This month one of our themes, is what they don’t teach you, or should teach you in art school. It was great to find Bianca, an Artist and tutor, who has written a great piece on this very subject…
Bianca Turner, Ph.D.
Artist
Instagram: @biancaturnerart
For 22 years I was a self-taught artist. I have a Ph.D. in Economics and postgraduate studies in Marine Biology. For over 25 years I worked in various American corporations, as a manager, dealing with customers, retail stores, hundreds of employees, and immense budgets of money to handle. My jobs were always extremely stressful and painting was my only relaxation technique. Due to the fact that I have an accent, was born in Europe, and spoke multiple languages, the white American society did not welcome me very well. From being physically attacked by white American women to being bullied even by my supervisors for my accent, in 2017 I mentally collapsed and I was not able to face the American society anymore.
Therefore, I took some time off from work and started to focus on my artistic career. From the beginning, it went pretty smoothly and I knew how to put my artist name out there, on the international market. After a while, artists from all over the world, either self-taught or graduates from Visual Arts Institutes, were contacting me to ask what’s the secret of becoming successful in the art world. I realized that what they were calling successful was in fact the marketing that I created for myself (from doing my own website to starting to take my paintings out of my studio and showing them off in various exhibitions, all over the world). I have also noticed that I found a niche in the art market: the necessity of combining business skills with artistic skills. I was aware that a lot of artists were extremely talented; however, they were not getting out of their “shells” because they didn’t have the “know-how”.
For a few years, I did the job as a business art consultant to the artists and the galleries that were able to invest in the marketing services that I was offering. But that kept me away from the time spent in my studio. In order to find a win-win situation between art and economy, I wrote the book “The Business of Art”.
Initially, the book was written in English but before I was even ready to publish it, a few universities from Europe started to approach me regarding this new discipline that I invented for the Visual Arts and Designs Institutes. So I translated the book into Romanian because The University of West Timisoara, Faculty of Visual Arts and Design invited me to do a residency with their postgraduate students, due to the fact that Timisoara (the second largest city in Romania) is the European Cultural Capital in the European Union in 2023.
The book was very well received there and I even had foreign students attending my lectures. I asked everyone for feedback with regard to the book and the general answer was that “the book gave them hope” and after getting their master's degree or a Ph.D. in visual arts, they won’t be stuck working in a restaurant, or a pub, or a retail store. They finally had a guide to help them start to market themselves and create their own artistic business.
During the lectures, I shared a lot of real-life art experiences with the attendees (those experiences are not even written in the book) and the fact that I encroached the theory with real facts and situations that I’ve gone through, was very beneficial to them. While lecturing, I also had a revelation when I realized what is the difference between working towards your career and/or having a 9 to 5 job. I am a true believer that if you do what you love, when you give 100% of your passion to your career you will never work one day in your life and you will be successful.
At the end of the lecture, I found out that the galleries’ owners and the art curators would like to have a guide for their field of expertise; therefore, a volume II will follow and I hope that I can have it done by the end of this year. Currently, I am looking for interns who are willing to work and learn from me how to manage an art business and I hope that my students will enroll in the internship because what better way to learn “hands-on” is out there, than shadowing your professor and doing the practice?
I also signed up for a contract with a publishing house in Los Angeles, and the book “The Business of Art”, in English, will be available for purchase in 3 weeks, on different book platforms on hardcover, paperback, audio style, etc. I am also intending to convert the book into an application for both Android and iOS. I think it’s necessary to update it yearly with everything that would be new and beneficial for artists to thrive in their careers.
As an artist, I am firmly convinced that we have to leave a legacy behind us and that we are the hope to future generations to make this world a better place for them. I see art as the definition of infinity and I like to focus on subjects like empowering women, climate change awareness, gender equality, and other societal issues that surround me.
My studio is at home, in Los Angeles and I created a daily routine for me: I spend 30 minutes to one hour to promote myself and 15 hours to develop my artistic skills.
Instagram: @biancaturnerart