Professional Slash Artist

I’m a Professional Slash Artist. 

Odds are, since you’re reading this, you are too. 

A few of you are even Artist Slash Professionals. 

I’m also positive there are a few Artists and Professionals with no slashes lurking out there too. 

But, this post is to make it abundantly clear, the magic is in the combination. 

The magic is in the Slash.* 

In the Slash being present.

In committing to doing something professionally and making something artistically - at the same time. 

Being both builds nuance into living.

More nuance in your life means accepting more nuance in the world. 

And putting more nuance into the world means accepting less nuance-lacking BS-takes. 

There’s more good news too - Professional Slash Artists are already an abundant bunch. 

We’ve been figuring out how to not settle for settling ever since our Artist friends struggled with turning pro.  

We’ve just been doing it out of order, and without much celebration.

Sound familiar? I bet to a lot of you reading this it does. So let’s start changing that. Not to be celebrated, not for recognition. Just to point at the value of keeping our heads on what we can add, beyond what we have to do to make life work, getting a bit more serious about what we can help move forward for ourselves and the people we care about.  

Ready to save some worlds? 

A few points to flesh this out a bit further. Because I do want feedback on this. I’m curious if this resonates, and I’m betting on my anecdotal evidence replies to my posts. 

A professional isn’t an amateur. 

An amateur has a hobby. A hobby provides value to the hobbyist. It’s fun, fulfilling, and an essential part of finding some peace in life. 

A professional has a vocation. A job that provides value for someone else too. It can still be fun or fulfilling or essential to the person doing the work, but the difference between an amateur and a professional is the amateur shows up because they want to, and the professional shows up because they have to.**

A professional alone is a boring life. Just like being an artist alone, only serving up art that nobody else cares for, cares about, or idly wonders why “nobody gets.” We need community, and community must be created. 

Always. Scenes seem to just spring up. But there’s art in the eye of every movement.   

Real professionals and real artists don’t starve. Fake professionals and fake artists do. We’re after the balance, we’re after the nuance, we’re after the dancers in the grey.

Now, a professional with a hobby - that’s getting warmer. But only if it’s like an adult who still knows how to tap into their child-brain. 

We’re not talking about an accountant who loves to play golf on weekends here, but we’re not not talking about that either. Play is a component. But unless the accountant is somehow mixing the golf into his business practices, in a way that serves his community or scene or even family, it doesn’t count. Pun intended. Play needs to go at least one step further here, all the way into the attraction of the nuance.***

All the way into making some sort of scene around the play that is concerned with community. Golf friend group that’s emotion support? I’ll take it. Golf to avoid work and family for a bit and have a few drinks to take the edge off? Not helping. Golf isn’t my target. The passive professional is.  

Curiosity is the key. Creativity is the lock. Habit is the unlatching of the door, opening everything up to the world of the muse, inspiration, and wonder about seeing what we’d like to do with all of these options today.****

A Professional Slash Artist cuts through the realities of what they have to do, while always adding some of what they want to do too. 

The priority is still there. 

The responsibility is still there. 

The status, the sometimes elitism, and hell, the sheer reality of a pro doing stuff professionally, for profit, to get by if not make it, in this cold, grey, challenging world. It’s all still there. 

But so is the art. 

So is the dedication to making, protecting, and teaching.**** 

So is the “If you build it, they will come,” because the voices are on the wind in the cornfields.

So is “the power - from a streetlight - made the place dark,” because the the art calls out to the community, and the artists respond viscerally.

So is recognizing that the art alone won’t save us. It’ll never be enough. The best scenes can’t even do it, because they can’t scale.

The artists can help. 

Artists, what they make, what they continue to make, can recenter even the most misguided scene away from trying to scale to the top, by reminding people what matters. What has weight.

What you can put on a scale. Not what somebody else wants to scale to the moon. The Professional Slash Artist gets this scale vs. scaling idea deeply.

It takes more than pure bottom-up, and this is how we mix just enough top-down organization in with our bottom-up ethic.

Is it mid? It’s more than the bottom, and it’s not built to be the top. If progress is mid, then - call it what you will.

We need more Professional Slash Artists. Now more than ever. 

You didn’t settle if you still haven’t settled down about creating things you love. 

I’m still learning that. I have a feeling a bunch of you are too.

Mos Def maybe put it best with “It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at.”

So. Where you at, fellow Professional Slash Artists?******

*the idea of “slash” careers shows up in Herminia Ibarra’s Working Identity which I did a whole review of here, and if you want a dedicated exploration for multi-hyphenate career examples I highly recommend Marci Alboher’s excellent One Person / Multiple Careers book too. Both lean on if not into the Professional Slash Artist idea enough that I don’t know if this label comes to me without their work (thank you).

**Steven Pressfield, RESPECT.  

***Tom Morgan, RESPECT.

****Yes, there’s extra Pinky and The Brain energy in that statement, NARF.

*****That’s Scott Bradlee breaking it down - he embodies the Artist Slash Professional in full if you ask me. 

****** Mos Def said it best in “Habitat” - this is the home all Professional Slash Artists are called to explore and create within the confines and nuances of, and very related to the KRS/BDP “South Bronx” ethic if you clicked that streetlight link above. Mos gets the last word today:

We all got to have, some place that we come from (Home: a place where someone lives, a residence)

This place that we come from is called home (The physical structure within which one lives, such as a house)

We set out on our travels, we do the best we can (A dwelling place with the social unit that occupies it, a household)

We travel this big earth as we roam (An environment offering security and happiness. A valued place. A native habitat)

We all got to have, some place where we come from (A place where something is discovered, founded, developed, or promoted)

This place that we come from is called home (A source, a headquarters, a home base)

And even though we may love, this place on the map (All correlating to a team’s place of origin on or into the point of which something is directed to the center or the heart)

Said it ain't where ya from, it's where ya at