Starving artist

Some starving artists desire mainstream success but have difficulty due to high barriers to entry in fields such as the visual arts, the film industry, and theatre.

These artists frequently take temporary positions such as waitering or other service industry jobs while they focus their attention on "breaking through" in their preferred field.

Virginia Nicholson writes in Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900–1939: Fifty years on we may judge that Dylan Thomas's poverty was noble, while Nina Hamnett's was senseless.

[2]The starving artist is a typical late 18th and early 19th-century Romanticism figure featured in many paintings and works of literature.

In 1922, Franz Kafka wrote a short story called "A Hunger Artist" about a man who seeks fame for his public performances of fasting.