make art

Oh dear. I guess it’s a bad sign when 43 Folders relegates all your entries and comments to “1 year ago” even though you can tell by reading them that they are close to 2 years old… Perhaps it is kind of this website not to record the year in which you wrote a comment… Heh. And all those lovely goals… about the only one I succeeded in was cleaning my studio. And that has happened multiple times since! Hell, I’ve even moved studios since then. Needless to say things have changed direction, but at last I do feel like I am making progress on something, even if it isn’t those specific goals I set down in January 2005.

Wonder if I will ever really use this site in the productive way it was intended to be used? I am going through a personal rebellion against anything “interactive” at the moment, but perhaps if I can interact on my own terms… Time will tell…

Setting things down in black and white:

• Make the summer show a success: creatively, professionally, personally, financially.
• Create an opportunity to do another site-specific project.
• Apply to 5 slide registries or exhibition opportunities (not sure what number is the right one, but I’d like to be specific).
• Two-week self-structured NYC-based residency this summer or fall.

• Do tool-gathering, model-making, site-selection and research for the summer show (including taking photos of the exhibition space).
• Research site-specific art opportunities.

• Shoot photos and get feedback
• Plan exhibition (mounting? framing? rough number of prints?)
• Plan PR (mailing list, what else?)
• Apply for 1-2 site-specific projects

• Mount show
• Schedule residency
• Apply for more stuff

Next year is another matter, I can’t go there yet.

OK, here I go:

Goal for this week: Finish rearranging and cleaning my studio, and mix some paint, and put brush to canvas at least once.

Goal for this month: Really work to stick to the nifty (if obsessive) color-coded schedule I have created. (Upshot is, I’m in the studio three days of the week for varying time periods on this schedule.)

Goal for next three months: Research digital photography, where to get things printed, what resolution photos should be, etc. At least skim my Photoshop Elements 2 book.

Goal for next six months: Build a reasonable body of work that includes paintings and video, document it, and apply to White Columns and possibly other places.

Goal for next year: Learn as much as I can about public art (making proposals, coming up with ideas, slide registry opportunities, etc.) from all sources, and move toward creating opportunities for my work in that arena.

Ongoing goal: Pay studio rent from painting sales/art income, without dipping into personal money.

Whew!!

The tricky thing is figuring out what art-related goals make the most sense. There are the kind of goals that just describe what you are going to do (i.e. apply to 5 slide registries) and those that describe what you want to accomplish (i.e. create an opportunity to do a site-specific project). How to pick the right kind?

Or maybe there is no “right kind” and maybe any specific goal is better than none. Right now I’m thinking of the two above, plus a goal about making my planned show this summer a creative, professional, and financial success.

Today I applied for my first thing in many months. Artists can spend so much time just applying for stuff. I have been desperately trying to set up systems to make it more efficient, so when an opportunity comes up I can whip out the application packet with minimal effort. But somehow I still wind up frantic on deadline day, updating my resume, writing my statement and labeling my slides to the exact finicky specifications of whoever I’m applying to. And the preferences never seem to be the same. One group wants you to mark the top of the slides with the word TOP at the top; another wants you to put a red dot in the lower left corner. One group wants a 500-word statement about your work, another wants 200 words on your career goals. And they have all the power. They get hundreds of these things and they can disqualify anybody they feel like for any reason. “Hmmm… The stamp on this guy’s envelope was a little crooked. Plus, he is clearly using an inkjet printer, not a laser printer. Banish him!” And still we come back, hundreds of us, especially this time of year, breaking our backs and sometimes our wallets to beg for money, space, exposure, recognition… whatever they’re peddling. And apparently it only gets worse… the older/more accomplished you become, the more time/money you spend on your proposals, and you still get rejected more often than not. In spite of all this, I am still hopeful each time I drop one of those envelopes into the mail. Guess I’m a glutton for punishment. I think you gotta have a bit of masochism in you for this career! But even a likely rejection letter can’t take away the feeling I had when I finally got my statement down to 199 words!! Victory!!! (It started out at 288, but that was 88 words too long… I am nothing if not wordy, as you all know well.)