The “starving artist” archetype is overrated. Not to mention a little insulting. Why should the labor of creative people be romanticized as a noble suffering? One’s ability to call oneself an artist need not be tied to how much of a week is devoted to a craft, nor how much money one earns as a result. Many successful Houston artists sustain themselves by working day jobs, even finding interesting ways to infuse what they’ve learned in other industries into their creative careers.

“So much of my day job has supplemented my music career, and I’m comfortable. I couldn’t do my art if I was a starving artist,” mononymic pop star Angelique says. “I’m not built for it, and so I couldn’t have one without the other.”

In addition to singing, she also runs her family’s entertainment company (AmericaStar Entertainment), sings in the band Nowhere But Up (also with her family), and works as a paralegal. And she enjoys it, pointing out how many wealthy people have multiple income streams. Why can’t an artist employ the same strategy for their own finances?

Angelique’s résumé is diverse, even factoring out her paralegal and musical work. She’s also been a nanny, helped people with their taxes, and served in a home health capacity. Her current role is with a lawyer whose daughter works as a screenwriter, so she enjoys a healthy degree of on-the-job flexibility working for someone who understands the demands of being both a professional and an artist. The skills and connections she’s picked up working outside the music industry directly translate to what she considers a gratifying career inside of it.

“I’ve definitely gotten in front of people who I wouldn’t have been in front of before if I didn’t have the day jobs that I’ve had,” Angelique says. “I would say it makes me a more knowledgeable musician and business owner.”

She says working with taxes has helped her learn how to best pay contractors hired at AmericaStar, and her work in legal and business fields has taught her valuable lessons in how to operate and scale services in a sustainable way. In fact, she wants to go to law school, focusing on estate planning and probate, and plans to continue being a musician and a business owner as well as a lawyer—just like her similarly interdisciplinary father, who, in addition to his legal career, owns AmericaStar and plays guitar in Nowhere But Up.

Watercolorist Philip Weigand, represented by Mont Art House in Sixth Ward, similarly likes having two separate career paths because they satisfy different interests. He works on the business and finance side of the oil and gas industry, and holds an MBA in energy finance from the University of Houston. Since 2010, Weigand has built up experience in mergers and acquisitions, midstream, commercial finance, and business development.

When off the clock, he paints tiny stylized portraits of colorful cattle and larger, more intricate renderings of missions and offshore operations, so finely detailed that new, eye-catching elements emerge from the paper with every viewing. Weigand’s father was an architect, and he credits growing up alongside this merging of art, design, and engineering with his own professional predilections toward these topics.

“I caught the [art] bug early on. Took some classes in my formative years, then did some as electives in undergrad, and just always enjoyed it,” he says. “It was just something that was a way for me to kind of turn on the right brain versus the left side of my brain, which was more for work-related stuff.”

One can easily see a synthesis between these “brains” occurring in Weigand’s work Yellow Platform, which depicts a rig in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. A helicopter flies toward it, adding a sense of movement and urgency, and he includes the fine details of steel beams, ropes, and windows. Because he understands the way every piece of the construction fits together, he’s able to depict it with accuracy while also adding his own aesthetic. In this, he presents as both an artist and a draftsman, adept at both the concrete and technical and the abstract and creative.

Weigand is married, with children. A stable career in oil and gas not only makes his art possible, it also ensures a steady income for his family. He’d require a steady flow of large sums from his watercolors to make the switch to painting full-time.

“I know the whole starving artist concept, but I do like the work that I do in oil and gas currently, and it’s a nice balance that I have right now,” Weigand says. “Yeah, I’d consider [art as a full-time job], but it would need to reach a little bit more critical mass.”

For author Dan Perez, writing both fiction and nonfiction is “just a hobby” for now. His main source of income is hypnotism. He has over three decades of experience in the field, holding down a private practice for the past 11 years.

Despite the connotations and images of being asleep, hypnotism is more a means of encouraging relaxation and hyperfocus—think mindfulness, not mind control. Cleveland Clinic considers hypnosis a form of complementary therapy that can work in tandem with established medical practices. Perez meets his hypnosis clients either in person or online, assisting with issues as far ranging as panic attacks, smoking cessation, establishing healthy eating habits, and even pain management. He himself has benefited from hypnosis, first getting into it while about to finish college and feeling stuck and depressed.

“Helping people get where they want to be emotionally and psychologically is extremely rewarding,” Perez says.

Royalties on his books pay for a meal at Whataburger every now and then; he wouldn’t mind writing, publishing, and selling even more reads. Like Angelique and Weigand, though, he’s satisfied with how he’s balanced having a day job with a career in the arts.

“If my client load ends at 3pm I’ll just grab my [writing] stuff…I do almost all my writing in coffee shops,” Perez says. “And so I’ll go to the Tim Hortons over by me, or the Panera by me, or I’ll go to Empire Café, or I’ll go to Mod Coffee House, and I’ll just sit down [and write] for a few hours.”

In addition to the nonfiction book and four novels he’s already published, Perez is currently working on a vampire novel called Stoker Rules, another nonfiction work titled How to Be Extraordinary, and has outlined a science-fiction book. Even with a full-time job, he says he manages about 1,000 words per writing session. Hypnosis helps, both self-administered and with his colleagues. Although Perez has to carefully maneuver his schedule to make room for his literary pursuits, they aren’t so siloed as to never overlap and influence one another.

“I used hypnosis to become a better writer, more prolific writer, and more committed to it. And I’m extremely happy with all of that,” he says.

He needs both practices in his life, and to make space for them to merge. As he credits hypnotism with improving his writing, he also uses writing to better inform readers about the ins and outs of hypnotism. In Gum, a novel he cowrote with fellow author Richard Nongard, one of the characters uses an hypnosis technique called neurolinguistic programming to keep herself calm during a potentially fatal confrontation. Vampires have traditionally been associated with hypnotism as well, and Perez plans to put a more realistic twist on this in Stoker Rules.

The arts can be a financially precarious pursuit, from potential clients expecting free or insultingly cheap labor in exchange for exposure to the increasingly alarming trend of companies turning to generative AI in lieu of paying for the real deal. But, as many local artists prove, the need for a day job can often converge with a sincere want. Interplay between disciplines holds the potential to enrich a creative practice rather than subtract from it.

“Even when I make it big, I don’t want to stop working in law. I enjoy both of my jobs so much, and I want to have several businesses always,” Angelique says. “It doesn’t mean that you’re a failure if you have a day job, it means that you’re successful. It literally means the opposite of what everybody thinks.”