You make paintings, sculpture, photographs or installations and sell them through galleries, commissions and grants.
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Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Counsellors: send it to a student from your own email in one click.
Programs in the fields this career usually comes through. Each has its own page: what it takes to get in, the courses you need and what it costs.
The median pay is about $62,000 a year. Across everyone in the job it runs from about $39,000 at the lower end to about $94,000 at the upper end. The source is listed under Sources at the end of this page.
Up to 4 years after high school, on the usual route.
$1,000 to $67,000 all in for tuition, fees, exams and kit. Living costs are not counted.
No. There is no licence to hold, though many employers still ask for training or a certificate.
Limited demand nationally, from government outlook data. Demand varies by region, so check your area.
Or read the whole thing here
What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Median
$62,000
Lower end
$39,000
Upper end
$94,000
Job Bank's national median is $29.57 an hour, about $62,000 a year at 40 hours a week, with a low of $18.75 and a high of $45.09. That figure only counts people employed as artists, so it misses the very large number who sell some work and earn the rest of their living another way. Treat it as what the job pays when it is a full-time job, not as what the average artist takes home.
$41.26 an hour
The median in British Columbia, the highest of the provinces Job Bank reports
Alberta's median is $29.00, Quebec's $26.00 and Ontario's $25.71. Job Bank has too little data to publish a figure for the other provinces and the territories. Like the national figure, these count only people employed as artists.
$2,574 to $4,208
The 2026 minimum fee for a solo show of up to 3 months at a public gallery
From the fee schedule of CARFAC (Canadian Artists' Representation) and RAAV (the Quebec visual artists' association). The fee rises with the gallery's budget, and it is paid for showing the work, whether or not anything sells.
Roughly, all in
$1,000 to $67,000
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
Nobody checks for a credential here, so the low end is a year of materials and nothing else. The high end is a four year fine arts degree at about 12,600 a year with fees (NSCAD University, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, for a student from outside Nova Scotia) plus materials at up to 4,000 a year and a few hundred dollars per show for good photographs of your work. A three year college studio diploma, about 5,300 a year with fees at Durham College, is the cheaper middle route. Studio rent of 200 to 700 a month once you leave school is left out because it is a running cost of working, not a cost of qualifying, but it is the expense that catches most artists out.
A degree is optional here. Many working artists have one because it buys four years of studio space, critique and contacts, not because anyone checks.
Sales through a gallery
The gallery keeps a commission on each sale, set in your agreement. In exchange it handles buyers, shipping and promotion.
Exhibition fees
Public galleries and artist-run centres pay artists to show work. CARFAC (Canadian Artists' Representation) publishes a minimum fee schedule that many of them follow.
Grants
The Canada Council for the Arts and provincial arts councils fund individual artists to make new work.
Commissions
Public art, portraits, murals, work for businesses and developers.
Teaching and workshops
Colleges, community centres and summer schools. Often steady part-time work.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
There is no licence and no required school. What you build instead is a body of work, a record of shows and a grant history.
High school
Grades 10 to 12
Visual arts, and make work outside class. Enter juried student shows. Keep everything photographed.
Art school, or not
0 to 4 years
A Bachelor of Fine Arts at a place like OCAD University (Ontario College of Art and Design), Emily Carr University of Art and Design, NSCAD University (Nova Scotia College of Art and Design) or Concordia University. Or a college studio diploma. Or neither.
First shows
While in school and after
Group shows at artist-run centres, cafes, small commercial galleries. This is how a record starts.
First grants
1 to 5 years out
Provincial and federal arts councils fund artists early in their careers too. Apply, get rejected, apply again.
Gallery representation
3 to 10 years out
A commercial gallery takes you on, or you keep selling directly and applying for commissions. Both are real careers.
Visual arts
Studio time and critique. Take every year of it offered.
English
Grant applications and artist statements are writing jobs, and they decide who gets funded.
Business or accounting
You will be self-employed. Invoices, expenses and taxes are part of the work.
Shop or technology
Welding, woodwork and fabrication open up sculpture and public art.
Anyone can call themselves an artist. What exists instead is a set of norms the sector agreed on. CARFAC (Canadian Artists' Representation) is the national association for professional visual artists and publishes a minimum recommended fee schedule with RAAV (the Quebec visual artists' association). Public galleries that receive government funding generally pay those fees. Knowing the schedule, and asking for it, is the difference between being paid to exhibit and being told the exposure is the payment.
Quebec has a 2 year college visual arts program before university, and a law that lets one association bargain minimum conditions for all visual artists.
Finish Secondary V
Age 16 or 17
Visual arts classes, and make work outside class. Photograph everything, since university programs judge you largely on a portfolio.
Visual Arts DEC (Diploma of College Studies, 510.A0)
2 years
A 2 year pre-university CEGEP (public college) program at 26 colleges, including Dawson, John Abbott and Heritage in English. Painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, photography, digital media.
University, in English
3 to 4 years
Concordia's BFA (Bachelor of Fine Arts) in Studio Art, with 7 disciplines from ceramics to photography. Apply with 15 to 20 portfolio pieces and a letter of intent.
Or university, in French
3 years
The 3 year visual and media arts bachelor's at UQAM (Université du Québec à Montréal). For DEC holders the portfolio counts for 60% of the admission decision.
Quebec arts council grants
Ongoing
The CALQ (Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Quebec arts council) funds artists who have lived in Quebec for the past 12 months. Up to 5 applications a year, creation grants up to $50,000.
Since a 2022 reform of Quebec's law on the professional status of artists, the RAAV (Regroupement des artistes en arts visuels du Québec, the Quebec visual artists' association) is the only association legally mandated to represent all visual artists in Quebec. It can negotiate collective agreements with presenters such as museums and galleries that set minimum pay and conditions they cannot go below. Members also get model contracts.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Grant writing
The single highest-value skill in this field. A funded artist gets studio time, materials and a line on the record.
Fabrication skills
Welding, casting, digital fabrication. Large public commissions go to artists who can deliver at scale.
Residencies
Paid or subsidised studio time, often with an exhibition at the end. Banff Centre is the best known in Canada.
A Master of Fine Arts
Not required to sell work, but usually required to teach studio courses at a university.
Documentation
Professional photographs of your work. Juries see the photograph, never the painting.
Preparator or installer work
Hanging shows at a gallery pays the bills and puts you inside the institutions.
Teaching qualifications
Community workshops, school residencies and summer camps are steady paid work.
A mailing list
Direct buyers you own beat any social platform you do not.
Bookkeeping
Self-employed artists can deduct studio rent, materials and travel, but only if the records exist.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Studio in the morning while the light and your focus are good. Afternoons are the business half: photographing finished pieces, writing a grant application, emailing a curator, packing a crate, chasing an invoice. Weeks before an opening the balance flips and you are in the studio until it is done. Many artists teach two days a week and protect the other three ruthlessly.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
Since 1988 the Copyright Act has given Canadian artists an exhibition right. A publicly funded gallery that shows a work made after June 7, 1988, and not for sale, owes the artist a fee. CARFAC (Canadian Artists' Representation) has published fee rates since 1968.
Five of the original Group of Seven, MacDonald, Johnston, Lismer, Varley and Carmichael, worked as commercial artists at Grip, a Toronto design firm, alongside Tom Thomson. The famous landscapes were painted around the day job.
In its 2025 budget the federal government said it intends to change the Copyright Act to create an artist's resale right. Artists in more than 90 countries already get a royalty, often 5%, when an auction house or gallery resells their work.
Job Bank counted about 17,100 people employed as visual artists in Canada in 2023, and half of them were 50 or older. It rates the 3-year outlook as undetermined in every province and territory. With no government rating to go on, this site shows limited demand, its most cautious rating.
Every list is built from the same numbers shown above, so you can see where this career sits next to the others.
Art and craft first, then the rest of the field. See every career in creative.
Last checked October 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in Canadian dollars, based on Government of Canada Job Bank wage data and published salary grids. They vary by province, employer and experience. Tuition is for domestic students. How every figure on this site is sourced and checked.
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