Have you ever heard something like this? “First, you have to complete formal education and earn a fine art degree” or “Artists are born, so you need to discover the talent as early as possible” or “You know, Georgia O’Keeffe painted throughout the later years of her life.” These are some of the numerous ways to answer the question of when it is the best time to become a professional artist – just imagine how many opinions are there. But it is not always the content of the question but your understanding of it that matters.

If you crave to find answers to this timely question, let’s look at the whole picture from a bird’s eye view.

Is There Even the Best Time to Become a Professional Artist?

In this debate, every opinion is technically valid because you can provide solid arguments for each viewpoint. The improvised statistics, however, fail to explain how it usually happens in real life. The thing is that both young and old people become professional artists and gain success; the same is true for those with and without formal education. Of course, we can assume that having a degree and being young and ambitious will be beneficial to your art career. It seems like truth on paper, but it doesn’t give us firm answers that we can rely on.

The answer is that the understanding of art is so diversified and even vague that you can become a professional artist at any point in your life – period. Such things as entering the art school or visiting workshops will hardly disappear in the future. Also, you might be young and ambitious, but you have nothing to say about in your art, so it is not something that brings you a sense of fulfillment. At the same time, if you feel that you don’t want to be a late bloomer, you should start as early as possible, even if your parents didn’t provide you with such a chance in life.

Being a professional artist is not about time; it is about ideas that you want to bring into the world. Nowadays, you can see both young and old painters and sculptors making creative breakthroughs that inspire. The moral is that the debate is pointless when you feel an inner urge to create and show people something you have experienced yourself. After all, it is your choice to become the second Mozart, Paul Cézanne, or Grandma Moses.