[protonimitate]

As a art-degree holder turned engineer - yup.

While there's a romantic vision of the starving artist, being broke is a whole different type of burnout.

[pmoriarty]

There are plenty of commercial artists (illustrators, designers, etc) that make a good living making art.

Even if you're creating fine art exclusively it's possible to make a good living at it if your art has mass appeal.

The problem is when you make art that's not really geared towards the masses. If you make something widely considered "ugly" or disturbing, that most people wouldn't want to hang in their living room or on the walls of their business then you've got a problem.

The other problem is if you've either got a style that looks too much like everyone else or if you don't have a consistent style. Then people can't distinguish your work as uniquely yours and that makes having a "brand" difficult to impossible. You can still get by this way (especially if your work still has mass appeal -- see the endless impressionist-style paintings out there), but it's still a lot tougher than if you have a distinctive style.

The most successful fine artists have both a distinctive style and mass appeal... or a good marketing team. Often marketing is actually more important than the art itself as far as sales go.

Problem is many artists aren't good at marketing and just want to make art and aren't yet famous/rich enough to afford to hire someone to do the marketing for them.

[Aeolun]

> The problem is when you make art that's not really geared towards the masses

Well, apparently there’s also a lot of money to be made doing very specific commissions.

Not quite sure where I heard about that, but the concept of ‘whales’ exists there as well.