A savage world of hyperspecific and generic forces
Clashing each other like hordes of furious crustaceans
So you're a jobseeker, the illustrator kind. Is it better to be represented by an illustration agency - "a pimp", grumbles an alcoholic cartoonist in the less illuminated and more piss scented corner of the bar - or is it better going rogue, like an illustrator ronin?
You are a freelancer! Nothing with "free" in the name can be bad, right? You run in the hills of commissioned arts, you grab the early eggs of school teaching books, you take instructions manuals from its roots with your bare hands, the wind in your face bringing wild insights for your next comic book that will be published by the highly sensitive pirates who converted a giant Xerox machine into a ship that navigates from one convention to another...
But the unavoidable will happen: the cyclical seasons of submiting works for editors, agencies, corporate mammoths, maybe the baker next to your home is in an urge for a new tattoo. It's time to do what a true warrior must do: the bloody ritual of sending emails. With tiny little links magically guided to samples of your work. And then you wait.
And, frozen Hell!, what a waiting it will be. But now and then you'll hear some distant beeps, very rare, random and isolated, as if they were sent by the mythical Voyager 1, now a very tired derelict affected by some kind of cosmic Alzheimer.
The exhausting activity of clicking takes its toll and you fell asleep, but fortunately your caffeinated guinea pigs don't, so the tape recording have some of the signals recorded. You take the tape and extend it all over the floor, looking for patterns, you cut it and rearrange it in a mad frenzy Burroughs-like butoh dance and then, finally, you get something out of almost nothing, little lead nuggets obtained from the ghost of a non-cooperative tortured oracle.
And it goes like this:
You must work with passion
Believe me, even if you work at home, it's uncomfortable to draw naked while biting a rose. Nothing against Julio Iglesias, but is very hard to work all day listening to all his discography, it makes me mad. Or "loco", in the Julio's language. And yes, I got the new Adobe pack that make your files smell like magnolia and chocolate.
The strict guide line agency
We see that you are an experienced professional with a wide range of styles, but we work only with deep fried illustration.
The international buffet agency
Yes, our goal is to occupy Greenland with 900 million illustrators and make it energy independent with the power generated by all this people drawing at same time. Unfortunately, our agency is a place for everybody but you. Yes, specifically you. Our computers analyzed data and profile details that we have been collecting since you were born and it reveals that in the next year you will have a rare aura tumor and it can be contagious. Oh, sorry, I'm telling classified information!
The tight pack agency
We're not looking for new artists for our team. We have Angus, a scottish guy living in Sumatra. You know, Angus has a very specific set of skills: he mastered the art of portraying hyper-realistic jelly recipes. He uses a self made airbrush with his feet. Oh, no, nothing tragic here, Angus has hands, is just that he uses the hands to make ceramics. And the other artist is Dolores, a consumed by heroin parakeet that works exclusively on pop-up books with World War I scenes.
Uniqueness or burst
Our agency gladly will take you if your work has true and pure originality, if you are really unique and stand out among others, like a pulsar of uniqueness in the middle of smelly meteorites fluctuating around like space turds. Let us know if you develop a third arm, if some tail is growing at the end of your back, if you can vomit eatable comic strips in a diverse variety of flavors.
Are you fast?
Sure, you can make a still life to present this evening, but can you be really fast? Like fast enough to fold space and time and get back to 1452's Anchiano, not far from Firenze. You arrive a little dizzy, walk around like a mad man in slow motion, but the people there gets from suspicious to welcoming and take you as part of the community. They feed you, they teach you, they show you the fields and the animals. You find love, you marry, you are one of them now, surrounded by the same trees and flowers, listening to the same birds, all of you under the same ancient Sun. You have a child, then another, then another, and your love for life grows with every new morning, you can see true commitment and purpose in the eyes of your dog, in the seeds, in the stones that form your home. It has been almost two years since your oldest son, Jacopo, left after the killing of a noble man in some unclear duel episode, something to do with a young girl and broken promises that nobody dares to talk about. But this is not the main itch in your mind that keep you awake at night, when nothing moves except the wind murmuring secrets to the leaves. There is something else that crawls deep in the back of your skull, a blind lizard searching for an exit. One day it hits you like a furious bright bull, an urgent discharge resulting from a combination of a specific spectrum range of colors arranged by the Sun light reflecting on the surface of the river you once called friend. This ray comes as betrayal and it brings a message: REMEMBER. You are here on a mission. You can't plow no more, this earth is now irrelevant, because you remember. You run, no matter the direction. Your wife will live and die under the sign of why?. To you the tears are now lubricant, because now you are an acceleration machine and now is forever. You arrive back just in time to send the commissioned art: a portrait of a newborn Leonardo da Vinci. The client returns the mail asking for some modifications, to make it more "renaissancy", because the baby seems just a regular baby. You look at the screen without really seeing it, in this perennial trembling pause to contemplate the unspeakable truth, the image that you will take to your tomb: a bearded baby.
ANYWAY, I know illustrators with good experiences with representation and others doing well without it.