The art of the side hustle: get you an artist who can do both

“Fatima’s next job could be in cyber (she just doesn’t know it yet)”. Remember that weird advert the Tories reeled off in peak Covid? Or have we collectively blocked it out? A ballerina posed in tights, destined for a serious career once she escaped her creative delusions. It was a perfect snapshot of how little value this country places on the arts, or on the people who make them.

The idea that an artist could survive, let alone thrive, on creating artwork alone is laughable, unless of course, you have a trust fund. But what if a second job isn’t just survival? What if it could actually fuel the work beyond finance? Not in the way hustle culture demands – girl boss side gigs, productivity porn, waking at 4:30 am to cold plunge before monetising your every breath – but in the quiet, weird, surprising ways that life sneaks into art.

What if Fatima took that job in cyber and perfected a kind of robotic ballet, drawing inspiration not in spite of the ‘non-art’ world job, but because of it?

Let’s be real, no one becomes an artist for the money. They do it for the love (or the fact they have no choice but to bow down to intrusive thoughts and ideas that wake you up at 4 am on a Tuesday). Therefore, most artists have a ‘bread and butter’ job. For my late father, that meant driving a mobile library around Essex (back when governments actually had the wild idea to fund public services). There’s always been something quietly eerie about suburbia and the rolling hills of East Anglia where we lived, so it is understandable that he found the role so peaceful and bountiful in inspiration for photographs, videos, and installation pieces. The job became more than just a way to make ends meet, but also part of his work too. As my mum (who is a ceramic artist, but also works part-time as a cleaner) said, “The best jobs are mindless so you can think about your practice.” When your hands are busy, your brain has space to wander. Ideas creep in when you’re not looking directly at them. It’s a phenomenon that has back up; in 2012, an article published in the Psychological Science journal found that performing simple, repetitive tasks can boost creative potential, enabling our brains to incubate ideas beneath the surface. A more recent Mic profile of working artists concludes that many deliberately choose mundane day jobs so they can conserve creative energy for their practice, not burn it up at work. These jobs aren’t glamorous, but they aren’t meaningless either. Tarek Sebastian Al-shammaa is a London-based painter who also works as a part-time private chef in between stints at the studio and exhibitions. “I could be peeling spuds and thinking of what my next step is on a painting, or I could be in the studio thinking of a dish I could make for a client.” Having a separate job can allow you to switch off and tune into a space where your mind can be quiet.

Corita Kent was lots of things: artist, educator, rebel, and, most notably, a Roman Catholic nun. Dubbed the “Pop Art nun”, Kent proved that devotion and disruption weren’t mutually exclusive – surely it’s what Jesus would’ve wanted! Artist/nun weren’t separate callings, but were one in the same – each informing the other. Get you a girl who can do both! In Tame is Not (1966), Kent includes a slogan from a men’s cologne ad: “somebody up there likes us.”

Cosey Fanni Tutti was a sex worker and pornographic model, and her entire practice is inseparable from that fact. Artists are sponges, and Fanni-Tutti absorbed everything. Her 1976 exhibition ‘Prostitution’ at the ICA scandalised the establishment so much that it had her branded a “wrecker of society” by one Tory MP (pot, kettle). “I never saw modelling and art as separate things. Both influenced the other. I started off modelling for pornographic magazines, and that influenced my artwork. There’s no difference between pornography and art in my work, one informs the other”, she told Interview Magazine.

Not every artist’s ‘other life’ is so clearly etched on their public persona. When I interviewed Irish artist Fern O’Carolan ahead of her recent show at Neven Gallery, she told me she was simultaneously qualifying to be an occupational therapist. “Medical science and art are two very different worlds,” she said, “but in terms of what I’m making, there’s definitely an overlap. My work has a big sociological element to it. I’m interested in working with different types of people and different communities, people with different types of brains, and seeing how different minds work. Plus, I like that there is actually a correct answer for things!” For Fern, the duality isn’t a contradiction: it’s a methodology.

Painter Sam Wooton has a similar kind of split, though the influences of his other job are more obvious. He works part-time for a modelling agency, and also paints distorted yet elegant bodies and expressive, stylised faces. “The glossiness of the editorials we do, I also find in my paintings,” he told me. Still, he sees the connection as mostly subconscious. “I’ll always need that work to remind me that my practice requires sowing ahead of reaping. I think to be an artist today is to fill so many boots anyway, what’s another pair of work boots besides a reminder that your studio slippers might be more comfortable?” Similarly, Jerusha West, an artist and filmmaker who works part-time as a teacher, describes the advice from her tutor at Slade in 2017: “Get a solid part-time job and protect time for your practice.” But where do you fit the time to do everything? It’s not just job vs. art. It’s job vs. art vs. sleep vs. exercise vs. socialising vs. life admin, and God forbid a woman have a hobby! So in this instance, we must adapt. Survive. Overcome. Find inspiration and space for thoughts and ideas in between the gaps in said second jobs. For Jerusha, this includes noting down characters she meets through teaching into scripts and paintings. 

Teaching has long been dismissed by the tired cliché: “those who can’t, teach”. But it’s a cynicism that doesn’t hold. Artists like Michael Craig-Martin and Phyllida Barlow made teaching central to their legacy. Frida Kahlo was as committed in the classroom as she was in the studio. For many artists, teaching isn’t a compromise but rather, it becomes an extension of the practice; one feeds the other.

Most of the artists I know work service jobs: bar staff, baristas, retail workers. In London, there’s a whole ecosystem of creatives side-stepping burnout just enough to survive. What makes these jobs bearable isn’t just the flexibility, it’s the community and inspiration gained outside what can be quite an isolating vocation. Bars are places of passion, chaos and the most exaggerated degrees of human behaviour – a shift behind a bar can make you understand gesture, intimacy and communication far more than any life drawing class could. The job can, for some, become an accidental residency, though, granted, it’s probably the back of a Pret kitchen, not an idyllic Tuscan art foundation. And the same goes for a lot of pubs in London, where you can’t throw a Scampi Fry without hitting an artist, poet, or struggling creative of some sort. The French House, the legendary Soho pub, recently opened a group staff exhibition because the majority of its employees are also artists. Artists Edith Liben and Mya Cavner see their hospitality jobs as more than just a place to meet like minded bar babes, but as an extension of their practice. Part of this year’s New Contemporaries, the duo’s project Ballet for non-dancers sort of does what it says on the tin – inviting participants to explore dance in non-linear ways. “Working in hospitality is a total performance,” Edith says. “It’s essentially conforming and creating a character on a stage, but in this case, it’s just to get more tips.”

It’s tempting to romanticise all of this, but just because artists can pull inspiration from crappy day jobs doesn’t mean they should have to. This isn’t a call to embrace precarity as a muse! It’s a case of making the best of it. Because while it’s true that capitalism rarely makes space for artists to just ‘be’, it’s also true that artists will always find a way to keep making. Not because struggle is noble, but because the impulse to create is stubborn and persistent – it seeps into every crack of a working week, and well beyond. A second job might not be the enemy of art, but another layer of it.