Distinguishing Between Art as a Personal Satisfaction and a Profession
I am sure there are a few very lucky artists out there that are paid a good living to produce art that is a true expression of their innermost selves, but most of us are not that fortunate. More often than not, a piece of art is either one or the other. Maybe on a lucky occasion it becomes both, but that isn't usually the case for the average working artist. The main difference between art done for personal satisfaction and art done for professional purposes is that the former is a manifestation of the artist's personal vision created for the sake of self-expression, while the latter is usually a manifestation of someone else's vision as filtered through the artist created primarily to bring in a paycheck.
I, like many working artists, do both types of work. On the one hand, I have my personal artwork, which I suppose is closer to my heart and that I tend to think of as my "real" art. This is because it is the tangible fruit of my own imagination. My personal paintings and writings are entities that I honestly think of as my letters to the rest of the world. They tell my stories, chronicle my experiences, and teach my lessons. Those who know me well have even known me to refer to my personal art pieces, stories, and poems as "my children". I do pull in a paycheck or two for one of these works now and again, but they are created primarily to satisfy my own drive to express myself creatively. Any money they might earn me is merely a bonus.
Then on the other hand, I have my professional work, which I consider to be a completely different animal from the work I do when left to my own devices. It isn't because I don't feel it's done as skillfully, it isn't because I'm not as proud of it, and it isn't because it typically brings in a bigger and more consistent paycheck than my personal art does. It's because it has almost nothing of my own vision and spirit in it. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, of course, but simply an objective observation. My professional work is the result of my using my skill and know-how as a fine artist to help bring someone else's vision to light in a way that maybe they themselves are not able to do, and I honestly feel that it taps into a totally different part of my creativity than my personal art does. This is because it takes a different type of skill and comprehension to be able to take direction from someone else and produce an accurate image of what they are looking for from you than it does to illustrate something from your own imagination.
I think that for an artist to be able to merge the two to the point where "personal art" and "professional art" are nearly one and the same, he or she needs almost to become someone whose persona is its own product in and of itself - a celebrity of sorts. Perhaps then they will have galleries and sponsors throwing the big bucks their way to put their own illustrious vision out there where all can drink it in and benefit from it. However, as sweet a dream as it is, this isn't really the typical circumstance for real world working artists. Most of us tend to create two separate types of art for two very different reasons.
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