In what ways can you work today to position yourself for passive income in your future?
This is an interesting question – positioning myself for passive income – and it wasn’t until I’d taken a Business Math class while pursuing my Associates Degree through correspondence courses that I learned about multiple streams of income. I think passive income can be considered an individual stream that, when combined, creates multiple streams. I have often thought of ways to create multiple streams of income while in prison, not just for the future. This is something many prisoners think about because the pay we receive is so small that it doesn’t even cover the cost of hygiene expenses for a month. So I have thought about passive income or any other form of income for many years.
No one in prison enjoys calling home to ask for money. Financial independence is a measure of adulthood to many. Being able to take care of oneself, or at least cover the costs of living while incarcerated, is a necessity since many do not have financial support from outside the prison. So, for me, multiple streams of income, or passive income, means financial independence inside as well as building a nest egg for future release. With these thoughts in mind, I learned how to paint and draw while incarcerated. This may simply sound like a productive way to pass the time, not a way to build passive income, but it required many personal hurdles.
Why would painting or drawing require mental hurdles? Despite simply training one’s hand and mind to work in conjunction? Well, I learned about photography in high school. This was before the advent of digital photography and photoshopping and then the evolution of camera phones. I learned about F-stops, exposure time, flashes, developing film/prints in a dark room, matte paper vs. glossy, black and white instead of color, matting a print, all of it. I fell in love with the silence of the dark room, the red glow of the bare bulb, the acrid sting of chemicals in my nose, positioning a negative under the lens to create a print, overlapping prints on top of each other to create unexpected creations and so much more.
I loved it so much that I went to college intent on a fine arts degree in photography. My first year art classes, though, were the most basic and boring: art history, and drawing. I slept thought most of art history and actively rebelled against drawing because it was messy and imprecise. In the span of a tenth of a second I could instantly capture exactly what I saw, or in a matter of minutes I could create something someone had never seen. Drawing took time and would never be exactly what the eye perceived. This disdain led me to actively dislike drawing.
Then life intervened. My college pursuit ended, I joined the Army and before I knew it I was no longer living in a college dorm, but a prison cell. And I suddenly had hours upon hours to fill. The art I fell in love with was taken away from me. I suffered many years with no access to art. It wasn’t until I met Arnetta, my in-prison art teacher who had attended art school in Cleveland, Ohio, that I felt the weight lift off my shoulders. Art became my solace and peace of mind in a crowded and often times negative place. Arnetta spent many hours teaching me how to paint, and once I realized I could be somewhat financially independent I saw a glimmer of a future for myself. She warned me, though, that learning how to paint anything other than flowers would require stronger drawing skills. I pushed ahead with my painting skills until I could push no more. I relented. Not because I wanted to be the best painter in the world (when was the last time you looked at a de Koons or a Pollack and thought, “Oh wow! That’s so accurate and technically precise?” Never.), but because I had hours to fill, so why not? I forced myself to sit during countless dull empty hours working in the kitchen and practiced on every random face I could find in any magazine someone had handy. I took up a pencil and begin training my hand to work in conjunction with my eyes. My first faces looked like the ones I had drawn in college – horrible. But over time – many months of practicing just one feature at a time – I finally got a face to resemble the one I was looking at in the magazine.
Then my art teacher handed me a charcoal pencil. I vaguely remembered the charcoal pencil from my college days. It was the messy stick that got black dust everywhere. But when I took that pencil and dragged it down the white paper in front of me I fell in love. After months of practicing, I had opened my heart up to drawing. I held on to that first charcoal drawing for over 20 years and often looked at it to remind myself of how far I’d come. And how far I still wanted to take this art thing. Did I want to return to photography? I had worked on the photo detail in prison on two different compounds, had many years of practice under my belt of arranging both humans and dogs to create happy photos, but the new photography with computers and digital cameras, was that what I had fallen in love with? Did I still see a camera in my hands for the future?
No, I didn’t want to return to taking pictures, or creating art with a camera. I had let the charcoal pencils into my life and their dust cluttered up, not just my nose and pores and clothes, but also my heart. I’d expanded my skills to include pastels and ink/pens and experimented with different papers to create layers of textures and moving effects. Now I see a future filled with pencils, paper and hopefully also paint and canvases. Currently I use it to support myself in prison and hopefully I can create a future for myself using this art.
How will art, whether with paint or charcoal, become passive income? Especially since the market is exploding with NFTs and computer generated art? As art evolves, so must the artist. I am looking forward to learning how to do the same things I can do with paint over the course of several hours, much like Banksy, but on a computer, and then that image can appear on books, or magazines, website screens. Those images will then become passive income, much like the royalties paid on books. A friend of mine at home is currently asking for artwork to go in his cookbook, but had I not disciplined myself to sit down and hone my skills, I never would be in a position to create art. I would only be able to admire it and mourn the loss of the art that fed my soul for so long. Now I am positioning myself in a market to be employable for all types of assignments – whether it is for people looking for art to go on their skin or art to go on their walls – and I plan for many of those commissions to be just one of the multiple streams of income I can incorporate into my future.
