3. You ever get depressed after a solo exhibition?

You ever get depressed after a solo exhibition?

I'm pretty much done with the transition actually. When I was younger I was semi-professional until I had a similar crisis of faith. I realized that the networking/social aspect of the grind to keep myself fed as an artist was killing me. Instead I love understanding, modeling, describing, finding themes and understanding the why of things.

So after a few years depressed in a dead-end job, still watching the world and learning, some friends encouraged me to try out a summer coding bootcamp(*), and the bootcamp automatically leads into a university program if I did well. I did really well. I quit my job, started living on savings, loans, and the generosity of my family, and went back to school for three years.

Turns out that those skills I love, mentioned above, are good skills for tech. Furthermore, both math and systems analysis is easier to understand when you instinctively visualize it in your head. Problem solving requires the same focus and mental activity in both painting and in programming. And my arts background helped my enthusiasm in image processing classes, which resulted in me becoming decent at teaching computers to "see" using Neural Networks. Now I'm interviewing for a job in that field.

So... Maybe the nuclear option is what I did: start from scratch at a job or go back to school. But you can transition from art to a related field. Friends of mine moved from artists to being art educators or administrators or coordinators of big-budget art. A few moved towards design, some into fabrication, CAD, carpentry, engineering, or similar. More dramatically one moved from selling to real-estate agents to working in their agency.

IDK if my story helps much. I think the big lesson is to always move forward looking for opportunities. Your past is important and you can draw from it, but it's not your future.

---

(* ironically one of the things that led me into tech was my disgust with it. Tech workers are so influential, and keep fucking up the world around them. If you're interested in the forces that shape the world it's hard not to pay attention to tech. So I'd talk about it with my friends in tech, who realized I had a feel/interest for it)

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