, that point where I was like, yes, actually, this is what I was supposed to be doing all along, and I’d gone along the path of being a computer programmer and everything else. Calling myself an artist felt like I was accepting that I wasn’t going to be part of mainstream society in a way that was kind of equivalent to somebody who chose, um, I don’t know, to eat dog food all the time instead of normal groceries or whatever, like, like being a weirdo. And it was really challenging. And it was reinforced not only by like little attitudes and stuff I’d seen. I also internalized that and applied them to myself. But when I was living in the village I was living in, the attitude when I went out to try to secure a studio space, a commercial space, even through the municipal, government there, where they had spaces available for residents at reasonable rates, they could run their businesses and create more, more, um, jobs in the economy in this little village. They didn’t want to rent space to me as an artist. And even when they put out a call for somebody to do a mural in the hockey rink, they didn’t want to pay me. They were really angry that I wanted to charge what they had budgeted for the mural. And so I didn’t get it because I dared to want to be paid for skilled work. And the person I’m sure she’s retired or hopefully, you know, not on this earth anymore, um, had such a terrible, terrible attitude that it just sort of stuck me aback. Like, why are you treating me like I dare to take a skill and make money from it and maybe, add to the community the, shorter version is that I ended up with a space that was very much contentious and ended up having to break my lease and leave and move out of the community, because the attitude towards artists there in a hockey loving community of inbred rednecks was, was really negative.
00:07:52 Speaker 3: but I think we don’t know I mean it’s, it’s always difficult to know how much our freedom of choice goes because we are entrenched in what societal norms are put upon us. And again, it’s like in schools and in schools today, you know, young people are often not allowed to pick more than one art subject because it’s seen unless you’re not very academic, and then you’re allowed to, which makes no sense whatsoever. And I know that that still prevails, because that’s what happened to me. But then I still bring it up when I’m working in secondary schools and see if people are allowed to take more than one subject and all that and, and what degree you take And you know, if you do an arts degree, it’s not deemed academic. Absolutely crazy. You know, you still have to write a thesis. You still have to have an argument. You still have to write essays. But no, again, all that through that time. And I remember almost like feeling like I’d caved when I went to do my postgraduate certificate in education. I felt worn down by pressures everywhere telling me that I couldn’t and I the fight eventually went out of me. hopefully that isn’t as it is today, but I very much doubt it. I think when people look at artists, that’s why people don’t think that they can be successful. Because we’re told constantly. You can’t make a living by being a professional artist. You can only do it as a sideline. What? I can’t think of one other profession. And please correct me if I’m wrong. Where people are told that incessantly, that what their chosen professionalism is is not going to be good enough and you’re not going to make money to live on.
00:10:12 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. The other one was music. So my family, arts and music, I was told, don’t plan on being a musician growing up because growing up I played the piano and violin. Um, lived in a household where, everybody picked up an instrument. And I was told that there’s no way if you’re going to be a musician, you’ll end up being a piano teacher or you’ll end up doing whatever. I mean, again, this is in the eighties, seventies and eighties. there was no internet. Even in the nineties. The internet was dial up. There was no people making, you know, their living doing music online. But now, of course, that’s people can make a living. But that was it, right. If you’re going to be in in the arts, good luck. A lot of that though is we get the, the supports, not even just removed but completely erased. So you can go to art school, I have a billion degrees and diplomas and everything else. You can go to art school and you’ll maybe at best get one or two classes, maybe a week of instruction on how to get clients or how to have a contract, or what you need to be aware of. You get three or four years of here’s how to do perspective. Here’s tonal values. Here’s use gouache. Gouache paints until you cannot stand gouache. It’s been thirty years. I have not touched gouache since um. And and you don’t get anything about. Okay, how do I negotiate with clients? How do I determine my prices? What is the margin.
00:11:35 Speaker 3: You were lucky to get. You were lucky to get two or three lessons doing a drama degree. I got none, absolutely zero, about becoming getting a job in the theatre or television or anything like that. We got nothing. Absolutely nothing. And I know I do have friends who had art degrees and they got absolutely nothing. So the fact that you got something was better because almost like the people running the course didn’t believe you could make a living.
00:12:12 Speaker 1: Right? And whether they did so intentionally or not, they set artists up to fail because even the training we got was inappropriate. It was for somebody who had been in the field for twenty years, and we only got it because one of our instructors had went, you guys don’t even know about contracts, but he gave us such ridiculous, terms that anytime I got a client, the contract was so ridiculous that the client walked away. it was a setup for for failure from the get go. And even when my kids went through the art high school here, which produces or used to produce amazing artists, and a lot of them went out and started going, showing in galleries and everything straight away. In the past they were told, go get another a job, a day job, you’ll never make a living, but you can do it for fun even if you’re amazing. Like, right, these teenagers getting this information and I knew it because my kids were telling me this.
00:13:01 Speaker 3: I think, Paula, that we need to now turn this on their head because I think probably every body who is listening to this podcast will be nodding their head, going, yeah, that’s me too, me too, me too. So how do you think that we turn that around and that belief around and get people to take us seriously as artists, as a mentor, how would you advise your clients to do that. We’re bearing in mind that a lot of them are worn down and have done other jobs, and whatever that must be. As a mentor, one of your biggest challenges?
00:13:45 Speaker 1: It is, but it’s also with the right people. It’s one of the greatest successes, and it is about being aware that art is a service. And when you have an art business, it is a business capital B not, you know, cowering small. B you are providing a service that makes a difference to your client’s life. You need to show up as a business, not as I’m an artist playing. And I’m hoping somebody might buy some of my pieces. And here’s something on a sketchbook piece of paper I’m going to put on Facebook Marketplace. I don’t know what it is right now, but the number of artists I’m now seeing on Facebook Marketplace is sickening. There’s no place for selling art on marketplace. That’s that’s that garage.
00:14:24 Speaker 3: Sale and vintage vintage vintage set. I’ve seen original art Marked for like ten pounds, twenty pounds, thirty pounds on Vinted. It’s like this is not the place.
00:14:38 Speaker 1: If you are selling your own art, so you’re not getting rid of stuff that you have in your house, you’re selling your own art. It should not be going on the equivalent of a car boot sale, or garage sale, or or charity shop type of thing, because you’re immediately positioning yourself as not worth it. So one of the key things is to be aware of how your potential collectors or, your audience, your visitors, see you. That means cleaning things up. It means being very aware of how your website looks. It means being very aware of how you’re presenting your art, how you’re talking about your art, so your art doesn’t speak for itself. I’ve said this a number of times, but of course, with this podcast, we’re getting in front of a new audience. Your art does not speak for itself. You have to give it context. You have to guide people into the story, how they react to it. It’s none of your business. Who cares? They’re a journey with your art. It can be their own, but you can start that journey with context. So if you are obsessed with painting, trees or whatever, you don’t just go, here’s a tree, you go, you, you write the story about. Okay, actually, one day I was feeling exhausted and sick of the world, and I started walking through the local park. I saw this amazing tree and I gave it a hug. And that hug made me feel connected to the earth. And I came back and painted that love and connection through this piece. When you present your art professionally, you are doing that guidance for people. You are also stating the dimensions and the details of the work as well and how to purchase it. So. So when you are trying to present your art professionally and position yourself as a legitimate, safe to buy from business. You are changing the story around artists, and the more artists that are aware of how they should show up. and I’m not talking about, okay, we must, you know, fit in with the guys who do table legs and whatever, but how we should show up in order to make lay people feel like we are legitimate, that it’s safe to buy from us, that we are. We are running a business that speaks to them. The more, the faster we will change the narrative around it. It is not going to take other people talking about this, although it does help. It is going to take us artists educating through our actions in doing that.
00:16:47 Speaker 3: And I think, you know, for people who are sitting there going, oh God, oh God, I can’t do that. This is where we go back to the mindset. This is where it is vital as a small business owner or as a professional artist to work on your self-confidence and belief in your work. Almost like if you haven’t got that, you can’t then show up and show and share your work. You have to know your work and how important it is and how you feel about yourself. We’ve talked about coming over as a bit apologetic. Pricing comes into it as well. If you’re pricing your art too low, then you are saying that you have no confidence in your work. You don’t believe it has the intrinsic value that it should have. So everything all ties in and, if you are sitting there and you are starting out an art business, that is where you need to start. I mean, and people like Paula can help with that, but it really is Being confident about your art, but also what it says. And that was like a real light bulb moment, wasn’t it, for me, Paula, when I said, I don’t understand. I don’t understand why I’ve always been quite confident about my art. And it’s like, because it’s not the art, it’s not about the skill set. It’s about the the conversation. It’s about the communication. It’s about what it’s saying. The message is what I’m confident about. And I think people, you know, oh, people are going to think it’s not good enough. And but if you’ve worked on what you want to say, therefore your confidence will start to grow.
00:18:41 Speaker 1: When I start with artists and working with artists, I do a lot of the things I wish I had been taught when I was starting up my art business. Seriously. Like I’d been sort of puttering around and trying this and that and whatever. But until I had that mid-life crisis, I hadn’t taken myself as seriously as an artist. And so the things that I wish I had, the tools I wish I had, is what I do with artists I work with now. So the number one thing is to make sure they have a body of work. So I’m on Reddit, I’m looking at all the art, Reddit posts and everything else because Reddit is now my new Twitter apparently. good Twitter, not bad. Twitter. and I see the artists who are just starting out and they have one or two pieces and like, is this good enough to sell? Well? Eh, no it’s not. And B, you don’t have a body of work, you don’t have a body of work, you don’t have a series that shows you working in one style, and one theme, one sort of idea that you’re expressing across pieces. So that’s really important. But the next thing to understand is you need to understand who your ideal collector is. Again, they don’t teach us in art school. They do teach us if you’re doing business work right. Ideal customer avatar ICA is the thing in business because it’s not anybody with a wallet or anybody with walls that can have your 2D art, or anybody with a plinth that can hold your sculpture. It is a specific person and everyone. I run this through this exercise in the in the beginning goes, oh my God, I won’t have customers. Everyone feels that fear of if I eliminate anybody that I’m turning away potential business. But not everyone is your customer, right? Not everyone is for you. If you. If you, um. I don’t know, grow peaches, for example, I use peaches a lot as an example. In in. When I’m talking to artists, you can grow peaches. They’re perfect, they’re wonderful. They’re golden. People cry over them. They’re fantastic and you can take them to market. They’re going to be people who do not like fruit, do not like peaches, do not like things that are fuzzy or are madly allergic to them. That doesn’t mean that you go and find those people and convince them that the peach is the right thing for them, because you have to change their mind. So when you have an ICA, an ideal collector avatar, so a person that you think is going to be most likely to buy your art, you can focus on the people you don’t have to change their minds of. So if I had amazing peaches, I would go to a fruit festival, if that’s a thing. I would go to vegan land. I would go to, I don’t know, um, restaurants that serve raw food or make amazing desserts and sell them my peaches. I would go where the yeses are the most likely. And if somebody on the side where I thought was a no says, hey, actually I am hyper fixating on fuzzy fruits this month, I wouldn’t say, okay, well, you’re not my ICA. I’m not selling to you. I’d go, yay! Have some, right? But I would be focusing on the yeses. The people I don’t have to convince most likely don’t have to convince first. And we can break this down because it sounds scary, but let’s let’s break this down. So we have eight billion people in the world, and we actually know that number is wrong because not everybody’s been counted. So it’s probably more like nine and a half or ten. But anyway we have eight billion people in the world. If half of those people are adults, that’s four billion people. And half of those people are, adults who like fruit. That’s two billion people, and half of those people are in a region where they have access to peaches. That’s one billion people, and half of those people have the money and desire to buy peaches. That’s, five hundred million potential peach buyers. That’s a lot of people. Even though we have narrowed it down to a tiny, tiny number. So when I work with artists who, want to be taken seriously and want to be positioned appropriately as legitimate businesses with, art for sale, that is worth the price you’re commanding for it, because you present yourself professionally on a professional website with, you know, professional, designed banners and everything else on your social media, and you show up regularly and all that. And I say niche down and pick the people are most likely to say yes, and you panic. How are you going to serve five hundred thousand people with your art or your peaches? So, so Understanding that being super focused when you are marketing, when you’re trying to find buyers, doesn’t mean you’re going to end up with, oh, there’s ten people in the sea. It means that there’s still quite a lot of people who are potential buyers. I’m just being super clear in my messaging. So in order to show up confidently as an artist, you want to speak to the people who are going to say yes. You want to show up with your fantastic business assets, your website and all that, and you want to show up confidently because they’re your people. And you don’t have to worry about, oh, what if somebody doesn’t like me? Somebody won’t like you. That’s just a fact.
00:23:33 Speaker 3: And I did the same thing, when you’re starting out your art business, it’s usually because people in your family, people, friends, either you have sold work to them or you’ve given your work away and that you think, ah, there’s a demand. But that little pool of people is very, very small. And I remember very early on I had a friend who kept saying to me when I made a sale, when I sold a piece of artwork, they’d say, is it somebody you know? Or is it an unknown? Because they put somebody who wasn’t in my world already and was buying as a higher status buyer, which is quite right in a way, because that’s where, you know, when you think, oh, I don’t want to be putting my art on my social media because, I’m going to upset all my friends and family who are thinking like, what? What are they doing? It’s because they’re not your clients. Yes, they might have bought something or that, but that that is all going to dry up very, very, very quickly. and once you’ve got your business going, it’s actually getting those unknowns to buy it that they only know you as a A professional. Not as their auntie, not as their cousin, not as anybody else.
00:24:57 Speaker 1: getting outside of your pond is critical, but how you show up outside that pond is also critical as well. We talk a lot about, um, collaborations because one of the ways I grew my own art business was doing a strategic collaboration with another business, and I didn’t approach them going, please, can you show my art? And I’ll make some art for you for free, which is what a lot of artists get from charities and organizations that are doing fundraising, that exposure, um, never, ever nets clients. It it just demeans the value of art. So when you show up strategically with a company, that or a business or a person that maybe has a bigger audience, you show up again professionally saying, actually, what I offer you will improve your business or your event or your whatever. I need you to do something for me in return and negotiate that. And in doing so, that’s again continues to change minds of people who assume that artists are fluffy, paste eating silly heads instead of professional businesses. How we show up and how we negotiate and and how we present ourselves, affects the general perception of other artists. One drop at a time. But the ocean is made of drops, if we consider that everything we do improves somebody’s view about art and artists so that they actually treat artists as legitimate business people, then that will spread. And each of us can do that.
00:26:30 Speaker 3: And also it’s like, if you don’t, you’re making it harder for those there because there are people. Oh, well, you know, and we’ve talked about, you know, we’re a bit because they’re lacking their confidence. They haven’t worked on their mindset. They’re just like, well, I don’t need to sell my work. I, you know, I can sell it for ten pounds or whatever. But when you’re doing that, you’re not just damaging your art business, you’re damaging people’s perspective for all art. And I think the way as artists, we can support each other is the more people that are professional, the more that myth about, well, you’re not going to make money if you decide to be an artist will disappear. We have to band together and just, picking up on your one drop at a time. It’s not just one person. It is all of us. We all have a responsibility to raise the profile of art and art business. It’s not just, oh, that’s okay for some people, but I don’t want to do that. I think that’s quite key.
00:27:41 Speaker 1: Yeah. And I think it’s it’s a stage a lot of artists go through. And some of them never leave it. but some of them, like I’m thinking back to my journey, and I started out initially when I was testing out, how commissions worked in order for me to sort of figure out what contracts worked and all that, I put out commissions that just are requests for commissions that just covered the costs of my materials and nothing else. In an effort to sort of do that learning. And then I immediately quadrupled the pricing so I could actually make a profit once I’d figured out what works and what doesn’t, how to communicate with people. But we end up, trying to walk this path that maybe is a little bit different. Well, I think art shouldn’t be ten thousand dollars a painting. So I’m going to do the fifty dollars paintings and, you know, show them. and so a lot of artists get stuck in that place of they think they’re showing them, but they also think secretly, maybe they’re not good enough to do the ten thousand dollars paintings. And and so we have to sort of get through that part, either through education or just speed running through it, so that we can actually get to the part where you’re paid for your marketing, your studio space, your materials, your time and effort outside of making art. When I talk to artists who are actually making a full time income on their art, like a significant income, they spend maybe thirty percent of their time actually creating art. The other percentage is spent doing all the stuff you need to do in a business, and any other business would be like, that’s just the fact of business. So if you make light switches, yes, you’re going to spend thirty percent of your time making light switches, but you’ve got to spend the other seventy percent marketing them, doing your inventory, going to light switch conventions and just really connecting with, with light switch, uh, enthusiasts and light switch buyers and all that, that’s considered normal. But with artists, they’re going, well. I want to spend all my time in the studio. You can’t, you can’t. You have to. If you want to make a difference in your business, you have to show up and sell your work or you are going to end up starving. I cannot stand somebody calling themselves a starving artist. I can’t stand when, people run classes and go like the myth of the starving artist, or don’t be a starving artist. Whatever. I can’t stand it because it perpetuates that idea that artists are starving, and people who don’t go farther than their little circle don’t see the artists who are doing well because they’re not the artists in Facebook groups going by my art. Is this okay? They’re not the artists who are showing up in Reddit going, is this art? Can I can I upset the art world with this? No, fucking go out and sell it. Go out and show up and skip all this upset.
00:30:11 Speaker 3: The art world. You know, this is the thing again. It’s to be taken seriously is not following other people’s path. It’s about being clear what your path is, what you want, and then you will be successful. It’s not about going well. Let’s have a look. How did they do it? Oh, I’m going to do the same. Everybody’s journey is different. And work on your self-confidence. Work on your as well as your art and your, um, marketing and your business. I mean, I when I started up my art business eight years ago, I had no idea I’d been working in education. I had no idea how you went about, um, running a business. I, I wasn’t a skill set that I had developed, but I knew as an educator that I had to learn. If I wanted to be successful, I would have to learn just as I would. People learn to ride a bike or learn to bake a cake. You have to learn. You have to learn. You keep learning and it’s not an option. And I say there are some weird things in the art world that people think are optional. They think it’s okay to say, I don’t do social media, or I don’t do marketing, or I’m not very good at marketing. It’s not. It’s not an option. And why are we? And going back to what I’ve just previously said, why are we making that acceptable? If you hear somebody saying that, say, oh, okay, so you do art as a hobby, that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. But you can’t call yourself, you know, that you have an art business if you’re not prepared to do the business side of it.
00:32:10 Speaker 1: Yeah. it always comes down to mindset. How much do you want this? How do you feel about yourself as a person and as an artist? And how do you feel about learning things? Curiosity comes into it. So maybe you don’t know how to do marketing. Nobody’s a born marketer. They are kind of because, you know, if you’ve if you’ve been around little kids a lot, or if you’ve had children of your own or if you’re in that environment, you know, kids are negotiating constantly, like five more minutes before I can have to go to bed, or can I stay outside for a little longer, or can I eat my dessert first? They’re constantly marketing themselves as sweet and innocent and lovely and whatever when they’re trying to get their own damn way. So we kind of are born marketers, but, um, you know.
00:32:52 Speaker 3: I still get that with my twenty one year old. So, no, it’s those little kids, right?
00:32:58 Speaker 1: This is this is true. But the point is that if you don’t know how to do something, you can learn. So what you have to tell yourself is I don’t know how to do it yet. I don’t know how to do it yet, but I can learn and that yet is important. And that, but is important because otherwise we just remove our responsibility from learning. I can’t make websites full stop. Well that’s bullshit. I couldn’t make websites when I first started because nobody could make websites. That was like a long, long time ago. and so we all just sort of learned. We figured it out. We, we, you know, did whatever. I don’t have a degree in programming, which is shocking. And I spent the massive portion of my years of my career as a programmer. It’s not working. Yeah, yeah, but it is.
00:33:46 Speaker 3: It’s not just about what you learnt at school, what you learned, in that education system, you are learning and choosing to learn about things all the time. And for those people who are listening to the podcast, you’re listening to us today because You want to learn and you want. But not just that. You want to hear an alternative view and you know somebody who’s actually dispelling the myths. So thank you. You guys are on the on the bandwagon. You agree to a certain extent that things need to change in order for artists to become more successful.
00:34:29 Speaker 1: Yeah, things do need to change for sure, but it starts with us. So how we show up, how we present our art that we take ourselves seriously, that we’re not apologetic in our marketing. so photos of ourselves at art shows, how we write about our art, how we show our art on our websites, how we photograph our art, all of that. We’re not apologetic about it, and we expect to be treated as a legitimate business that provides a service. Having that expectation and not asking permission requires some practice, but it starts with you deciding that your art business is legitimate, that your art is a skilled, technical, trade or technical, whatever that you want to call it. I mean, trade is a is a fairly good descriptor. It’s a skilled it’s a skilled skill. That’s really brilliant, Paula. It requires skills and learned skills whether you are self-taught or go to school for it. Uh, that you continuously have to hone, that should immediately garner respect. But if you don’t respect yourself because you’ve taken in just the same way that people can internalize misogyny and internalize, um, anything else, xenophobia or racism, we can internalize a disdain for the arts because it’s constantly taught to us. So I’m going to wrap this episode up. We’re going to come back and talk about the nuanced, things around it. But this is really a timely episode because specifically, I live in Ontario, Canada, and we are having our post-secondary system gutted by a a conservative premier who has decided that if you want an education and yes, it’s going to cost more now suddenly as of September, unless of course, enough people protest. Just he he literally came on camera and said, don’t waste your money doing basket weaving courses. Get up out there and do things that actually are worth it, like Stem programs, nurses and tradespeople and whatever. He said this, which immediately causes problems because if you have a community without the humanities, Stem without humanities means that there’s no ethics, there’s no people considering stuff, science without artistic interpretations and renderings to help the public understand is science that is has lost its soul. We all have to work together. The arts are really, really important. So. So if you’re taking the rhetoric wherever you are, because the rise of conservativism and anti arts is, is a huge thing and very, um, very much a thing today. Pay attention to this and what you’re taking in and understand that this is obviously an incorrect assumption around the arts. So when you want to be taken seriously as an artist, you have to step up and demand that place, not ask for it. We’re not asking for permission. We are saying this is what we do. This is how it is a service to you, or a service to the general public, or a service to your business. And take me seriously. I’m not going to accept anything less. And that’s, I think, really important. So is there anything else you want to add before we end this particular episode?
00:37:37 Speaker 3: Um, no, I think you sum that up very nicely, Paula. But yes, I think we got in quite deep today, and we started off by asking the question, how do we get people to take us seriously as women and as artists? And it is a huge, huge subject that we will definitely be revisiting.
00:38:03 Speaker 1: Yeah, especially the angle about being taken seriously as women, who happen to be artists. So that I think will come up in a future episode or maybe the next one. So we want to thank our listeners for listening. We’ve been watching our numbers go up. We really appreciate your time and attention. If you want to check out fees website, you can see how she presents herself professionally. It’s at fee Art UK and you’re welcome to also check out my website where I’m not actively selling art currently, but I am presenting myself as an artist and a writer, and that’s at Paula Comm. The URLs will be in the show description, so you can just click and go depending on the platform you’re at. And of course, listen to our podcast on Spotify, YouTube, audible, Amazon, Apple Podcasts and wherever your favorite podcasts live, subscribe, like and share so that more artists can be inspired, have discussions, and hopefully start taking themselves seriously too. We’ll see you in the next episode.
