Grants to Painters should:
Be income, as for a professional career.
As a grantor, I offer painters income commensurate with their level
of talent, dedication, and the valuable gift they alone can offer to the
world's culture.
Given the current absence of broad support for painting careers,
artists find themselves in a precarious position with life choices.While
painters can find an abundance of academic programs in fine art studio practice,
once graduated few can afford further development as painters.
There is no correlation between talent and wealth at birth. In fact, the
odds for great genius and wealthly birthright coming together in one individual
are remote. Without independent wealth, aspiring artists go into debt to
become professional through academic training programs. Then, unlike graduates
from other qualifying programs, painters find themselves with only a slim
chance at viable careers. In holding to their career path, dedicated artists
must endure relegation to a suspect class of citizen, disrespected and marginalized
for their failure to attain gainful income.
Artists fall victim to vain remedies for their situation. Some get jobs
and paint on the side. But because high art forms require full
focused attention, they will not achieve artistic maturity. Other artists
become dependent upon the caprice and charity of non-wealthy family members.
These artists are forever troubled by looming resentment against their dependency,
jeopardizing both their relationships and careers. Career artists who are
dependent on family members exist as supplicant children, never knowing
the status of normal adult autonomy. Circumstances like these prevent painters
from viewing, with any kind of insider's context, the world they endeavor
to reflect on.
Society agrees that the painter is an integral part of the culture's historical
fabric. Painters today are following a high calling that deserves to be
honored. Society has fallen short in its promise to these artists by offering
expensive college degrees with no follow-up support pathways. The first
thing that needs to be done is to gather up a number of promising painters
(of all ages) and provide them with sufficient support to enable them to
have dedicated, productive and long painting careers. Let these artists
define the conditions that will enable them to excel in their discipline,
and then enable them. From this pool of painters, a few will rise to levels
of expressive genius that will astound us and
make us proud. Seeing gifted painters given the opportunity to fulfill their
sense of destiny will open new avenues of hope for young aspiring artists,
and will redeem with fresh meaning the value and place painting has in a
contemporary world.
Agreed or not?