MONIKA: How do you balance time for personal work and commercial work?

BETH: Balance is probably the hardest part. I am lucky, though, because I do commercial work for money as well as having various outlets to sell my personal work. So I have to give equal time to both. Also I have ADD, and a lot of good personal work comes out of procrastinating big commercial projects. Like, I literally work on five to eight things at a time.

ELEANOR: One of the most important things I’ve learned as a freelance artist is how to say no. The more jobs I do, the more I learn that it’s the personal projects that really excite me more than anything. So you have to make the time for your own work—even if that means temporarily setting aside a big, lucrative project. If you don’t keep the momentum going in your personal work, you’ll wake up one day and realize you’ve only been doing your art for other people, never for yourself. As necessary (and sometimes truly exciting!) as doing commercial work is, at the end of the day, art to me should be 100 percent selfish—that’s when true beauty comes out. So you need to clear that time for YOU.

MONIKA: That’s so true! When I overload myself with writing assignments, I’m not only more stressed, I’m also less creative.

ELEANOR: The best situation, though, is when you get a client who is up for something experimental and wants your stamp all over it—then you’re basically doing something you’d do anyway, for your personal work, but getting paid for it, and a wider audience will see it.

MONIKA: When you’re doing something for a specific client, how do you deal with pressures to adapt to their image or idea of what your work for them should look like? How much creative control do you ask for?

MARÍA FERNANDA: Sometimes when I do fashion stuff, I don’t like the clothes or the image they’re asking me to make, but at the end of the day those will be my pictures, with my name on it, so I try to stay calm and do the job the way I want to. Sometimes, for example, they get afraid when they see me using a film camera [instead of a digital one]. They’re like, “No, wait, what are you doing?! We need digital because of the quality!” I want to be like “Dude, I’m using a medium-format Hasselblad, you don’t have to worry about ‘quality.’” But they don’t understand stuff like that, so I’m just like, “Oh, don’t worry, these are extra pictures, all the rest will be digital” and then I show them the film pictures and they love them and use them. I mean, they’re the ones with the money, so you have to be super nice to them so they can trust you. Then, once they trust you, they’ll let you do anything.

MONIKA: How does working solo versus collaborating (perhaps on a commercial shoot) affect your output?

ELEANOR: Collaborations push you to think more, and you develop as an artist. But there are also times where I like to work 100 percent on my own—which is when I do my really personal self-portrait stuff—so I like to strike a balance between the two.

MONIKA: I’ve been struggling with how to formulate this question, but I’ll give it a go: Do you think the separation between art and commerce is phony? Like, we have this idea that art is somehow above money, but in reality people pay for art—even museums—and it’s always been that way! And while being a “starving artist” could be romantic for a while, don’t we all want to get paid to do what we love?

BETH: I know there’s a very pretentious side of art—fancy galleries in NYC and celebrities and rich-people cliques and what not. Some people hold out for that world, I think, rather than “compromise their integrity” or whatever. And that can be admirable in a way, but it’s also a luxury. We are not all independently wealthy. I don’t really know any starving artists, unless they’re students or young kids. No one wants to starve! Everyone has to pay their bills. If that means some people would rather work in a laundromat to afford painting materials, that’s their choice.

There is a huge difference between selling your work and selling out. It’s all about having tact and good taste and staying true to yourself. If I feel there’s something weird or wrong about a particular commercial thing, I say no. Also I’d love to see the art buying/selling game change a bit—which it is now, with so many online platforms. I’d much rather have my work be affordable and attainable and give everyone (well, most people) the chance to own a piece of quality art that inspires them. The rich-kids club shouldn’t be the only option. That is why I sell my prints online. Some people think it’s corny, but I’d like to change that attitude a little bit.

ELEANOR: Maybe this is angsty childish wishful thinking, but right now I really believe that it’s mostly the (commercial) clients, not artists, who see the separation between art and commerce. If they understood that this divide doesn’t have to exist, they’d give more freedom to artists and trust our choices more.

SUZY: Art is labor is money. I mean, if someone requests your labor, you should be compensated for your time. It’s as simple as that.

ESME: Yeah, I definitely agree that art is so labor-intensive that it only makes sense to be paid for it—some of dat shit takes hooooours! But there’s quite a big difference between art I slave over for money and art I slave over for love. My favorite thing to draw is stuff for my buddies—like birthday drawings or fliers or whatnot—and I actually get embarrassed if they insist on paying me. Basically, in my head, it’s divided into “stuff I’d do for free any day” versus “shit I deserve a triple fee for.”

CYNTHIA: It’s naïve nowadays to believe that art is “above” money. You have to learn to play the game or just step out of it completely, and so far I don’t know of anyone who have stepped out of it completely (and they exist, there is a reason we never heard about them). I love artists like Grayson Perry and Marina Abramovich, who are really aware of it all and try to use the system to their advantage to get what they want out of it, without compromising on the quality of their work. They are also not afraid to critique [the system].

Artists like Eleanor and Olivia are interesting to me, because they started out in these very organic, less institutional internet communities. But now it can be argued that those very platforms—Flickr, Tumblr, Instagram, Behance and so on—are becoming part of the same problem. In order to survive, they have to compel artists to keep posting their content on there, usually for free, for “exposure” or “community” or “fun.” Meanwhile, the companies themselves are making the dough. As artists, we often feel like we NEED these institutions to make it and to survive. And, to an extent, we do. But they also need us. It should be a mutually beneficial relationship. Why is that so much to ask? ♦