Visual artists in England, at any stage in their career, working in any medium, can contact our team for free careers information

The professional visual artists employed by Artquest as our staff team have over 70 years’ combined experience. If you’re an artist working in England, we can give you tailored advice and information on any aspect of your working life. If we can’t help you directly, we can send you to other services in England that can.

Key information

  • As Artquest is funded by Arts Council England, we can’t answer questions from artists outside of England.
  • We don’t provide legal advice. You should ask for legal advice from a qualified lawyer or solicitor where necessary. You can get arts-related legal information using the form below.
  • We can’t read your applications. There are only 4 of us working part time, and we unfortunately don’t have capacity to read all the applications artists ask us to read.
  • We can’t provide mentoring. Check our listings of artist mentors, peer mentoring, or artist networks instead.

We aim to get back to all enquiries within 5 working days, giving our small, part-time team a chance to research an answer and discuss your issue confidentially.

CONTACT: queries from artists
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Looking for a quick answer? Try these pages on artquest.org.uk for an immediate answer your question:

Unfortunately, we can’t read any applications for funding and give individual feedback. We are a part-time team of 3 artists, and don’t have the capacity.

Arts Council England provide limited access support for artists making applications to their funds. Expect a response in around 20 working days (4 weeks). See Visual Arts South West’s useful guide on Arts Council England’s access support.

We are also unable to support artist project funding.

These pages on Artquest might answer your question:

 

How long have you been an artist?
Telling us this means we can give you better answers and suggestions.

If you recently graduated from art school, check with your education provider for careers advice.

You can still request advice from Artquest, but consider also seeking advice from your education provider: there are only a few Artquest staff to respond to all the queries we get.

The top three services for new graduates are:

You can also check our free PRIMER ebook on the first steps for new arts graduates.

We cannot answer questions from current students.

Seek advice from your tutor or education provider, or check our PRIMER ebook on the first steps for new arts graduates.

The top three student advice services from art schools are:

Contacting you: accessibility

We want all artists to be able to use this service, and we usually email a reply. If email doesn’t work for you, give us some other ways to contact you and we’ll get in touch in a different way.
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Monitoring questions

Your answers are used only for monitoring purposes and are kept separate from your query
We ask these questions to monitor our services
Due to our funding, Artquest can only respond to artists living and working in England
Did you attend a higher education institution?
You do not need to have studied art at art school to use our services. We ask this question to understand which art schools we might work with in future.
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Artist in England? Get free advice and information from the Artquest team on any aspect of their art practice and career.

Step 1: search our website

Our website has been constantly updated since 2001 and contains 12,000 pages of advice, information, tips and guidance for artists at all stages in their career. Over 80% of the questions artists ask us are answered on our website.

If you can’t find anything on our site, you can send us a message on the search results page.

Other ways to contact Artquest:

Other resources for artists:

Our Directory contains listings for professional services for artists. See listings for:

See the full Directory for listings helpful to professional artists on dozens of career topics.

Our Artquest Exchange online professional network links artists with their peers. Search for artists with the experience you need, and ask each other questions. Artquest Exchange is open to artists anywhere in the world, for free.