If art runs in your veins to the point that you love delving into any medium you can work with, from painting to sculpting, to even creating art digitally, this article is for you. Here we have Yasmine El Meleegy, inspirational visual artist telling you what you need to know to become a successful visual artist.
What Is a Visual Artist?
Being a visual artist means you have anything to do with anything you can touch see or hear. A painting, a sculpture, short movies, multimedia art, an installation. A big part of it is also linked to research, I could do the research (history, family archive) needed to create my art and publish it under the name of visual art. There is no actual definition of what a visual artist can be or can not be.
How Do You Work on a Portfolio as an Artist?
In order to build your portfolio, you need to increase your volume of work, so you can have something to showcase. You can do so by attending workshops, preferably ones that allow you to venture into different areas of artistry like multimedia, editing, film, or even smaller installations. Networking also is a great way to broaden your portfoli0. The more people you know the more you’ll have chances to collaborate on projects, create art in some form and have something to display in your portfolio.
How Do You Take Criticism as an Artist?
There will always be a challenge to separate your artist self that loves your work and is proud of from your artist self who needs to learn from whatever constructive criticism you’re receiving. It’s very important to keep that line between the two clear for yourself. That is the only way you’ll be able to take criticism given by other artists whose opinion matters to you the most and learn from it.
Should You Invest in a Studio Space to Practice Your Art?
This is always a hard decision to make since it won’t always make sense financially. Except of course if you’re constantly creating film or editing, you’ll probably need a studio to do all of that in. In my case, I always have so much preparation to do before my installation. I’m constantly working with a lot of raw material and technicians on so many things. So, it makes sense that I have a studio so I can have a place to “play” in as much as I need to with my sculpting.
How Did You Transition into Sculpting Installations?
I always loved to sculpt since college really. In Arts School, you get to experience all forms of art in your first year, so you can know which one is the one for you. For some reason, I decided to go into painting because I had different interests back then. I studied it for 4 years. In the last few years of university, I started to get into installations, doing small projects that were a bit haphazard along the school.
Then my transformation phase as I like to call it started when I went to France on a multimedia scholarship. I was thrown from the small niche of work I was doing by painting to a whole world of videos, photography, and so much more. It was after this year that I decided that I want to be a professional artist. I started working for real to create art from scratch, beginning with sketching to going to workshops to install my visual art. It was very hard in the first 3 years because I was doing this without any previous experience.
How Do You Present Your Work in a Solo Art Show?
It can be done in any way the artist wants. You can showcase work you’ve done in previous collections of art shows or you can be showing long research or project you’ve been working on for a while.
