The 4 Types of Artists – Starving, Dying, Dead, and Rich!
by
Shafali The Caricaturist
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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The 4 Types of Artists – Starving, Dying, Dead, and Rich!
Copyright © 2011 – Shafali the Caricaturist
Other Verbal
Caricatures by this Author:
The 5 P’s of the Creative Process
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The 4 Types of Artists – Starving, Dying, Dead, and Rich!
Somewhere in my journey of art, I learned to present my forgetfulness as a trait common in artists. I realized that people suddenly became more forgiving when they realized that I could draw and paint too. Guess they thought to themselves – we’ve got to carry those artist types around – because who knows one of them might turn out to be a Da Vinci, a Van Gogh, or a Picasso!
Personally, I’d want to be Da Vinci or die unknown. (If I sound like I am suffering from megalomania, please put it down to my being an artist.)
But…am I really an artist?
I mean what makes you an artist?
And…if you are an artist what kind of artist are you?!
After researching about three-dozen artists, two-dozen cartoonists, and a dozen or so caricaturists, I came to a conclusion.
Gentlemen and Ladies, hold your breath.
There are 4 basic artist-types and they are:
1. The Starving Struggling Artist
2. The Made-in-Lifetime Artist
3. The Posthumously Great Artist
4. The Richie Rich Artist
Let us look at each of these artist types individually.
I. The Starving Struggling Artist or the SS Artist!
This is the most commonly found species of artists in the world. The Starving Struggling Artist is characterized by his impractical dream of making it big without paying attention to the theory of probability (which he obviously can’t understand, as he’s shied away from Mathematics and Logic all his life.)
I have a question for my left-brained readers. If about 100 artists have made it big from a pool of 500 million (approximately) what is the chance of a random artist making it big? What would your answer be? Come on. Be honest. Tell us. You won’t – will you? Because you are a sensible left-brained person! You know that the artistic types are the emotional sorts. You know that they’d rubbish your math and statistics, and continue to believe in their impractical dream. Obviously then, you’d be wasting your breath for nothing.
Well. The point is that a Starving Struggling artist has a better chance of dying in a road accident, or even drowning in a cup of tea, than he has of becoming famous – but he doesn’t know, nor does he want to know.
In my opinion, this kind of artist is worse-off than the unfortunates who walked the streets of London during the time of Jack the Ripper, and I believe that such artists should be confined to their rooms without paints, brushes, pencils, charcoal – or any other dangerous equipment that could leave a mark on any surface. Such treatment should straighten them out by helping their brains acquire the right orientation, which quite obviously is the left one.
II. The Made-in-his-Lifetime Artist or the ML Artist
This artist is that particular exception, which proves the rule that struggle and starvation results in nothing but pain, agony, and a gradual erosion of the family assets. The Made in his Lifetime artist is one of the following two kinds.
1. He is smart enough to know what’d really catch the fancy of the buyers, or
2. He is lucky enough to display the right thing at the right place at the right time to the right audience.
Note that you seldom come across this kind of artist in real-life. You read about them in the art-history classes, or in the newspapers. But yes, they do exist, and they are the ones who are responsible for the existence of the Starving Struggling Artists all around the world. The poor art-struggler spends half his peanuts (...well, okay – if you don’t like the term, let’s call them his measly wages) on buying paints and the other half on buying stupid books that contain biographies of Made-in-Lifetime artists. Fortunately, you can count the Made-in-Lifetime artists on your fingers, and so the starving struggler has bought all of them by the time he hits forty. After he hits forty, he realizes that he’s got to get a job that would pay for the education of his kids and also for his family’s medical insurance – so he comes to his senses. Unfortunately, by then the damage is already done.
For more on the Made-in-Lifetime artists, you should download “The Practical Definition of Art,” which will be available at Smashwords soon. Until then, open the windows of your mind and try to remember the names of the starving strugglers who transformed into a Made-in-Lifetime artist.
What?
You are drawing a blank? There could be two reasons again.
1. There are not enough Made-in-Lifetime kind of artists or
2. You have the potential of becoming one such artist. (Wondering why? Because if you can indeed draw blanks you must be the avatar of Picasso, who had become an artist in his lifetime!)
III. The Posthumously Great Artist or the PG Artist
You obviously know this kind. The best example of course is Van Gogh. Remember that he was once a Starving Struggling Artist who went crazy and chopped off his own ear. If Both Da Vinci and I were his contemporaries, none of use would’ve allowed Van Gogh’s work in our studios, let alone in our living rooms. But note the accent is on the word contemporaries. Today if I could somehow get a Van Gogh, I’d...oh well...I am at a loss for words. Let me try again. If I had a Van Gogh, I’d become the Richie-Rich kind of artist, with immediate effect.
So poor Van Gogh lived off his brother’s dole all his life, got insulted by everyone including his landlord, did atrocious self-portraits after mutilating his own ear, and then died at a young age – but today’s rich heirs who’ve never starved in their lives, who’ve never had a landlord threatening to throw them out if they didn’t pay the rent – they pay millions to put his paintings in his living room. If I were Van Gogh, I’d come back to haunt each one of those smug owners of my paintings.
But let us not allow the ghost of Van Gogh to divert our attention from our primary concern of glory-after-death and try to formulate a method that could help people like us become posthumously famous.
I believe that for becoming a Posthumously Great Artist you need to be able to pull some strings up there. It’s my belief that most of the Starving Struggling variety of artists have a pure heart and so they end up in heaven – but I also think that even when they are up there, they continue being their non-diplomatic selves lost in their own dreams of making it big in their next life – and so they don’t pull the right strings. Hence they don’t become posthumously famous. The point to note is – if the dead artist has left a family and a couple of good-for-nothings behind, then such posthumous fame can come in handy…otherwise, it’s all wasted effort.
IV. The Richie Rich Artist or the RR Artist
When you are born with either a silver spoon in your mouth or a strong social network through your parental connections or if you’ve married the right person who’s got the right connections, then you are a Richie Rich artist. A Richie Rich artist needs neither talent nor death to become famous. Such people become artists because they’ve got to do something with their time – and there’s really nothing that they “need” to do. If you are a Richie Rich artist, you can teach your dog to pick up the brush and color the canvas – and you’d have a masterpiece selling for a million dollars! Then of course, you can take the limelight away from your dog and bask in it, as you pose in front of the canvas. This of course is a very common way of achieving some degree of fame, which isn’t all that bad.
The richest of the Richie Rich artist possibly was Raja (King) Ravi Verma, who had all the time in the world to paint, all the minions in the mansion to clean his brushes, all the women in his palace to massage his fingers after he had finished painting – and to do him justice, some measure of talent too, which he didn’t really need – because he had everything else that really, truly matters.
The best part of being a Richie Rich artist is that you don’t really have to sell what you create, you can just give it away. Now if you didn’t even have to recover the cost of the canvas and the paint, and if all the “buyer” had to do to get in your good books was lug your creation away – who won’t buy your artistic produce?
Contrast the Richie Rich artist with the Starving Struggling Artist – the SS artist’s got no books that can be called good because he’s scribbled and doodled in all of them, nor will he waive the cost of the paint and the canvas – so why the heck should anyone be buying from him and not from the RR artist?
Beats me.
Now let us try to answer the million-dollar question (ahem!)
Am I an artist?
I don’t fit into any of the above – and so I am not an artist. But the good news is, there’s no law against people calling themselves artists, and there’s no law against blowing your own trumpet (whatever that means) – and so…even though I may not be a starving struggler, an unbelievably lucky person, a dead artist with god on her side, or even a well-connected rich kid – I still have the right to say that I am an artist.
And being what I am, one day I might wake up and exercise that right – just like that…and again put my quirkiness down to my being artist. Now...what’s your excuse?
A NOTE TO THE DEAR READER:
Thanks for downloading and reading this verbal caricature. I hope that you enjoyed reading “4 Types of Artists – Starving, Dying, Dead, and Rich!” If you did perhaps you’d like to visit to my page at Smashwords.com for reading other verbal caricatures by me.
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