None of These Creative Careers Started in Art School

Episode 0011: Tsherin Sherpa on bringing Thangka & the art of Nepal to the contemporary art world

Nepalese artist Tsherin Sherpa on training as a Thangka painter at 13, representing Nepal at the Venice Biennale, and his show at the Honolulu Museum of Art.

Four guests on the show built careers around photography, web design, writing, and painting. None of them has an art degree. One learned his craft from his father starting at age 13. Another taught himself Photoshop as a teenager by cold-emailing bands.

A degree isn’t the only path into a creative career. An apprenticeship under someone already doing the work, or a self-directed education built around real deadlines and honest feedback, can do the same job a formal program would, and sometimes produces a more distinct body of work.

The apprenticeship model still works

Jonny Hoffner, now a wedding photographer and co-founder of the golf apparel brand Good Lion, studied philosophy in college, not photography. After graduating, a professor’s advice stuck with him.

Find somebody who’s doing what you want to be doing, and study under them.

Hoffner found two photographers through Craigslist who were looking for assistants and spent about six months learning under them before he had a portfolio of his own. He hadn’t planned on shooting weddings specifically. It’s just what the photographers he studied under happened to shoot.

Tsherin Sherpa’s apprenticeship went further back and lasted longer. Born in Nepal to a family of traditional Tibetan Thangka painters, he started training under his father at 13. The formal training took five years: copying the same drawing over and over, for months at a time, until the technique became automatic.

You’re repeating what your master gives you, a sample drawing, and you copy it over and over for months until it becomes your second nature.

Teaching yourself when there’s no one to apprentice under

Not every guest had a mentor down the hall. Ethan Marcotte, who coined the term “responsive web design,” started designing websites in college in the late 1990s, before web design existed as a taught discipline or much of a formal industry at all. He describes himself as self-taught, learning through blogs, essays, and a community of people figuring out the medium in public at the same time he was.

Joshua Graves came to design even earlier, and even less formally. As a kid, he pored over the album art on records his dad brought home to repair jukeboxes. As a teenager, he taught himself Photoshop and started cold-emailing his favorite bands, offering to design their record packages.

No one was going to let me design their record packages. I wasn’t even close to being good enough. But I got a couple of bites, and that’s how I got my start.

Those small, real jobs, a band’s website here, a photography assistant gig there, did what a classroom might have done for someone else. They gave both guests a place to practice a skill against an actual deadline and an actual audience.

How not having formal training becomes an advantage

A shared curriculum tends to produce a shared sense of what “good” looks like. Building your own path, without one, forces you to construct your own criteria for good work, drawn from whatever reference points you happen to have.

That’s close to what happened with Sherpa. His formal training was rigorous and narrow: sacred Buddhist iconography, passed down almost unchanged for generations. When an art professor and friend later suggested he consider a conventional art degree, she told him something different.

You have a very unique perspective. You might as well not go to art school. Just continue what you’re doing, and you’ll find your own pathway.

Sherpa took that advice. He built his practice by studying contemporary exhibitions on his own time and using the traditional technique his father taught him to make work about identity, migration, and his own life, subjects a purely academic path might have pointed him away from.

What to do when school isn’t an option

Not everyone weighing a creative career actually has school as a live option, whether that comes down to money, timing, or access. A few things can replace it, based on how these four guests actually built their skills:

• Find one person already doing the work you want to do, and get close to it, even for free. Hoffner found his mentors through Craigslist assistant listings.
• Attach your practice to something with real stakes. Sherpa’s five years of repetition were aimed at actual monastery murals and Thangka commissions, work with a real audience waiting on the other end.
• Build a feedback loop with people whose judgment you trust. A program does this automatically. Without one, you have to go find it yourself.
• Study the history and theory of your field deliberately, since no one will assign it to you. Marcotte still keeps up a wide reading habit through blogs and RSS for exactly this reason.

None of these four guests would say a degree is worthless, or that self-teaching is easier. What their paths share is a willingness to start before they felt ready, and to find, or build, whatever structure a formal program would have provided. You can hear the full conversations with Ethan Marcotte in Episode 1, Joshua Graves in Episode 6, Jonny Hoffner in Episode 8, and Tsherin Sherpa in Episode 11.