When are you allowed to call yourself an artist?

If you clearly have the talent from a young age?
If others tell you: "You are a born artist"?
If you have been to art school and got your diploma?
If a gallery wants to display your work?
If you have sold a certain amount of paintings?

Different people will give you different answers.

Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as this:

So, an artist is somebody who creates art using conscious skill and creative imagination.

It does not say anything about art school.
(You could also ask yourself what people who made art before the existence of art school were called.)

It says nothing about having to be born with talent.
Noting about selling your art and galleries.
And nothing about getting permission from anyone at all.

An artist is someone that makes art by using creative imagination and who is skilled in it.

And skill has a scale.
Somebody who creates art for a year is more skilled than somebody who started yesterday. 

But somebody who created art for 20 years is more skilled than the artist who started a year ago.

I would say that skill therefore, is relative.

When I started out in 2023, I had very little skills compared to today.  I did not dare to call myself an artist just yet. Especially not in public. 

I just could not see myself in that way.

As I progressed, my skills got better. And at some point, especially when you yourself are the one teaching yourself how to paint (albeit with the help from free online resources), you have to ask yourself: 

When can I consider myself an artist?
When am I allowed to call myself that?

The truth in my opinion is this.

1. We are made in the image of the great Creator and Artist, which makes us all creators and artists by nature - just by living our daily lives. Just by being yourself. Even if you would never would make actual art or if you would be really bad at it.

2. If you are created with a (hidden) dream, an artist dream in our case, we are destined to be just that.

A dream is not some fantasy.
A dream is your navigation towards your purpose.
It's just that we are taught to move away from that because bills need to be paid.

3. Being an artist is an identity. ("I am an artist".) 

And this is where it gets interesting.
Because nobody told you you could step into identity to realize your dreams way faster than the way you were taught.

We are taught that we need to work up to becoming something. You need to go to school for another 4 years to become this or that. And I am not saying that education and skill development does not matter. 

What I am saying is that I discovered that stepping into an identity, even before you see any proof in the physical world that you are that person, will manifest the thing that you desire into your life.

You need to see yourself as an artist first.
You need to BE that artist before you become one.

We will be diving into this a lot in future blogs.

But what I can say is this: I did this even before I realized what I actually was doing and in hindsight I can see that it works in general and that it worked for me.

Because at one point, early in my journey, I made a decision: I AM A GREAT ARTIST (even when I was not). I told myself this over and over again. And many times I started painting with this phrase on my mind. I was just being delusional about it basically, in the privacy of my own home. 

Things began to shift quickly. 
Resources appereared in my reality: just the right kind of online lessons that I needed. Oh, what a coincidence!

I began to paint better very quickly. 
People began to say to me that I was so talented. 
People began to give me art stuff (Like my standing easel that suddenly appeared out of nowhere).

It is easy to brush it all off as coincidence, or the natural order of things. That is what most of us do in life, when things like this happen. Because we have no clue how reality works and we often don't zoom out to reflect on it and investigate it.

But I did. 

For 2 whole years while I painted, I also learned about reality from a neuroscience and quantum physical point of view. And I realized how much psychology, religion and spirituality actually overlap when it comes to changing your life.

Identity shifting is a thing.
I experienced it.
I still do.
And I want you to experience it too.

Let's talk about it in future blogs and build a community together. If you create a free membership account, you can comment and join in on the conversation.

Does this identity shifting excite you?