September 29, 2008

Times Art School: Leading artists reveal how they got started
ll this week, the Times Art School will tell you all you need to know to make it in the art world, from creating to collecting. Today, top artists tell Louise Cohen how they fulfilled their ambitions

Grayson Perry, Turner prizewinner 2003

I drew boy stuff when I was a kid - I had notebooks full of plans for my imaginary world, maps and designs for aeroplanes and cars and houses. I think that making work is very much connected to how you are as a child. I didn't see art as a career when I was young, I just liked doing it, and I think that was the key to everything. I wanted to make art first, and be an artist second. Even when I left art school I didn't know anybody who had sold a painting, and I didn't make a living from it for another 15 years or so. I just enjoyed making it.

After art school I just came to London and stayed in a squat, then I put a few slides together and walked round a few little galleries that I found in Time Out, and luckily I actually did get a show out of that. But I didn't get any where, really. I sold work, but never enough to make a living.

Until I was about 30 I had this back-up plan to go into advertising. For each exhibition I had I would set myself a target of how much I would sell, and I'd always make that amount and about £1. So I kept going - even when things blew up in the kiln! I did odd jobs, and my partner supported me, and in 2000, stuff took off. I was in the British Art show and Charles Saatchi bought a large amount of my work. I had stuck to my guns, and I think the art world had come round to accepting me.



Today I still make my own work - I'm in the studio four days a week. I find that the social life is a big plus of being an artist in London too - I'm not one of these people who hangs out in bohemian parts of Hoxton or anything, but I've built up a lot friends in the art world over the years, and I go to a lot of parties and openings. Exhibition openings are convenient occasions -arly evening so no horrible noisy music, free drinks usually, and the lights are on so you can admire each other's outfits.

Grayson's tip Hone your personal skills. You can have all the technique and all the originality in the world, but if you're not much fun to be around, nobody will want to work with you. Go to openings if you can, and meet people.

Sue Webster, mixed-media artist, collaborates with her husband Tim Noble

I never knew I wanted to be an artist - it was just a sort of burden that I was born with. I always wondered, “When will this thing, this disease, go away?” I dressed differently from all my friends, and spent my teens wondering why I wasn't like everyone else.My dad was always telling me to grow up and get a proper job. I went I enjoyed art at school, but there was no art world at this point. Once we did one of those career programmes on the computer, and it told me I should be a cobbler. It was a teacher who took me to one side and said: “Have you ever thought about going to college?” I hadn't.

I went to college, and I met a lot of phonies - people were always in the library, getting inspiration from books, which I found weird, because my inspiration was always in my head. But I met other people who were like me, too.

When I met Tim [Noble] and we started collaborating, we were always asking ourselves what we were doing, is it any good? That is how I learnt to make good work - by questioning everything all the time. We lived with this doubt and discomfort, and it gave our work an edge.

Tim nearly died when we did our first piece. We were filming him with is head in a tank of water, trying to make him look like the ornament in a fish bowl, and then his tube got clogged and he almost drowned - he went blue. Sometimes you don't research things properly when you're young and stupid.

Our break came just after the last recession. We did a show in a cheap space on Rivington Street, and Saatchi bought two out of three of the works. Things went on from there, but we've never stopped contemplating the same questions. Am I any good? There are so many opportunities now that I wonder if that doubt is lacking among many younger artists.

Sue's tip Retain some doubt and discomfort. Always be asking: “Is this good? Will this be successful?”

Michael Landy, mixed media artist

I didn't get in the first time I applied to Goldsmiths. Michael Craig-Martin was on the board and they said no because I was rambling. On my foundation course I had started doing textiles because, coming from a working-class background, I suppose I thought I could get a job out of it. I didn't really like fabric, but I couldn't quite get to grips with what fine art was because it's not a secure job.

A year later, I think I had come round to it. I realised that I liked working with patterns, but that I was interested in making things out of found objects and materials. I went back to Goldsmiths and I got Michael again. This time they thought I made more sense in my interview, so they took me on.

Goldsmiths ethos was that you could do more or less do whatever you wanted - we did a lot of drinking, and eventually worked out how to break into the pool table without paying.

When I graduated, Craig-Martin recommended me to Karsten Schubert gallery and it was all going well for a while. Then the economic recession of the early 1990s hit, and suddenly I wasn't selling any work any more. I did odd jobs, painting and decorating. I had to do some thing to dig myself out of this hole. I actually found that I make my best work when things are going badly. I invented Scrapheap Services, a fictitious cleaning company that got rid of unwanted people, of which I was one, and sold it to the Tate.

Now I find the hardest bit is generating ideas - sitting there and thinking things through makes me feel lazy if I don't come up with stuff. It was much easier when I smoked 40 a day, but I've quit now. To relax I watch America's Next Top Model instead.

Michael's tip Be patient. Young people often have bigger expectations now and it's probably unrealistic. Success happens to people at different times of their lives.

Anya Gallaccio, Turner Prize nominee 2003

Before college I used to work at the Royal Court Theatre doing wardrobe and stage management, but all my teachers told me that I couldn't be a designer because I didn't work to people's briefs, I just did what I wanted. I was making lots of “stuff” and it wasn't really sculpture or painting, and Goldsmiths was the only place that I could go at that time where I didn't have to know the answer first.

But I was always concerned about being an artist, because I am quite pragmatic and I didn't know how I would support myself, and in a way I learnt to approach making work driven by my experience of working in a theatre. I needed to work to a brief, and take into account other people's opinions - I sort of thrive on restrictions, it gives me something to push against.

But while I was at art school I still wasted a lot of time wrestling with what the hell I thought I was doing. Richard Wentworth persuaded me to stay, convincing me that being at art school was the best education “for life”.

I suppose I owe some of my success to Damien [Hirst], too. I don't know him any more, but early on we were friends and he had an amazing energy and enthusiasm, which was contagious. He put my work in Freeze, and unwittingly gave me the confidence to believe that I could achieve anything.

Until fairly recently I felt anxious about calling myself an artist because I always felt it was going to stop. I have finally had to concede that this is it now.

I've just moved to California with my partner Kelly, and taken up a professorship. I'm 45 now, and I felt that if I didn't shake things up now I never would.

Anya's tip Be true to yourself, and resist pleasing the market. It's easy now to make things that look like art, but actually making art is a totally different thing.

Susan Hiller, mixed-media artist

I grew up in the States, where you can study art alongside other courses, which I did, but at that time there weren't really any well-known women artists, so I didn't see it as a career. Instead I did a PhD in anthropology because I was inspired by a lot of famous women anthropologists that I'd heard of and it seemed exciting. But I became frustrated because it wasn't really me, and eventually I dropped out and became more committed to art practice.

I came to the UK and started with minimalist painting, but in the end I wasn't comfortable with it. I just couldn't accept the constraints. I was interested in minimalism and conceptualism, but I was always interested in the unconscious and the irrational elements of life, and I somehow had to combine that with the very ordered and logical way that they worked.

So I made a promise to myself that I wouldn't censor out anything that I wanted to do. I started doing different things, such as making live events with groups of people, and after five or six years I developed a way of working that I felt totally comfortable with.

It took some time for my work to take off, and I struggled financially for years doing jobs on the side, but as a result of that promise to myself, which gave me complete freedom in working, I really did do some of the first installations in this country, such as multiscreened video work.

Susan's tip Don't pursue being artist unless it's the only way you can express yourself creatively. If you can be a designer or an illustrator, or something else then do that instead, because being an artist is not an easy life. It's a last resort.

David Shrigley, cartoonist and mixed-media artist

Once I had given up on becoming an astronaut or footballer, I thought about art. I remember coming home from secondary school and seeing the bigger kids from the community college with their portfolio cases, and thinking they were really cool, but I didn't know what was in them really.

I graduated in 1991 and leaving was quite a big shock, suddenly having to start the rest of my life - and it was still in the halcyon days where you left without any debt. I couldn't really draw or paint, and I didn't know what to do.

I made a panic decision to be a cartoonist, but I was kind of a failure at that - I wanted to be a cartoonist for The Guardian, which I actually am now, but at the time I didn't really know anything about it.

I started making these books to disseminate my work to newspapers and magazines, but I realised that what I enjoyed most was the process of making books themselves, and that really I just wanted to be left alone to make art for a living. So I published my books and just sold them to friends and in pubs and local shops, and people really liked them.

Eventually, Michael Bracewell wrote about me in Frieze and that was it - once you're on the cover of Frieze, you're famous. It was ridiculous really, because I'd done one solo exhibition in an artist-run space and a group exhibition, and suddenly I was being discussed in an important art magazine. But it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people think you're big and famous, you become big and famous.

David's tips It doesn't matter whether you're 20 or 50. Get a website and keep making work - if it's good, it will find a place.

Doris Salcedo, sculptor

I didn't enjoy my studio training as an undergraduate in Colombia nor as a postgraduate in New York. The quality of the teaching was really low. The part of it that was absolutely essential was art history. We studied it in a very serious manner for five years. Isaac Newton said that he was able to see farther because he stood on the shoulder of giants, and for me art school did that.

When I returned to Colombia, I was teaching and never intended to show my own work. For me, making it for myself was enough.

It has never been an easy life. Because I am a Third World artist, and because of the issues my work deals with, I am constantly in touch with death, physical violent death or social death. I have become so aware of the terrible things that go on around me that at times it feels so heavy it is unbearable. But it became part of my life, and the now every time I finish a work, it is worth it.

When I make that very last detail on the installation or sculpture and I realise I have been truthful to the issue I set myself, that moment is absolutely extraordinary. It's like an epiphany - everything reveals to me unexpectedly in that moment, and to me that is success..

Now I'm always working in my studio, sometimes 20 hours a day. I live in Bogotá, Colombia, which is out of the way of the art world, and that's very convenient because it allows me peace and quiet. It doesn't matter where you are, the most important thing is the work. Some artists spend so much energy playing this ridiculous role of half artist, half showbiz person, they waste their talent and intelligence.

Doris's tips I believe the most important thing is to be truthful to what you want to do, to your work, no matter what, no matter which obstacles you encounter on your way.

Jonathan Monk, mixed media-artist

At school I could do art, but I didn't really do much else. Still, back then, art school seemed like an odd choice, and not at all a career move as it does now. I went to Glasgow and did a foundation course and a BA, but it never felt like being trained. We were taught how to weld two bits of metal together, but I think the training of how to be an artist came afterwards.

It was the usual signing on the minute you leave art school - and it still wasn't necessarily possible to survive and pay the rent that easily. But there was quite a crowd of people who left at the same time with not a great deal to do, so we banded together. There was no system of galleries in Glasgow yet, so we had to kind of invent our own scene. We started showing our work in small, artist-run spaces, and that's how it all started.

People didn't really start buying my work until a fair bit later. I started making copies of adverts for cheap holidays, such as “Tenerife, two weeks, £199” - so you could either go on holiday for £199, or you could buy my painting for the same. I think most people went on holiday. It did change slowly, people started taking an interest in the Glasgow scene and my work began to sell, but it's only in the past five or six years that it has become comfortable.

I lived in Glasgow for nine years, then I lived in LA for two years. I moved there for love, I suppose, and then I and my wife moved to Berlin, where we live with our two kids. I love it here - lots of artists are here now, but it's much more relaxed here than it is in London or New York.

Jonathan's tip: People who really want to go to art school should go - it doesn't matter whether they're good or bad. You take your A levels at 17 or 18, and the art education you get to that level is not really similar to what you get at art school. Afterwards, hang out with lots of other artists, go and work in an exhibition context, and something will turn up.

New works by Jonathan Monk will be exhibited on the Lisson Gallery stand at Frieze Art Fair (Oct 16-19) http://www.friezeartfair.com/