The Jobbing Artist

It is the nature that over my career of thirty plus years, making my living purely from what I make, design and play that makes me think that the term 'Jobbing Artist' best sums it up, it is a career not bound in the garrets of Paris or some other idealised fabrication of the media, but in the realities of getting commissions and completing them so well that I can get another job.  The fact that I take immense pleasure from designing and creating is a bonus.  So the 'Credit Crunch' in 2008 hit artists hard, and maybe public artists the hardest, when jobs are being cut and the word 'cutbacks' shakes us all to the very core, we artists had to think again, redefine how we might make a living in this new 'austere' world, where the pavements aren't paved with gold or public art.  So as the 'Jobbing Artist' I have recently been working creating pieces for new housing estates, in Trowbridge I have created house numbers, seating, tree guards and grills, railings, slate diamond for exterior of houses and a bronze trail along the pavement.  This has led to more house numbers and in the West Midlands if planning permission is approved I will be carving 78 oak house numbers.  So the 'Jobbing Artist' lives on, maybe not with as much money as before and maybe with more variation of scheming, the honey pot of public art is no more and we are left to live on our wits, using our talents and imagination to forge a new future for ourselves.