wondercabinet

Specimen No. 5 reprinted and shimmery.

Yay, I love when a new interesting book page or a really good little print run makes me excited all over again about this series. I just added some of the new prints to my shop.

(part of new painting on a map, at Flickr)

I had decided before my hiking trip with Korben that I would come home and blog my face off afterwards, because I was so bursting with ideas and inspirations to write about that week. I now can't remember what any of it was, nor do I care. After spending all day every day last week scrambling up rocks and crawling over boulders and plunging in icy water and staring into Vermont and Maine from the top of a New Hampshire mountain, sitting in front of a computer has seemed an utterly impossible activity. I can't believe they havent yet figured out a way to let me just hit "play" in my brain and let my thoughts dictate entire blog posts which immediately insert themselves into the Typepad compose screen without me ever having to be near one of these little body-imprisoning brain-depleting laptoppy contraptions (contraption is one of the words John Stewart advises John McCain never to use because it betrays his status as an old geezer, BTW). Seriously, this week, if I spend more than one hour looking at the screen, I come away with the equivalent of a severe hypoglycemic crash: spacey, headachey, and with a warbly, half-dead voice. But here I am.

Needless to say, I had a good time on vacation. Totally restorative, and in several ways, clarified a whole bunch of major confusions I've been stuck in for a couple of years.

And glad to find comments on the "how to make time for art" post. I thought of another big one I've been trying to live by:

 - at the beginning of the day, make a list with two items on it. These are the main things you are going to get done for the day. No more doing lots of little teensy things on the to-do list all day just to watch it get smaller. Chances are there are a couple of things on the long complicated list which constitute real work, I mean the kind that moves your mind and creativity and maybe your "career" forward - writing an article (for an audience or not), working on a painting or puppet show, redesigning your web site, or organizing and event, or something less fun but just as important, like researching health insurance plans or cooking all your lunch food for the week, or something else YOU-nourishing that you would otherwise have left to the last minute after you got all the leetle teensy things out of the way. Sometimes the activity will be job-like...like for me, on mondays and tuesdays, it will just be teaching all day.

Then take all the teensy things and quickly number them in order of importance. set aside 30 minutes sometime during the day to tackle the first few. Then stop and do the same thing the next day. BAM. Little (though sometimes necessary) things are now put in their place in relation to the thing that make a much bigger difference to you.

For example.

7 - 8          run or stretch, and breakfast
8 - 12         ART: work on new sculpture
12-12:30     SUSTENANCE: lunch
12:30-1:30  COMMUNICATIONS: emails and communications and blog attention
1:30-4:00    WORK: redesign web site. OR: plan class OR: list new work and process orders. OR: etc..
4pm - 4:30  THE TEENSY THINGS: (on this day it might be: email 4 people to plan things. make dentist appointment. water plants. fix that stupid door hinge. order supplies)
5pm           SUSTENANCE: go home. eat. love. talk. sing. sleep.

Again, as I said in the other post...its about establishing the ideal. Sometimes life hands you days when you just HAVE to get FOUR major things done in one day, and you just stay up 'til 2am doing it all.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Q. Amy, do you ever actually stick to that schedule?
A. About one day in every 4. Which is enough to change my life and make the other days closer to the schedule than they would have been otherwise.
Q. What about loneliness?
A. Yeah, working by yourself all day is lonely. So, calling a loved one and chatting for 10 minutes and getting some giggles in trumps other things in the plan sometimes, as it SHOULD. Screw capitalism!
Q. What about blogging for an hour about how to organize your day?
A. Total procrastination. Don't do it if you value your time.

How to make time for art.

How do you navigate the competing requirements of cobbling together an artists' life - making a living, possibly piecing together income streams, paying attention to family, being pulled towards millions of interesting things on the internet, favorite TV shows, having friends, doing activism, having good relationship(s) etc, and still keep your art making, which may or may not be income generating, right in the center of your life?

I've been experimenting with the structures and principles of my daily life for some time in an effort to find an answer to this question. I tend to get all excited about potential solutions as THE ANSWER, and inevitably my long-held habits and patterns creep in and the New Perfect Structure disintegrates. But the rules listed here are the ones that seem to make the most sense – and attempting to stick to them has been making a big difference in my life, particularly in the sculpture studio.

Keep in mind this list is for people who do not have a set full time job, people who piece together a living from many different activities.

0. Get clear about your priorities. Is making art your first priority, in your heart and mind? Even if making money seems like it should be th top priority for practical reasons? I think you don't have to choose – both can be true. Making art is your true priority, making money is the true practical priority. Cool. If this is true:

1. Start your day making your art. Before doing ANYTHING related to money or work-for-money. It might be an hour, or 10 minutes, or 4 hours. Don't check email, look at your bank account, market your online business, do your laundry, make a call to a debt collector, or ANYTHING before making your art. Establish in the structure of your day that your heart and mind and imagination and craft, your ART, comes first, non-negotiably. Do it first. (This will, inevitably, get you developing your work better and faster over time, which will increase the likelihood that the artmaking and moneymaking priorities will come close together sooner – grants, residencies, teaching positions, commissions, sales, etc will only come because you are taking the time to make really good art – which requires lots of time to make the requisite mediocre art along the way.)
   

2. Check and respond to email once per day. Even if you have an online business. Even if you have 5 web sites or you sell work online or you use 5 social networking tools to promote your exhibits. Once. Per. Day. Completely break any addiction to email with this rule. There is almost nothing I can think of that would require you to check it more than once. When you check it, think of a reasonable period of time in which you think you can respond to the new emails that need responses, and then set a timer/alarm to go off five minutes before the end of that time. This will force you to stay focused and work a little faster to get done in the time you have alloted yourself. This will accomplish 2 things: 1) it will free up a lot more time to focus on your work-for-money jobs in more efficiently, and 2) it will help defragment your Internet-addicted brain and cultivate a better, longer attention span you need for art making. Seriously, what kind of amazing art can you make if you stop to check your email every 15 minutes? We need uninterrupted periods of time to develop good work. Reclaim your brain!

3. Completely redesign your work-for-money life so you can get it all done in the period of time after making art and before dinner. This, for me, involved breaking a number of habits. How can you automate some of your tasks so they don't take so long? What tasks aren't that important, and you only do them because they make you feel like you are getting something done? What are the time wasters in your work life? Reorganize, streamline, cut the fat.

4. Then, start working on ways to increase the ratio of artmaking time to everything-else time. Ask yourself each day, "If I could increase the artmaking time by ½ hour or an hour today, what could I cut out of my afternoon time to make it possible?” Usually, there is SOMETHING that can go; which makes you realize that it wasn't that important in the first place: certainly not more important than your art. Or, you may discover that there is a much more efficient and results-generating way to do one of the afternoon activities. (For example, I had planned to spend one afternoon finding 10 places that would consign my prints online and pursue relationships with them. When I asked myself how I could more efficiently do this in one hour instead of 3, I realized that it would be smarter for me to approach only 3 places, places that have much higher visibility than the 10 smaller places I was thinking of, and shoot for getting large wholesale accounts with them. I worked on my art for 2 more hours, and then did went for the big accounts at the end of the day.)

5. After dinner and on weekends, DON'T WORK. I know it sounds all traditional and bourgeois, but seriously, take nights and weekends off. You may not work in your studio or work-for-money. What you can do is read about art, see art, talk about art, be with your friends and/or family, be in nature, do laundry and make food for the week, be bored, pet your cat, ride the trains and stare at people, kiss someone for a long time, clean your belly button, take walks, go to the farmer's market, read the paper, or whatever else regular people are supposed to do on the weekends. Recharge. Have fun. Rest. Cultivate relationships. Live. See movies. A good weekend of that stuff is like a long sleep full of creative dreaming: you show up in the studio on Monday with a clear mind, with your life in good shape and your house clean and friend love in your heart, and you are excited to work. You may even have some new ideas you won from the reading or art viewing you did; from the idle time that artists so desperately need in order to let life happen and let our minds wander. What you may NOT do on the weekend or at night: go on the internet. (that's right – you have to wait until after you make your art on Monday to check email!!!). Or work on your work-for money or directly on your art. No work goals.

6. Don't worry about the many times that you stray from these rules. Unexpected interferences happen, bouts of procrastination/laziness/feelings/addictions/habits/ impulses and other human experiences get in the way: this is what makes you ROCK – you are creative and unpredictable. But then work your way back to the rules, and follow them again, for as long as it makes sense until the next time you can't, won't, or shouldn't. This list is an ideal, not a program for perfection. Perfection is the death of art! Visionary goals can be incredibly helpful though, as long as we don't beat ourselves up in the process of attaining them.

So, this is a first stab at articulating some of these principles I have been applying to my every day life. Anyone have advice to add?

Also, I am curious what parents have to say about this. I know all the rules of the game change when one becomes a parent, particularly in the realm of fragmentation of time and concentration. I'd love to hear the parent's version of this kind of list.

Long summer days in the studio

Happy happy joy joy....Happy happy joy.

long summer days in the studio, sweating over my glue guns.

Good news, too: I'll be teaching some 2D classes at Tyler this semester. I really missed teaching this past year. What was I thinking in quitting teaching and heading to work at Etsy? Oh, yeah...I needed a salary. Now I am happy to be going back to hanging out with brilliant students and being in a state of daily surprise and pleasure at what they are making. And, I am excited to organize my thoughts about the (infinite, boggling) nature of two-dimensional design.

I love this anonymous militant art bitch!

Militant Art Bitch

refreshing, so refreshing. Thank you O anonymous woman artist for just complaining about sexism in the art world with humor without apology, and keeping tabs on the situation.