Can you make any kind of living as an artist?

The statistics make for uncomfortable reading. Almost a third of visual and applied artists earn less than £5,000 a year from their creative work, according to a survey conducted last year by Artists' Interaction and Representation (AIR); 57% of the 1,457 respondents said that less than a quarter of their total income was generated by their art practices and only 16% of them paid into a private pension fund, raising questions about how professional artists will support themselves once they reach retirement age.

The figures are not much better for musicians. PPL, a music licensing company that collects royalties on behalf of 24,000 performers, says that 90% of them earn less than £15,000 a year. A similar proportion of songwriters and composers earn less than £5,000 a year.

Then there is the added pressure of austerity-era cuts. Local authorities anticipate cuts of 7.1% each year for the next two years and the arts are often earmarked as dispensable in comparison with "frontline organisations". This leads to an inevitable loss of commissions and grants, in a climate where competition is already rife – individuals applying for grants to the Arts Council already have only around a 32% success rate nationwide.