Hi BlueMac 55! Feeling this post so much. One of the biggest struggles I've faced as an artist - and continue with today is the very quickly changing outlets for art. At one point I was in quite a few galleries and doing quite well, a few years later tastes changed and although my work was definitely better - my sales dropped. I owned and operated an art gallery in a major city around me and did quite well in it, but found some major emotional barriers to continuing on that route. I moved many hours away and found myself working for someone else's gallery, which was better as I got to work for a major player in the historical art scene here, but definitely didn't keep me happy as I couldn't sit around in a gallery and be happy. I moved on to teaching art and definitely found that to be very rewarding. I struggle very much with self-promotion though so I have my issues with this. I also am on the Board of Directors of our city's art gallery - I've learned that I dislike this very much, but it is eye opening. Once teaching art I had an opportunity to work on backgrounds for the animation industry - the pay is not awesome to begin with! Teaching has much more potential, however, working in the animation industry can give you some cred to start teaching later on - plus pay increases fairly quickly if you put the leg work in. What I've come to learn through being in the fine art side of this field for decades now is to be honest with yourself where your strengths and weaknesses are. I would also say that it is absolutely essential to focus on the foundations of art to really get anywhere. Clearly you're very talented, but keep up with constant practice and do not let the talent get to your head. It requires talent plus hard work to make it in this industry! If I had have been honest with myself from the get-go I would have worked to start teaching much earlier on. I know that I don't deal well with wealth gaps - watching very wealthy people come drop $40,000 on a painting, step over homeless people and complain about them on the way out of the gallery is not something I could continue doing. I also would have known that I detest sitting still and working in an art gallery kind of requires that. Mild social anxiety also has gotten in the way of sales. That being said, if you can handle that stuff - there is a lot more money to be made selling artwork made by other people than creating the work yourself. Being surrounded by art, you learn a lot about what the public likes and supports, which in turn helps your own artwork. I doubt that my personal journey means a lot to you, but I wanted to share it with you because it shows that there are soooooo many different ways to make money on art. If you are interested in the fine art industry I'd be happy to share more of what I've learned over the years in the traditional art gallery system (I'm in Canada, where ideas are similar, but not the same as the US). If not, I would research and come up with as many different types of ways to make a living as an artist. Then make a list of your personal wants/needs/skills/deficits and just try to align them. Where you are happiest - likely you'll do the best. I hope more people respond to this because I would love to also read other people's thoughts on this. I tried to keep this short, but I probably could have written a novel on it - ha ha... sorry for the long read.

If you could be doing anything with your art (you had no barriers and had sufficient skill) what would you imagine yourself doing? Also, what do you mean when you say you're struggling with the emotional part of your art?