I started as a makeup artist almost ten years ago. I was a single mom of two boys working as an alt-model (read: naked chick with tattoos serving what was still a niche in a mainstream-saturated market). The money was great, the work environment and what it does to a person, was not. Most of these shoots were poorly-styled and about absolutely nothing but creating jerk-off fodder. I was naive and would daydream about concepts, styling, and artistry- things that didn't matter much but sometimes the "photographers" (I use this term extremely liberally) would let me run with something. Sometimes these guys have fetishes for looking legit, so they hire a makeup artist. As one was going my makeup, I asked her if she liked her job. She was methed out and hung over, nodded her head and said, "yeah, you can make a lot of fuckin money."
The next day I enrolled in cosmetology school.
I was a smart, resourceful person who was desperate for stability. I took any job related to makeup and very much felt wet behind the ears. I worked mostly for makeup stores and built a (shitty) portfolio using the connections I had in the alt-modeling world. Looking back, I know I needed to do this, and I learned a lot, but there comes a time like I experienced this year, where you've got to decide if you're going to live your dream or get paid by someone else to live theirs. It usually comes when what you once thought was a good opportunity, becomes something that insults your skill and level of experience.
My last straight job was at a salon. I was excited for the opportunity because the salon was so prestigious and had a great reputation. I had worked for a leader in the cosmetic industry before and had really felt like my way to making a good life for myself was to work my way up the retail management chain. But when talking to the managers I discovered that in order to keep their job and in order to work their way up, they had to almost completely abandon their makeup artistry and focus on numbers. The internal politics of their work was disheartening. So I knew the game and knew I didn't want to be a part of that. The salon promised something different, which was clienteling under their brand. For a hairstylist, this is a great place to be because the name alone will get asses in your chair, even if people have never met you. But for a makeup artist, I could barely beg people to get in my chair for a free makeup touch-up. They were there to get a haircut and go home.
I'm a Type A, and being clocked in at a job with nothing to do gives me intense anxiety. Doing the same thing over and over without any kind of completion makes me restless and depressed. Not feeling heard when I presented ideas I knew would work if we implemented them, feeling undervalued and replaceable when I knew I had skills that could make the company a lot of money, and a company culture of having to deal with cattiness and gossip because they were coping mechanisms of coworker boredom, wore me down in a major way. I was turning down huge wedding parties that would have paid me cash outside of the salon because I had one 30-minute appointment at a place that paid me $15 an hour, and I started to resent my employer and situation. But I was loyal and trying to make it work because I really felt I needed that steady paycheck.
I'm the last person to rag on a job. I know as an artist that I am sensitive and less-adaptive to certain things that other people have no problem with. I am a firm believer that every job has dignity. If you're employed and you're trying to support yourself, that deserves respect whether its a fast-food restaurant or an operating room. But at this job I felt like my wheels were constantly just spinning. It felt like the perfect job for me... 8 years ago. But where was I going to go, and what was I going to do?
I started talking to a friend just to vent and bitch about my job. I beat myself up all the time because I felt like I was being ungrateful and was just never happy. She was a good friend and told me, "you need to just get out there and be a freelance makeup artist full-time." That was really easy for her to say. I told her that I couldn't do that. She told me that everyone on the outside could see that I was capable of doing it, I just needed to believe it and go for it.
She told me to think of my salon job as my second job and to start putting everything I had into my "real" job- the job I really wanted, which was indeed to be a full-time freelance artist. Then something amazing happened. I got fired.
When my boss called me into her office to pull the plug, I thanked her. I said, "I can physically feel a huge weight lifted off of my shoulders because I hate this job." I walked out of the building so elated that I never had to walk back into that place, and I will never forget the drive home. I wasn't scared, I was excited. I would have never left that job and if I did I would have gotten another one just like it because I subscribed to that dangling carrot of "stability." My boss took that option away from me, and even today, I could fucking kiss her for it.
I went home and made a list of everything I had to do, from the immediate things like file for unemployment to search Craigslist for gigs and call EVERYONE I could think of and let them know I was available for makeup gigs. I became a social media whore- if I bought a new makeup brush, I posted about it, if I used an old one, I posted about it, if I did my friend's eye makeup for a date, I posted about it. I wanted to make my name synonymous with makeup artistry and when people thought of makeup, my name and face needed to be the first thing that came to mind. It took about a month to get the wheels turning and before I knew it I was bombarded with paying work. I was happy. I loved my job and the people I worked alongside. If someone pissed me off I finished my gig and never had to see them again. I could wear what I wanted. I could add things to what I did that made the experience special for the client. I discovered that what the salon tried to do to mold me into their "brand" was preventing me from being who I really was, but that who I really am is marketable. People can get their makeup done anywhere, but they hire me and refer me to their friends because they like how I treat them, they like how I make them look and feel, and they think I am fun to be around. That's MY brand.
Unfortunately, I live in a cold weather climate where weddings and outdoor photo shoots come to a grinding halt in the winter. I was prepared for the slow season, but my savings account was quickly wiped out by a car repair, a roommate moving out and effectively doubling my rent, and a couple of other unexpected things. With no work but the same amount of bills, what am I going to do?
I thought of that scene in "Ace Ventura:Pet Detective" where Ace takes on the case of a missing dolphin. He's dodging his landlord and yells at his pets, saying, "I have no FOOD for you. I need a DOLPHIN to get MONEY for food!" The dolphin didn't just disappear, but where the fuck was it? When you're looking for work, you know its out there but you can't find it. Your daily emotional rollercoaster goes from driven and determined to panicked and desperate. I still would not trade it. It challenges me, and I've learned about myself that comfort makes me lazy.
Tyler Perry said something that has always stuck with me, which is that sometimes all you can do is plant seeds. You can't control the weather. In those seasons where all I'm doing is working my ass off with no pay and wondering how I am going to do this, I have to remember that I am not running in circles, I am planting seeds. I have seen fruit bear from shit I didn't even know I planted, and its been some of the biggest of my career. Artists, the reason that most people don't do what we do, is because they quit during these times. It is incredibly easy to get discouraged and give up because the game seems rigged against you. One of the biggest things that pisses me off and makes me want to throw in the towel is an "entrepreneur" in my field who's got someone taking care of her. If you're a bored housewife married to an investment banker, you and your girlfriends have always liked makeup, and you decide to drop $20k in a poorly-planned small business that crashes and burns, its an eye roll from him and back to business as usual. When I can't pay rent, there is nobody there to make sure I am not out on the street. There's no rich family member to make sure I don't fail, or to give me the one-time investment I could use to take what I do from small potatoes to big time, if only. Everything I do is piecemeal because it has to be. This gets people down to the point that they quit, and I understand why. But the difference between them and us is that we don't see times like these as FAILURE, we've trained ourselves to see it as the seed-planting season and understand that we have to wait for the harvest. Like farmers we have to learn how to plan, how to ration what we have when we get an abundance, how to push ourselves to work even when we aren't yet seeing benefits to us, and learn the extremely difficult skill of waiting.
I know I can only do one thing at a time, but I've got a list of things I am diligently checking off at any given time. This kind of life is not for everyone but I am convinced that it is for me and that this is a starting point, not the final destination. When I look back on where I was- from the quality of my artistry to the people I interacted with to the type of work I did- I can noticeably see growth, and every time there was a big bump upward there was fear, uncertainty and risk. A large part of success was just knowing what I was good at and owning up to what my weaknesses are so that I can avoid them, push through them or seek help with them. The rest is learning what you have that people want and getting people to pay you for it.