Lu-Hai Liang

A painting (based on ancient cave art) I did last week. It’s not great, but what if I kept practicing? Wouldn’t professionalism eventually be an option?

I’ve been freelancing since the autumn/winter months of 2012. Back then I’d recently moved to Beijing and was interning at a listings magazine called The Beijinger. And in order to supplement my meagre income I started pitching to UK publications.

I’d learned how to pitch and the rules of how to do freelance journalism while I was still a student on my journalism B.A., so I knew the fundamentals. But doing it while I was a student was like a game.

Doing it for real, in order to try and make money, as a professional freelance journalist, was something I learned how to do as a necessity.

For several years the majority of my income came from the full time jobs I had; freelance journalism was what I did on the side, both as a very satisfying sideline (with longer term career prospects) and extra income stream.

Last year I turned fully freelance, and it was tough, but since the start of 2016 it has become a viable and comfortable means of living.

It took me four years before I reached this state of affairs. I now control my time, am earning a comfortable income, and have many opportunities for travel, leisure, and socializing, while at the same time indulging in my interests and thinking of other ways to develop.

One of these interests is painting, and I attended a painting class very recently in Beijing. I discovered how much I enjoyed it and that I displayed a natural knack for it. And I’ve been thinking to myself, “What if I kept at this for four or five years?”.

What if I started learning how to draw, then how to paint, and steadily kept at it. Wouldn’t it, at some stage, reach a level where it could be professional?

At this point, two dissenting voices will come to light. They will come from family and friends and will go something like this…”He goes to one painting class and now he thinks he can be a professional artist!” Or it will be something like this…”You think it’s too easy, so easy to do it, but you don’t know how hard it is”.

That voice, which comes from a place of doubt, and short-term thinking, is one you do not need to listen to, especially at the beginning. If you are a person who shows discipline, dedication, obsession, adaptability, and a huge appetite for learning and, perhaps more importantly, an appetite for self-learning (and how to do that), then you need to simply disregard that voice.

The second dissenting voice, and this one is more serious, is the voice that says your motivation is wrong. This voice is one I respect much more. What it’s saying is that you shouldn’t automatically think you can just be a professional and think it’s so easy to make money from being an artist or writer or photographer. This voice says you’ve got it backwards. You need to first appreciate the process, before you can enjoy the outcome.

That’s a voice with serious authority. Too much have I seen other writers or journalists, aspiring to make a living from it, not dedicating serious commitment to actually getting better at it. I write, and edit, for a living, and I write for a hobby and in my spare time. Because I love it. And I try to constantly improve. So forgive me if I’m a little skeptical about the aspirations of amateurs.

This is exactly what a professional painter could say to me, with my little dream as an amateur of someday making money from painting. The only way you could disprove that skepticism is by putting in the time. By putting in about seven years or so into learning the craft. Why seven years? Well, I took four years learning the freelance game, but I spent three years previously learning more on my journalism degree. So there’s seven years of experience (not including earlier, perhaps foundational experiences before that) that has led up to this point.

However, I think there’s nothing wrong to have that dream of making money from an art or craft, as long as you respect the process of getting there, and the time and effort needed. For me, that thought is the little fire powering some of that motivation. The motivation of learning how to paint or write. What serious writer doesn’t harbour dreams — along with critical acclaim and crowd adulation — of, if not stupendous riches, at least very comfortable earnings from the work they produce?

If I want to become a professional painter, then I’ll need to commit. See you in about seven years then.