It’s time for another post. The frustrating thing this week is that I don’t have a lot to write about. Or I don’t think I do. I’ll know for sure by the time I finish this post if I have much to say about the week.
I did learn something that has made a difference in how I approach something. And it’s made it more palatable, tolerable, both, maybe. That’s helpful. So maybe a little personal background for a start. I have a stubborn streak. I have such a stubborn streak that when it gets triggered, I dig in and throw a mental temper tantrum about it. If I’m lucky it’s just a mental temper tantrum and not a full-on tantrum. I’ve gotten better about this over the years because I have learned that it really doesn’t serve me well. But it still comes up on occasion though not too severe. Usually, it rears its head more as ‘that feels really awkward or creepy’.
I will be the first admit that I don’t really like the whole putting myself out there and asking for people to look at my work or like my stuff and that sort of thing. I would tell you it’s always felt sort of desperate. But as I’ve started my art prints store, I need to learn to do this and get comfortable with it. The company I’m working through has a whole strategy for doing this and several artists who have become successful through it have come out and said it absolutely works.
One of the first things that is needed is to get eyes on my art and activity. They have a strategy for this. And when I first heard it, I was thinking how that sounded sort of pathetic the way they suggest going about reaching this social media goal. But this week I happened to catch just a little bit of a discussion about this goal, and it included the reason why. It wasn’t the reason I thought it was.
It had to do with the algorithm for the particular platform. Not to just get people to like your work. That’s just a side benefit. It’s to trigger the algorithm and get it to show your work to more people. Well, dang. I get that. And with that information the methodology for reaching the goal becomes a lot easier.
Now, I am not saying there aren’t still some internal discussions going on. It does require a shift in thought. I have to decide that I want this enough to see it happen and that I’m willing to accept that there are things I might not think make sense that I need to do to make it happen. And then I have to be willing to do the work to make that happen. Because as much as it seems like for some people things just fall in their lap, the truth is they probably did a whole lot of work to get to the point that things could land in their lap. They either did the work or had connections. I don’t have the connections, that I know of, but I can do the work. And having an understanding of why helps make the work more acceptable, if not more palatable.
I worked on art this week. I worked on the Galah over the last weekend and haven’t got back to it. It needed a rest. It’s just about ready to get some work again so I expect to have more on that soon. I mostly worked on the lizard. I think the last post it was just the sketch outline. Now it’s got dots and is coming together, though there is still a lot of work to do. It has been rather insistent this week that it needs attention. I find it much easier to not fight the art and insist on working on something that isn’t interested in being worked on and thus neglecting something that really wants attention. Doing that just never goes well.
Besides, the Galah was at the point all my pieces hit at some time and that is the point where I think, ‘ugh, maybe I should just start over’. I have learned to have a little patience and faith because often this is a fleeting moment in the creation. So, if I just keep going, or give it a rest, I can then see what needs to happen and where it needs to go next. The Galah had hit that point. I’ve had that with the Lizard already and I just keep working. I even had that with my experiment.
I don’t work on the experiment near as much as the other paintings. But it was asking for some attention, so I obliged. It was not a simple straightforward process. I added color to fill out more of the scene and then thought I needed to go back and adjust or add more to the areas I’d already worked on. The result was that it looked a lot darker than I wanted it and it lost some of its luminescence. I did what I could to fix it. Not entirely certain I had done the right thing, but I was at a point I couldn’t keep working on it without making a mess. So, I stopped. I walked away for the night. I came back to it the next day after it had dried and discovered that I’d done exactly the right thing. And learned something of what I might need to do for the next segment.
I don’t paint/work from a very trained and technical background. I’ve taken few formal classes and few online classes, so I haven’t had a lot of exposure to techniques for solving specific problems. Or even any problems. That means that for me a lot of things are trial and error and then fix it again. I’ve read a few things of theory about not using this or that when painting and the properties of this or that, but not much. So, to make something of a guess at what might solve the problem I had and to see it be exactly what I needed, was a huge win for me.
My next steps with that piece involve getting the base of color down for the whole thing so I can apply a layer of fixative and get a bit more texture to move on to more detail.
I had another big moment for me. One of the things that we are often asked to do, whether in business or art or anything else we do, is to sum up or present a one or two sentence synopsis of what we do. What type of music we play or compose, what type of work we do at our place of employment, what type of art we create. In the case of art, and music composing I think, it seems we are also expected to convey not just what we create, but also our philosophy regarding it in those one or two sentences. I have always had a hard time doing this. There are reasons for that. The biggest and most prominent reasons are my unwillingness to really assess what I do, and my distaste of being confined to a definition or category.
Both of those reasons have gotten in the way of me being able to introduce and explain my art to others, particularly since I use multiple mediums. I have finally been able to come up with that definition, explanation. I’ve only just been able to identify this definition and I am still adjusting the wording so I’m not ready to share it.
As you can see, it’s been an eventful week artistically. It has been a quiet week musically. I have work I need to do there though. Some of which I really need to make time for. A friend has asked more than once if I knew a particular song as he can play it but isn’t comfortable singing yet, so I want to learn it. And I have a whole holiday playlist from my sister that I need to get to work on. I did work on a couple of songs but there are like 15 or so on her list. I know I just strum for these, but I do still have to get some familiarity with the strum pattern and the chord changes. And transpose a few of the songs so there’s quite a bit of work to do there. And you know what, with thought I will sign off for this week and catch you up again next time. Cheers.