PSYCHOLOGY BUSKING a la wordswords: GUITAR BUSKING OR PORTRAIT BUSKING: DECISIONS DECISIONS.

AN EVENING BUSK

For me, busking season is in full strum! I have slung my guitar to my favorite haunts at least a dozen times since the munificent prairie weather began. For me, there is no better way to practice my guitar skills than to go on a busk. When busking, I get paid to practice! In my reality, busking is always a mercenary adventure.

However, every time I run or walk by the Saskatchewan Legislative Building, and I do so every day, I have a yen to portrait busk. Such a perfect setting for drawing a person’s visage and having that Legislative Building as the backdrop!

SASKATCHEWAN LEGISLATIVE BUILDING

And now my good fortune: To busk with my guitar, or to busk with my pencil. Decisions, decisions.

Such a situation should be simple to solve, especially if I really think about it and break it up into these qualitative categories: technical skills, tactical skills, time economy, and social acceptance.

Technical Skills

Prerequisite skills are necessary for both busking endeavors. For guitar busking being able to strum some chords, along with singing and/or harping, is a must for making big money. Those busking with a guitar but without these technical skills are just beggars with guitars. Saying this, people will toss coin, out of pity, to a beggar with a guitar, but people will toss more coin to an obviously talented street musician.

Factoid: Learning a few cowboy chords, C-G-D-Em-Am-F, on the guitar is a rather simple process (practice, practice, practice) and from just these, one can thrum and sing or hum a hundred songs.

Now having the skill to draw a person’s face and have that drawing closely resemble the person does take skill, and a tremendous skill at that (if I do say so myself). Such a talent does not come easy. I know a slew of visual artists who either draw or paint landscapes, seascapes, cityscapes, but cannot draw portraits. Portrait busking is a high technical skill, especially on the street.

Factoid: Drawing a person’s likeness is challenging at the best of times, never mind when a self-imposed ten-minute time limit is attached.

Tactical Skills

Guitar buskers need high traffic to make money. And so, guitar buskers should know where and when the best buskspots are for the highest pedestrian traffic. Oftentimes, this is determined by the type of community. If one is busking in a tourist hot spot, anywhere and anytime downtown will fit the bill. If one is not in a tourist community, noon hours and supper hours are the best, provided the buskspot is in front of a grocery store or liquor store or drug mart. If the buskspot is at a mall entrance, then anytime is fine.

Factoid: Liquor stores, drug marts, corner grocers are perfect settings for buskers during the noon and supper hours. Of these buskspot choices, liquor stores by far, provide the most profit for the guitar busker.

Portrait busking needs the high traffic but not the same setting as the guitar busker. The portrait busker needs a slow setting, a park or somewhere similar. Noon hours are good, but supper hours not so much. The portrait busker needs the pedestrian high traffic but not the pedestrian urgent pace.

Factoid: None of these places where a guitar busker typically sets up would be very profitable for a portrait artist. These places are just too zippy, people arriving to purchase and then leaving. And setting up a drawing space would be clunky and cluttering and intrusive. Better to be drawing in a park, a more relaxed non-bustle buskspot.

Time Economy

When guitar busking people simply toss their coins into my guitar case as they pass by. Some passers-by-consumers may stop to chat, but only for a minute or two at most. Never have I drawn a crowd busking in front of a vendor’s entrance. And only sometimes have I drawn a crowd busking in a park, Victoria Park close to my condo, and on non-busking occasions while thrumming on a bench in Wascana Park. Whenever I guitar busk I stay 60 – 90 minutes only at any particular buskspot.

Factoid: Though I am there for 90 minutes max, it takes just seconds for even my most generous consumers to throw coin or bills my way. Guitar busking, take is usually $40 - $60 dollars per 90 minutes.

My consumers for portrait busking, on the other hand, take longer. Drawing anyone takes me 10 – 15 minutes! This is an eternity when I compare to the time economy of guitar busking. This means 10 – 15 minutes to be paid. Mathematically, from a point of profit, say I take 15 minutes per portrait.

Factoid: If I am busy, and there is usually a line-up, that means four portraits per hour which translates to 60 dollars an hour, like my take playing my guitar and harp.

Weather

As a hiker I abide by the expression, “there is no such thing as bad weather, there is only bad dress.” As a busker I know there is a simple formula. When the weather is clement, windless, and sunny, my consumers are munificent – when the weather is inclement, my consumers are miserly. I believe this inclement-weather stinginess is the result of people wanting, not to linger, spent as little time as possible in miserable weather conditions. In rainy weather I cannot busk. Period. In cold weather, temperatures as low as 10 degrees, I can guitar busk, but I cannot portrait busk. In windy weather I can (with adjustment) guitar busk, but I cannot portrait busk.

Factoid: I have attempted to fancy myself as a brutto-tempo busker. To become this, in the past I have traded my guitar for a didgeridoo and droned while wearing my mittens. Actually this worked out very well, not really sure why I have been reluctant to replicate such a busking behavior.

Factoid: I cannot stand being out in the cold (two puns intended). Dressing comfortably while at the same time looking cool is a high skillset. Over the years I have evolved to accomplish this. There is no such thing as bad weather, there is only bad dress. Busking, I have no bad dress. I dress always (and always in fashion too) for the weather.

Social Value

Among the hoi polloi, there is vertically measured social strata hierarchy. Moving from left to right on this social appreciation street continuum, first there are the perceived dregs, a group nobody seems to appreciate. These are the unkempt who stagger and stumble and mumble and bump into people. Toward the right of the dregs are the beggars who stagger and orally solicit for food or coffee money. Vertically more to the right are the panners (panhandlers), who stand or sit cap-in-hand hoping for coins. And farthest to the right on this continuum are the street buskers.

Just yesterday, as I packed up my guitar, finishing my one-hour busk, a couple of middle-aged men approached and informed me that they were going to busk. Within minutes both were sprawled along the sidewalk, their legs stretched almost blocking the entrance, and their backs leaning against the store glass. One of them was blowing cacophony out of his harmonica. Not to besmirch these two, too much, but yikes.

The collective social prestige of all the above mentioned is somewhat low but rising the farther right they are plotted on the social strata continuum. All these groups can be quite entertaining, and sadistically, this would include the dregs, the lowest group, as indicated which I have plotted on the far left. The buskers, on the other hand, are meant to be entertaining from any social point of view.

Factoid: Guitar buskers are often referred to as beggars with guitars. Always, I am attempting to dispel this notion, not in the general sense, but only selfishly in the brackets-around-me personal sense.

Factoid: As a portrait busker, I sense of higher public appreciation for me when compared to my guitar-busker self.

And after having this empirical evidence in my busking brain for over a couple of decades, my being recognized as a portrait busker is regarded in a much higher esteem than my being recognized as a guitar busker. However, for me, portrait busking is also a much higher challenge than my lissom guitar busking.

Portrait busking is moil and toil, whereas guitar busking is as effortless as the perfunctory nods I offer those with whomever I have eye contact. Though ofttimes tempting because of the recognized social value of being a portrait (street) artist, but being the rather lazy person that I fundamentally am, and ever abiding by my mea culpa of minimum effort for the maximum return, I doubt that I will ever completely jettison guitar busking in trade for portrait busking.

I do confess though, there is much, much joy in handing a consumer a likeness that I have drawn. And after drawing over a thousand faces I love to brag over and over again that "My pencil never lies!"