In deciding to double major in Graphic Design and Studio Art, I heard a lot of "good luck living in your parents garage after college" and "art is not a real job," specifically about my Studio Art Major. While majoring in the Fine Arts can be a great risk, I would also like to bring attention to how important majoring in the Arts can be and why those taking this risk should be respected.
Art is a very personal thing. It is never guaranteed that people will like your work which is required for artists to make money to support themselves or to even purchase art supplies (that, to the surprise of many, is not cheap). Art is a labor of love - whether it be in the Fine or Performing Arts, anyone who has the determination to put forth the amount of work to major in the Arts is doing it out of their love for it. There is no guarantee to success or to a well paying job, but the joy that is brought to the world by art is reward enough.
What would our world be without the people who took the risk? I'm sure that everyone has a favorite band, maybe a song. A favorite play or musical? A Movie? Maybe there is a font that you like to use all the time. Think about the clothes you wear or the buildings that you see and use every day; somewhere there is an architect who spent hours and hours designing them. Everything in this world has been touched by art and design, from packaging to your favorite pair of shoes and everything in between. But, none of it is easy.
Being an Art Major is much more than stick figures and crayons. We take very intensive classes that can meet for hours, where we may solely focus on perfecting the angle at which we draw a model's hips or on whether we should use a serif or sans serif font for the subtitle of a project. Contrary to popular belief, we don't just sit around and color. We take history and anatomy classes, as well as studying how math and proportions impact our work.
Our projects happen over night - but not how you might immediately think. Most of us stay up until the sunrise hunched over a drawing trying to perfect the shading, or waiting for that last layer of paint to dry so that we can add the finishing touches on a painting that has taken us weeks to get right. But then there are the times that we don't get it right, or our project doesn't come out how we imagined it would. This is one of the hardest parts of being an art major - accepting that we are never finished learning. Artists cannot just sit down and memorize notes to write them back down on a test. We are constantly learning about ourselves and our style, developing what we are trying to say as an artist. Because of this, our work may not always be consistent, but that just makes us that much more proud of our work that does turn out the way we imagined it.
Acknowledging that not everyone appreciates art the way that Art Majors do, we do ask one thing: please take us seriously. We know that it will be a hard road for us, and we know that it will be difficult to find a job and to make a living at first. But we are not in this field for fame or money. We are in this field for the joy and beauty that art brings to the world.
