Art Magazines
The last few of years I subscribed to several art/craft related magazines:
Raw Vision
American Craft
Surface Design Journal
FiberArts
Art Calendar
ARTnews
Art in America
Art Forum
The result is I have piles of unread magazines about the house. I felt that I should care about the art world and so I subscribed to the last 3. What I discovered was that the articles were interesting enough if I took time to read them but in general I don’t care about this stuff. Fascinating as it may be, and relevant to my career as an artist, I can’t drum up true interest.
Those 3 expire in February and I’m going to be happy when they don’t arrive anymore. Especially Art Forum, that thing is big and thick and heavy and interests me not one bit. Mostly it sits around the house still wrapped in it’s plastic protective wrapper making me feel guilty. I’ve gathered up the full 2 years worth (the last one arrived today) and I will be taking them to the recycle bin sometime in the next few weeks. No more "I should read and be fascinated by these" guilt!
Art News and Art in America have been more useful and provided me with some great images that I’ve used to create an idea book. The image above is a page from the book. I’m using a spiral bound sketchbook and gluing images from the magazines into the book. It’s a fun project when I’m traveling or not wanting to work in my studio but still wanting to look at art. I only cut out images of artwork that I like.
I’ve been subscribed to Art Calendar for years and realized I quit reading it a while back. I get all the marketing info I want from Alyson over at artbizblog.com. I also dropped this magazine.
Today I renewed Raw Vision, Surface Design, Fiberarts and American Craft. I don’t read many articles in these magazines but I love flipping through and looking at the images. I think I’m going to start cutting these up and gluing them into my ideabook also. Otherwise they just sit around and take up space, and I have no plans to ever go back and reread them so no reason to keep them.
What magazines do you subscribe to? Do you read them? What do you do with them when you are finished?
Some more ideabook pages:
I have an amazon affiliates account, which means if you click on a link from my account to amazon and then you buy something I get a small percent of the sale. Last year I made a grand total of $0 on this because I’m usually too lazy to generate the links correctly for this to work but if amazon wants to give away free money I’m all for signing up for that plan. Just thought I’d let you all know I’m doing this.
Posted by Lisa in: The Art World
Tagged: art world, ideabook, magazines, sketchbook
Lisa,
I’ve loved reading your blog lately. It seems that you are in a place of “recognition” for lack of a better term. Take your old magazines to the library and put them on the magazine exchange table. Most libraries have one and somone like me would be thrilled to stumble upon a pile of ArtForums!
yep, the library…or an art coop so people who sit have something to read.
offer them up on freecycle.org in your county.
I recently subscribed to Embroidery, published by the Embroiderer’s Guild UK. It’s a little pricey, but has lots of interesting fiber art and artists
Dear Lisa,
I was recently intoduced to http://www.freecycle.org. This recycling organization was a great connection for me to pass on old photography books that I no
longer needed. The magazines that you don’t find interesting will be someone else’s treasure.
ps .thanks for your heartfelt and honest approach to your blog. You are saying what many of us are thinking!
Patience….is my resolution revolution.
Helen
http://pineshorestudio.blogspot.com
Quiltmaker is the last quilt magazine I have coming-otherwise, none. I read magazines only occasionally and a year ago decided to let all subscriptions end-like you most of them sat around unread making me feel guilty. I feel so much better now-I can create more from my own vision without magazines promoting their patterns. I think your word for the year is great-I chose kindness….and other readers are being inspired by this idea as well. thanks for the link to Christine Kane.
Paula – I posted the magazines on freecycle and they found an owner in minutes. I’ve used freecycle quite a bit in the past and didn’t think to use them for these magazines – great idea – thanks!
Shan – yes – I’m becoming crystal clear on my authentic desires. I like the word recognition – I’m doing a lot of recognizing of things that are in my way or not good for me.
Cher – kindness is an awesome word. Great choice.
Helen – thanks – this honesty – part of the courage thing – to stop pretending to be perfect and just be real.
Chris – I find these pricey magazine (Raw Vision is pretty pricey) to have some wonderful pictures – worth the price.
I’ve had a similar experience. I’ve been subscribing to a range of art magazines, because that’s what you are “supposed” to do. But rarely read them, because most of the content seemed so disconnected with my world. Too many stories of Damien Hirst and how much money he made. Or the party scene in Miami. And when I’d try to read photography magazines like Aperture or Photograph, I’d find that what they consider to be “good” art photography is work that I consider dull, trendy, and derivative. So I now get my inspiration from non-art magazines, like Seed, and am much happier.
Hi Lisa -
I’m so glad I’m not the only one who lets unread magazines pile up! And thank goodness I kept reading and found out about freecycle. I’m going to look into that right now! Recycling is a good thing. Robin
Yeah, I’m guilty as you about letting them pile up. However, since I just got my Art Calendar…I still like it although I don’t use it the same way as I used to for juried shows. I just don’t have time for juried shows now but the other articles are good.
One thing I do with them is give them to the local community college or high school art teacher for use in their classes. If I don’t do that, I take them to a retreat I go to twice a year and set them out for anyone else to take who doesn’t subscribe.
Hi Lisa, I just gave you a “You Make My Day” award. Check out my blog for details, but if you want to, give your award to ten people and leave a comment on their blog.
Great recycling ideas. But to address your other question — I too cut out photos that are inspirational and paste them in my journal/sketchbook of the moment– or even just leave them in a box if Im too busy to paste at the time. I keep a big stack that fits in an old tin bread box for my classes and workshops to use, but don’t stack any others than those that will fit there. I get SAQA, occasionally Quilting Arts, and other Somerset mags (usually passed along to me by others) but subscribe to Smithsonian, National Geographic, Texas Monthly for image inspiration. When I’m looking for new input, I scroll through the last few sketchbooks. It works better for me to have everything in one sketchbook — photos, notes, journaling, (except for Morning Pages, when I do those they are in a separate notebook), notes about projects, from lectures, doodles — and the cut outs. I find things better in time.
Daniel – I love that you get inspiration from Seed magazine – great idea.
Robin – good luck unloading those magazines full of guilt.
Cheryl – great idea to share them with other artists. I have some bead magazines I might try to find a home for that way.
Pam – thanks for the award – I will pick others someday.
Susie – thanks for listing your magazine. I love the photos in nat geo also. I’ve pasted a few photos into my sketchbook like you do but I think I’m too neat and tidy – I have this need to categorize everything. Maybe I’ll trying mixing it up for a month and see how it makes me feel.
Interesting topic! I subscribed to Art Forum this year and find it’s mostly ads, and what editorial content there is seems rather esoteric. I won’t be renewing that one. I also get ArtNews and Art in America when they send me discount offers. I do like the indepth articles in Art in America. I also get FiberArts and Surface Design Journal. I scan these immediately when they come and sometimes read them cover-to-cover, except the wearables issues, which don’t interest me. Some of the process and inspiration articles are quite interesting. These last two I also save all issues of, and sometimes scanning really old ones provides inspiration – both visual and for writing.
I have no art education background, so I discovered I was trying to educate myself through some of the magazines that were not quilt related. Smithsonian magazine often has articles on different aspects of art that are eye-openers to me. Surprisingly, I get a lot of inspiration and ideas about use of color from The Magazine Antiques – their ads are full of wonderful paintings. (And yes, I read the articles in that one too – I’m anal retentive that way…) On a whim one day, I bought a copy of American Art Review. Again, yes I read the articles because this stuff is so foreign to me, these artists unknown to me, but am drinking up the art shown in both articles and ads. As I let some quilting magazine subscriptions lapse, I decided to go ahead and subscribe to this last one for at least one year. I’m way behind reading them, though, and find at this point I can’t throw out the ones I have read – just too much I think I want to go back and study.
As for the Smithsonian and antiques magazine, I pull pages of inspiration as I read, then recycle. If I wasn’t removing things from them, I’d probably offer them to a school, or retirement home or something like that. Maybe I should anyway. Anyway, the pages I’ve torn out either go into a scrapbook like yours, or into file folders to look through from time to time. The really striking ones go up on the bulletin board in my studio until their impact wears off or something better comes along. I seem to be looking more at how color is used or how line is used, or how the space is divided up rather than at the actual subject matter.
I have never subscribed to art magazines, but have taken and read several quilt magazines, all of which are not being renewed as the subscriptions run out. I don’t use them as inspiration – more for seeing what developments are happening in the field, but all of them are so Quilt Industry driven – and becoming more removed from my focal points. It’s always been so, but now I am tired of them, and they’ve become clutter around me. I know where to find one if I need one i nthe future….I’m currently in clear-out mode in my studio and by week’s end will have a heap of them to pass on to local quilters working in the mainstream. SDA and SAQA come with membership – I take FiberArts and the Australian Textile Fibre Form magazine, the latter being by far the better – FA has so many ads and the articles are so short/ lacking analytic depth, imho, and I’m going to let that one go, too. I don’t know Raw Vision – but will look for it, and I generally pick up a copy of American Craft when I am up in the US, generally every 6 months or so. Ditto Craft International when I’m in Aus. The Economist and National Geograp[hic also come into our house, and I do read them, pretty fully. Ah, nothing like the arrival of the New Year for reflecting and taking stock.
I think I got my last art forum (a gift subscription) last month. What I got out of 2 years worth of subscription to it was a reminder that I can do what the heck I want artistically. I did get a kick out of the pontificating, but honestly one almost needs a crane to lift the darn thing up to read it.
Ceramic’s Monthly
Pottery Making Illustrated
Art News
I post magazines for free on Craigslist.
I have been checking out magazines from the library like Southwest Art – and just realized that they carry Art News too, so I should probably cancel that subscription.
The only problem with that is that you can’t tear out pages.