{"id":63690,"date":"2022-03-30T12:19:36","date_gmt":"2022-03-30T12:19:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/?p=63690"},"modified":"2022-03-30T12:19:36","modified_gmt":"2022-03-30T12:19:36","slug":"growing-up-in-the-art-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/blog\/growing-up-in-the-art-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Growing Up in the Art World"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ZAyaSkpsNKM?autoplay=1&#038;mute=1\"><\/iframe>Growing up in the art world is an unusual experience. Many people who become artists have unconventional childhoods: for example, the children of missionaries learn about other cultures in a very direct way.<\/p>\n<p>I was born into the art world. My father is an artist and my mother is a gallery owner. I grew up in a world where everyone talked about art and artists were friends of the family.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>There is a common idea in the art world that an artist&#8217;s childhood art experiences are important to their later work. This article looks at artists who were raised in the art world and draws some conclusions about what this experience does to an artist.<\/p>\n<p>Section 1: The Art World Childhood<\/p>\n<p>Section 2: Kids and the Art World<\/p>\n<p>Section 3: The Art World as Inspiration<\/p>\n<p>Section 4: The Art World as Pressure<\/p>\n<p>Section 5: The Art World as Inspiration II<\/p>\n<p>Section 6: Conclusions<\/p>\n<p>Artists are always talking about how their art is autobiographical, but I think it&#8217;s more than that. I think artists are born into an artistic culture, and this affects them in ways they aren&#8217;t aware of.<\/p>\n<p>I grew up in the art world. My father is a painter and my mother is a writer. They have separate studios at home, but they don&#8217;t have separate lives. They talk to each other while they work. They have friends who are artists. When I was growing up, Columbia University had just started building its new campus on the site of the old John Jay Homestead, where one of my ancestors had been a Dutch dairy farmer three hundred years before. There was an artist colony there where my parents and their friends would go to talk, drink wine and paint on the weekends. The Homestead had been preserved as a museum and artists from all over the city would come on field trips to draw or paint what were now called &#8220;period rooms.&#8221; The place was full of art students drawing the same things my brother and I were drawing with crayons on our bedroom walls.<\/p>\n<p>Sculpture professors would stop my father in midtown to ask him about some detail he&#8217;d gotten right in one of his paintings of trees, or cloud formations<\/p>\n<p>Growing up as an artist can be difficult. It is crucial to respect every member of your art community, no matter how much experience they have or do not have. This is a story about the difficulties that may arise when people think they are better than others, just because they are older or more experienced in the art industry.<\/p>\n<p>The Art World is a great place to work. It is full of interesting people, who have made it their life&#8217;s work to create and practice various forms of art. You can choose from diverse fields of study, from painting to sculpture to writing and storytelling. There is something for everyone.<\/p>\n<p>Some people believe that there is a certain personality type that makes someone a good artist. I do not know if this is true. My experience has been that people from all sorts of backgrounds can be successful in art.<\/p>\n<p>What is it like growing up in a family of artists? This can be isolating for children. There is a lot of pressure to live up to the family&#8217;s artistic tradition and to carry on the family lineage. The children of famous artists get so used to being around adults talking about art, they do not have the opportunity to act their age or be children. It might seem like these kids are set from birth to become artists themselves but this is not always the case. Some children rebel against their parents&#8217; expectations and choose lives outside of the arts.<\/p>\n<p>When parents are both artists, they may not have much time to spend with their children because they are both working hard at their careers. The parent may also be concerned with making enough money to support the family and spend little time with their kids. On the other hand, having parents who are both artists can be very beneficial; many times both parents will encourage the child&#8217;s interest in art and nurture them along as they grow into adulthood.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I grew up in the Art World. I was a child prodigy, and when I was four years old I sold my first painting.<\/p>\n<p>My father is an artist, so naturally I wanted to be one too. He didn&#8217;t force me to become one, but he also didn&#8217;t discourage me either. I ended up studying art and becoming a professional artist. A successful one at that, selling paintings for thousands of dollars and making my living by selling art to people.<\/p>\n<p>Unlike most artists though, I do not paint beautiful landscapes or portraits of people. My art is different from a lot of the other art out there. Most paintings are about trying to capture beauty in a permanent way; mine are about capturing a moment in time that will never come again once it passes you by.<\/p>\n<p>What is my art? They are paintings of animals in frozen moments of time. They seem like simple things, but they require a great deal of skill and knowledge to do correctly.*<\/p>\n<p>I grew up in the art world. My parents, who I am named after, were both artists and my grandparents were artists. I was surrounded by art from a very early age, but never once encouraged to become an artist myself.<\/p>\n<p>Telling someone how much you love art is not in itself very interesting to most people, because loving or not loving something is usually the result of environment and upbringing. Coming from a family of artists, I was exposed to art at an extremely early age and loved it from the start. The appreciation for art I had as a child skipped over the &#8220;I like this&#8221; phase and went straight into &#8220;This is amazing!&#8221; It seemed natural to me that people would want to make things that look like what they see in their head and share it with others.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0I&#8217;m not sure why my parents never pushed me into becoming an artist, perhaps they knew it wasn&#8217;t in my nature. Whatever the reason, I didn&#8217;t start taking art more seriously until I entered college where I majored in Art History. Although historically controversial, I find studying art to be incredibly important because it gives me context and perspective on the work that is being produced today by living artists.<\/p>\n<p>When I moved to New York City after college I started working in Contemporary<iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/-9S0r27ylKc?autoplay=1&#038;mute=1\"><\/iframe><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/dd8B5KFZ8ak?autoplay=1&#038;mute=1\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Growing up in the art world is an unusual experience. Many people who become artists have unconventional childhoods: for example, the children of missionaries learn about other cultures in a very direct way. I was born into the art world. My father is an artist and my mother is a gallery owner. I grew up [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63690"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63690"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63690\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63691,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63690\/revisions\/63691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}