The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 4
In a work of this sort, when discussing art as a means of livelihood, we must consider it as a practical profession, not as a divine gift or inspiration. This book is written for the girl who must become economically independent within two years at least. For that reason we will not consider the training, environment and work of the girl who aspires to portraiture, miniature-painting, or oil and water-color masterpieces of that moving character which represent the highest type of the fine arts, and which require years of patient work, to say nothing of more or less genius. Such girls must either have enough funds to study for years in the best ateliers of America and Europe or they must be willing to wage an indefinite warfare against poverty and discouragement.
There are comparatively few girls in America possessed of such boundless ambition and persistency, but there are thousands of young women who show decided artistic talent, and
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who realize that they must either turn this gift to practical financial account or look to other avenues of money-making. Nor is there any reason why a girl, who can afford a few years of hard work in a good school, should hesitate—to develop her one talent along artistic lines. "The practical worker in any line of artistic endeavor can find a market for her wares or a salaried position, but she must not fail to place due emphasis on that little word "practical." The man who stands ready to pay for artistic products wants his art-workers to be as business-like as his stenographers or salesmen. The day of the lackadaisical maiden with unkempt locks, bedraggled skirts and dreamy eyes staring into the blue heavens for an inspiration, are past, so far as the publishing and manufacturing world is concerned. While such a girl waits for an inspiration, a practical worker with perhaps less artistic ideals, but a keener appreciation of her employer's needs and the importance of punctuality, secures all the orders.
In other words, the girl who imagines that she can put her artistic talent to account must start out aright, with a perfect understanding of the business-like atmosphere in which she will work. She will have to work regularly, not spasmodically. She will have to deliver her product on time—or have the order canceled. And she will have to deliver the sort of work her employer orders. She cannot substitute some sudden, inspirational idea. If she is one of those rare creatures, a genius, an iconoclast in art, if she must do things in her own way or not at all, then she must not enter what we may term the field of commercial art.
Broadly speaking, girls who want to earn their living by pencil, pen or brush may be divided into two classes: those who wish to work in their own homes, and those who can and will fare forth in search of work and salaried positions. The resident of a large city, like New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago or San Francisco, naturally has the advantage over the girl in a smaller city or village or on a farm. She can do the most practical forms of art work, such as designing for textiles and metals, fashion drawings, book covers and illustrating, and still live at home, while the girl living far from an art, manufacturing or publishing center must leave home to gain practical experience and to make her reputation.
The girl with the brush who cannot make this change in residence must cultivate her talents so as to use them in her environment. Only one girl in a thousand can establish herself as an art-worker through correspondence. This does not apply to high-grade illustrators, many of whom prefer to work far from publishing centers, but to girls who wish to secure regular work, perhaps salaried positions as designers along some particular line. Designing of jewelry is generally done in the manufacturing plants, managers of fashion syndicates or fashion magazines want illustrators to work under their direction, even makers of wallpaper or carpet patterns must be near enough to the factory to confer constantly with those who use their designs.
This explanation is made at the very beginning of the chapter because so few girls from farms, small towns and inland cities appreciate the importance of being on the ground to market their wares, or the vital necessity of making their work practical and utilitarian. Many girls imagine that they can take an art course by correspondence and put city girls out of business with the designs they will be turning out in a few months. While I think the correspondence course is a boon to the isolated girl with artistic talent, I want each of these girls to understand that the day will come when she will realize the stern necessity of direct teaching and of being in the market with her wares.
We will discuss first the future of the girl who is about to graduate from the high school, who has displayed considerable talent with her pencil or brush, and who can afford to give at least two years to the study of art.
She may become either an instructor or a worker. If teaching appeals to her, if she has the natural pedagogical instinct, she will succeed either in a salaried position or as a private instructor. But if she is the sort of girl who demands practical results of her own hands, if her tastes are mechanical rather than theoretical, if she is happiest when working alone and watching the work come out from under her pencil, then she will secure the best results and find the surest avenue to contentment as a designer, illustrator or worker in arts and crafts. No girl should select a course of art until she has given this problem earnest consideration and has decided on the use to which she will put her knowledge. Much time and money can be saved by settling this question in advance, and selecting the most expeditious or practical course of training. To be sure, a change of mind and heart may come after the student begins to work at an art school, but as a rule a high-school graduate is able to decide whether she will find her greatest happiness and usefulness as a teacher or as a worker. The girl who "hates the schoolroom" and has no natural interest in children or power to attract them, will succeed much better as a worker along the more practical art lines than as an instructor in either public schools or private classes.
As the girl inexperienced in the business world knows little of art work which has a commercial value in manufacturing plants or publishing houses, we will discuss first these methods of money-making.
Among the courses offered to girls desiring to become practical workers are the following: General art, drawing, painting and illustration, which lead to positions as staff illustrators on newspapers and magazines, or free-lancing as an illustrator; decorative and applied design which leads to practical designing for book covers, pages and illumination; stencils, silks, damasks, rugs, wall-papers and wall coverings of all sorts, lamps, candlesticks, grilles, stained glass windows, mosaics, carvings, furniture, etc.; interior decoration or architecture, either of which lead to positions with architects or interior decorators and eventually to an independent venture; and the course in jewelry, metal chasing, enameling and medal work which leads to salaried positions or good prices for individual designs with jewelry and arts and crafts manufacturers.
The time required for training varies from two to four years, according to the school selected and the work done by the student. At an endowed institution where no specific time is set for the completion of the courses, one pupil will secure a position at the end of two years and prove a satisfactory worker, while the girl who started at her side will work in the school two years longer, and then start at a lower salary than her more ambitious and earnest fellow-worker student.
The course in general art work, leading to illustration at the Cooper Institute, New York City, runs four years, yet a girl who had studied only eighteen months, met with financial reverses, entered the offices of a fashion syndicate and under the practical direction of its manager whipped her somewhat crude work into practical shape, with just the dash of originality which is sometimes born of desperation. Within a month she was earning fifteen dollars a week. To-day she is head of the illustrated fashion department of a magazine for women, and is drawing a very comfortable salary.
The girl who can take up the study of art as her sister may be studying stenography, closing her ears to the call of Bohemia, and working as if she were engaged in a trade at which she must serve a stern apprenticeship, need not dawdle away four years of youth, energy and family funds. Her work will be marketable not when the school hands her a diploma, but when it has a practical market value.
From this you must not think that I advise hasty, superficial work. What menaces the success of the average out-of-town girl sent to a city art school by her parents, is misconstruing that famous line: "Art is long and time is fleeting." She thinks she must take indefinite time to study and gain inspiration, when steady, regular, concentrated work is far more important than what she terms a "gradual growth."
There was a time when students were urged not to draw fashions or enter the services of any syndicate which supplies cheap magazines with head and tail-pieces, fashions or pattern drawings and illustrations, but there has been a distinct change of sentiment on this question. The practical training received in the art rooms of such a syndicate and the education in the value of lines, light and shade, as seen in actual reproduction, are superior to that which can be secured in an art school where the work is never reproduced on either fast or slow presses. The few bad tricks or habits which a student may develop in the rush work of such a syndicate office are more than balanced by the practical results of seeing her work reproduced in newspaper or magazine.
Girls completing the course of illustration in a publishing or manufacturing center can find positions in publishing houses, as staff illustrators, particularly in fashions or pattern work, or making drawings for the advertising manager of department stores where illustrations are prepared for daily newspapers and periodicals, or in advertising agencies where catchy illustrations for exploiting proprietary articles are always in demand; or if the worker has a particularly novel and fetching treatment of feminine foibles, she can secure a salary or space rates doing timely drawings for the daily papers, particularly the afternoon editions.
Another very profitable field for the illustrator who wants quick returns is catalogue work, illustrating the catalogues put out by high-grade manufacturers or wholesalers, Any girl who secures practical training along these cash-return lines will be laying up money and securing experience against the day when she feels artistically strong enough to branch out as an illustrator of stories and books. And furthermore, she may avoid many months spent in treading the valley of humiliation if she will do this more practical and yet artistic work, before storming the portals of big publishing houses.
The girl who selects decorative and applied design seldom secures a salaried position, for by the time she has completed this course she realizes that a design which is worth anything at all will bring a better figure as an individual creation than if she is employed on salary. Still there are manufacturing plants which employ artists on salary, and the girl who prefers a small but sure income will seek such work, ranging from fifteen to twenty-five dollars a week.
All the leading manufacturers of hand-made jewelry or specially designed objects of art, medals, enameling, etc., employ women and pay good salaries, while women are succeeding not only as assistants, but as independent architects and interior decorators.
It is almost as hard to give a scale of salaries or earnings for art workers as it is to state how much time they must expend in preparation. With both questions the answer depends upon the girl. There are patient, conscientious, but mechanical workers, drawing fashion designs in New York art rooms at twenty dollars a week, while less conscientious workers with more originality and that rare offering to a harried editor, an idea, are drawing fifty, sixty or even seventy-five dollars a week, making near-caricatures of their own sex or drawing charmingly impossible little ladies for metropolitan dailies.
There are girls patiently redrawing plans and specifications for men architects with ideas, for fifteen dollars a week, while right across the street a woman who can conceive, as well as reproduce, ideas earns her ten thousand a year designing depots and business blocks of the most utilitarian sort.
There are girls who studied interior decoration from composition and color to sanitary science and electricity, but, because they lack originality and business or administrative ability, they are working on a salary of fifteen dollars a week, while a fellow-student with executive ability and push has her own business and is furnishing and decorating clubhouses, hotels and private homes.
Mere training in the best school of America will not turn out financially successful workers. It may develop an artistic, finished workwoman, but it cannot train her to make money. She must prove her business or economic worth by the manner in which she markets her wares.
The cost of such an art training varies. A girl can spend a thousand dollars a year for tuition, studio rent and living expenses while attending a New York art school, or she can study at Cooper Institute for a nominal figure, two hundred dollars a year covering her expenses, light-housekeeping, tuition and incidentals. Or she can work by day and study free at night schools.
The would-be art teacher must outline her course of study with infinite care, as the position she secures will depend not so much upon her ability, however important that may be, as upon her diploma and the name of the institution from which she graduates. Before selecting the course, let her decide upon the sort of position she expects to fill. If she intends to become a teacher in a fashionable private school or to rise to the post of teacher of art in the high school or supervisor of art in the city public schools, then she might as well decide at once that she must have a college degree, such as is furnished by Teachers College, Columbia University, or a normal training course of equal standing. This will represent at least two years' work in what is known as a normal art and manual training course, in addition to the regular, high school course of four years. The two years' normal work will cost, including living expenses and tuition, about one thousand dollars. If she intends to become a teacher in the graded schools, a normal course, added to the regulation high school course, with specialization in drawing, will be sufficient.
Special teachers of drawing are paid from seven hundred dollars a year up, the teacher of drawing in a high school never receives less than one thousand dollars per year, and a supervisor is paid from twelve hundred a year up, according to the size of the city and the scale of teachers' salaries.
In conclusion, a few words to the girl who cannot take a comprehensive course, either as a practical art worker or as a teacher, and who must earn money in her home town, perhaps in her own parlor. Only one girl in a thousand can study at home, remain at home and still market her wares in a distant art or manufacturing center. The thousandth girl is a born illustrator, whose work compels the attention of art editors. Even then, eventually, she must make frequent trips to publishing centers. Or if she is a worker along the more practical lines, she turns out such original designs in arts and crafts wares, china painting, stenciling, etc., that proprietors of exclusive shops are forced to notice her work, even though she may not be able to confer with them in person. But the thousandth girl is not the average girl, and that is why managers of art stationery stores, women's exchanges, and art shops, and private individuals whose names appear in public print are literally deluged with impossible handwork from trained and untrained art-workers in smaller cities and villages. Their output includes crude hand-painted china, satin cushiontops, pincushions, menus, favors, place cards and postals, not original, but copied from lithographs which sell for a mere song.
These workers cannot find a market in a distant city. They must seek patrons and work up trade in their own towns or adjacent cities, where they can ascertain what women with money wish to purchase. The crude oil painting of a basket of peaches which won first prize at the county fair may sell to one of the judges, but the city art dealer handles only work by a man or woman with reputation. The pretty trinkets made of birchbark or the postals with scenes of the local pleasure resorts or monuments will sell to tourists visiting the artist's town, but they will not appeal to the buyer for an art stationery store a thousand or two thousand miles away.
The young woman with mediocre talent—and she will soon find her level if she goes to a large city and competes with original workers—will do best in her own town, organizing classes for young girls who want to paint Christmas and birthday gifts, holding Easter and Christmas sales, making up souvenirs for tourists, and creating a demand among local social leaders for hand-painted prizes and favors. If she can build up a reputation for introducing into her community the latest fads of metropolitan society, she will soon have an established home trade and a certain income which she can never secure by dealing with city merchants or exchanges, through the mails.