Lisa Call

Structures #57
©2006 Lisa Call
33" x 66"
Textile Painting (hand dyed fabric, batting, thread)

Art For Dad

Today I took my son (a teenager – but really any age will work) to the Denver Art Student’s League annual Summer Art Fair. We had 2 purposes – first was to
enjoy the art and the second was to buy his dad a father’s day present. My daughter had previous pool party plans so was excused from the outing.

All around it was a successful event and we had a great time, saw a bunch of art and my son picked a nice abstract painting for his dad. At first he just wanted to go home but once he got into it he wanted to walk by all the booths to make sure he saw all his options first. Very cool he got into it eventually.

I bought a little ceramic house to add to my collection of houses. It’s now a collection because this is the second one I’ve bought.

Collectors in the Making

My goal, besides spending time with my son and seeing art, is to create a future art collector. As an artist I have a vested interest in there being a lot of these out there.

In addition to taking the kids to museums, art shows, galleries and other art events I also occasionally buy them art for their rooms. And of course we make art together.

I’ve now added in the element of having them buy art. Unless wildly inappropriate, I believe we will focus on purchasing art for all our future gift giving needs this year.

Support an artist – buy art for your friends and family!

Hm. That just might be a bumper sticker I need.

Progress

In addition to the art fair, I also had my second photo lesson today. The above image is another attempt at photographing Structures #57. This version is too dark because it’s now too dark in my house to process photos appropriately. But I’m on the right track as think it looks better than this version: Previous post with Structures #57.

Ironically that post is also about progress in my art career and it’s great advice based on a blog post by Seth Godin. I really recommend you click that link above and read my old post if you feel like you are never making forward progress. Seth is a smart guy.

Here’s one of his quotes from my article:

Add up enough urgencies and you don’t get a fire, you get a career. A career putting out fires never leads to the goal you had in mind all along.

It’s about making sure the things we are doing move us forward.

Today I put out a slow smoldering fire that has been blocking me for at least 6 months. I turned the website work I have done over to my builder and can now refocus on my career.

To that end look for the very first bit of content to come from makebigart.com later this week. I’m excited. Moving forward!

 
PS – If you are looking for some art to buy as a gift, I group together small pieces here: Affordable Art for Sale.

Quick post tonight as I cook dinner and head out the door to an artist lecture at the Denver Art Museum by Sandy Skoglund.

One of the things I love about twitter are the quotes people post on occasion. Here are a few that resonated with me today:

Failure

“People fail in direct proportion to their willingness to accept socially acceptable excuses for failure.”

Tweeted by Sandra Martini

This is so relevant to what I wrote about yesterday about not making goals because I wanted to be the free-spirited artist type. It’s socially acceptable to not get stuff done cause I’m an artist and schedules are stifling.

Well – forget that – I’m not going to fail and my art career is not going to fail cause it’s cool to just float about unrestrained by structure.

Preparation

“The will to win is worthless if you do not have the will to prepare.” – Thane Yost

Tweeted by Jane Button

I read this and immediately equated ‘prepare’ with ’setting goals’. Some other day I might have read it differently but today it dove tails nicely with my intent to get back to structure.

Bathing

“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.” ~ Zig Ziglar

Tweeted byValery Satterwhite

Love this. I journal every morning and most mornings I set and intent for the day. When I can’t think of something specific it is often something along the lines of ‘live the day focused on the tasks I want to get done.’ Staying in the moment helps me stay motivated for the current task.

Bumper Sticker

My tweet for the day:

"Want to get new bumper stickers for my car – anyone have some good art ones? Any pointers to sources for art related bumper stickers?"

Didn’t get any pointers. So how about you blog readers? Do you have any art related bumper stickers on your car? What do they say?

If you don’t have one but wanted one – what might you put on it? Anyone have resources for some funny pre-made ones?

Preparing for the New Year

I’m not sure how it got here so quickly, but it’s December. I’ve been thinking about how I wanted to approach this month for a while and have decided to dedicate it to Joy. Absolute wonderful peace and delight in things that make me happy.

A snippet from my journal this morning:

Hello December, I’m happy to see you. This month is all about joy, peace, happiness. I’m going to have 31 days of delight. Each day my intent and focus will be to appreciate and do joyful things, have joyful thoughts and experiences and be a joyful person.

As I was writing my cat came over and silently sat next to me, her sign for "pick me up and put me in your lap so I can purr". My first moment of joy after declaring my intention for the month.

I will share my experiences with intending joy each day in our typically busy holiday season throughout this month of blogging and hope to hear from my readers about their joyful days also.

Pencil Holders

Driving home watching the beautiful sunset I was excited to see a package by my front door upon my return home. Aha – total delight – my pencil holders from Paula have arrived. I love them – look at the 9 new holders all in a row in the photo. I love it. I love repetition.

Paula – thanks for sharing your art and spreading happiness to this corner of the planet.

Thank You

And next a huge thank you to all of my readers as the pageviews for my blog topped 100,000 for the month for the first time ever. I’d been holding pretty steady around 75K-80K for a while and finally something pushed it over the top. Maybe spammers. Who knows, even if I cut that number in half to account for the noise, I have a lot of readers. Unique visitors are over 22,000 per month and average around 1300-1500 per day. Thanks everyone!

Thank you all for reading and commenting. I love what I learn about myself and my art when writing my blog and then I get more from all of your comments, rethinking my ideas. I fall behind occasionally on comments and I suspect there are questions I said I would answer that I forget about. Sorry about that – if it’s important, just ask again. Just wanted to let you all know every comment is greatly appreciated and my goal is to respond to them all.

New Beginnings

So what’s behind all the joy crap? Well a couple of things. The first is I have signed up for a year of coaching with Christine Kane and I suspect she might have been a baker in a previous life because most of us are are really getting a bonus 13 months, which means it started today.

I plan to get the most out of the upcoming year and I know that change comes from within, not from Christine, she’s just really good at holding me to the things I said I would do and calling out my bullshit. It felt right to dedicate the first month of the coaching to shear delight.

The other motivator is that my relationship with Jim has come to an end. It was time and while I’m sad I’m not surprised. I’ve gotten very clear about what I need and want over the last year and things weren’t working out for either of us. I wish Jim well and trust he will have a joyful life moving forward.

Clearing Out

Over the past few days, inspired by Colin’s rss cleanout, I’ve removed a large number of blogs from my feed reader. I think I was up to 150 or something around there. I was always behind and reading blogs wasn’t an activity it was a diversion.

I’ve got the list down to less than 70 and will probably weed out more as I find the ones I don’t really read. Now reading blogs is an activity – 10-15 minutes a day and I should be caught up. Feels great – it’s decluttering! I’m hoping this leaves me more time to respond to blog comments and look over the blogs my readers are writing.

It felt great to dump all the "you should read this if you are a real artist" type of blogs, like Tyler Green. I tried really really hard to care. I just couldn’t. It always just sounded like gossip and complaining, or it was just boring. Reminder – I am defining my art career, the only MUST DO things are the things I define.

I dumped most of the inspiration type blogs and the marketing type blogs as they started to sound repetitive. I’m really tired of blog posts with lists: 7 ways to have more energy, less hair, more clothes, less time, etc. That format has lost it’s charm on me.

Also, anyone that didn’t publish a full blog post in their feed got removed. Okay – 2 exceptions – but I still prefer you publish full posts. Katherine and I already had this conversation and agreed to disagree, darn. Colin, please, give us the full feed – save us from carpal tunnel having to click to read your thoughts.

Sea Foam Green

Two of the new pieces of art I made over the weekend were sea foam green in nature. Looking at Paula’s pencil holders I can see what inspired me. Not to mention the same color on the mugs I bought from Cynthia. Hm.

Here’s my green:

Lines #7
©2008
4" x 4" – Mounted on stretched canvas
Sold

Lines #7 – On Canvas

ACEO #29
©2008
2.5" x 3.5"
Sold

Available for purchase here, along with art that is not green in case that isn’t your thing. I think I had those old pink and green bathroom in my mind when I made these. Or maybe there was never a time when people had pink and green bathrooms. But it sounds good.

My daughter wants a neon orange bathtub. Do they make those?

 
Happy Monday everyone!

Markings #20
©2008
14"x 14"
Sold

New Paradigms

It seems an unwritten rule of the art world is that if you want to be taken seriously you do not sell your work cheaply and you certainly don’t worry about affordable art. I used to buy into this story, thinking that if I wanted to show my work in museums I needed to only make large, serious artwork.

I think the art world is changing with the advent of the internet and old patterns of thinking are no longer necessarily valid. And even if they are, I’ve decided they don’t apply to me.

I’ve decided to take full responsibility for my art career and in doing so have decided I get to come up with my own rules, if I ever feel a need for rules.

Who says I can not make ACEOs and sell them for $25 while at the same time having 6 large pieces in a museum show and also sell my larger work for thousands of dollars? Apparently no one because I’m doing just that.

Quality

I do not think my $3000-$10,000 artwork is devalued by making smaller textile paintings. The main reason for this belief is the quality. I know that I put extreme care into every aspect of my art, from the largest pieces down to the smallest. I also believe my art is really, well, good.

I’m consistently told by collectors that they are impressed with the level of detail and precision in all of my artwork. Every color, each line, each shape is created with care. Even in my small work I am pushing myself to make the best art I possibly can by trying new things and pushing limits on what I think might work.

All of my art is priced about the same amount per square foot. Actually the smaller pieces end up being more per square foot because it takes longer to work on such a scale. My line of affordable art is not a lower quality, but is instead simply smaller so it takes less time and materials to create, so it can be sold at a lower price point.

I’ve considered doing larger affordable pieces but haven’t yet worked out the details. I’d have to do some type of limited edition where I could create the work quicker in quantity, but still with the same quality.

By keeping my quality consistently high I believe the value of the work, no matter the size, will always be evident.

Art for Sale

Markings #20 is another small piece inspired by Markings #19, one of my favorite of the Markings series. I know coming up with $350 to purchase a piece of art is not always possible. I’ve sold a few of my larger pieces in a series of payments and it worked out well for everyone involved so if you are interested in any of my artwork, no matter the cost, and would like to work out a payment plan please contact me and we can figure out something that will work for both of us.

Markings #19
copy;2008
56" x 58"
$17,000

This morning Natalya Aikens emailed a link to an article in the New York Times titled Late Bloomers by Malcolm Gladwell and I second her recommendation.

Wow. I think I might have found myself.

The article starts by chronicling the writing career of Ben Fountain, an author who spent 18 years writing before getting his first big hit at the age of 48. The article goes on to postulate on 2 different approaches to creative work – conceptual vs experimental. Prodigies, like Picasso, tend to be conceptual, they are born to genius. Late bloomers take a more incremental and experimental approach to their work.

The biggest "wow" part of the article for me is an excerpt from an article by David Galenson which comments on late bloomers:

The imprecision of their goals means that these artists rarely feel they have succeeded, and their careers are consequently often dominated by the pursuit of a single objective. These artists repeat themselves, painting the same subject many times, and gradually changing its treatment in an experimental process of trial and error. Each work leads to the next, and none is generally privileged over others, so experimental painters rarely make specific preparatory sketches or plans for a painting. They consider the production of a painting as a process of searching, in which they aim to discover the image in the course of making it; they typically believe that learning is a more important goal than making finished paintings. Experimental artists build their skills gradually over the course of their careers, improving their work slowly over long periods. These artists are perfectionists and are typically plagued by frustration at their inability to achieve their goal.

Okay – wow – that is almost exactly how I feel about my work. I often say that I’m still in the student/learning part of my career, believing that my work is no where near where I think it should be. I’m okay with this, going along one piece at a time trying out a new idea to see what it will bring me. After 7 years I have 99 textile paintings in the Structures series and I have no intention of stopping anytime soon. I’m searching for something that I know is there and seems rather illusive.

So now I have a whole theory about why I do what I do. I’m a late bloomer. Excellent – when I’m 60 my work will be selling for millions. Woohoo!

A Patron

The article makes an interesting point:

If you are the type of creative mind that starts without a plan, and has to experiment and learn by doing, you need someone to see you through the long and difficult time it takes for your art to reach its true level.

and goes on to discuss the patrons that Cezzanne (also a late bloomer) had in his life, such as Vollard and Pissaro.

The late blooming author, Ben, quit his job in his 20s and when I first read that I felt I was some how a slacker for not suffering the poor artist life and slogging through 18 years of hard work til I made it. Then around page 4 or 5 they reveal that Ben was able to quit because his wife was making a big chunk of money as a lawyer and he was a stay at home dad. Although his kids were in day care until the afternoon so he had large piece of uninterrupted time to work.

Aha – okay – so I no longer have such a patron, no wonder I’m going to work. I was a stay at home mom for 10 years and it was during this time I launched my art career in full. So I am quite grateful for that opportunity. My kids were never in daycare and I got a divorce as soon as my daughter went to kindergarten so I had naptimes to make art, but still, it was really great to not to have to work.

I’m now my own patron and this line from the article gave me pause:

This is the final lesson of the late bloomer: his or her success is highly contingent on the efforts of others.

Hm. Is that true? I’m a pretty self sufficient person that rarely asks for help and am pretty determined that I can do this, even with the day job (for now). Maybe I need to go hunting for some patrons. Anyone want to provide me a nice stipend to make art til I’m brilliant?

Structures #72 detail

Time in Studio vs Art Career

Last week I wrote about looking for balance between making art and the business side of an art career. I’m still pondering the issues for myself and thought taking an informal poll of other artists would be interesting.

So I asked: "question for artists: On average – per week: 1) how many hours do spend creating new artwork? 2) how many hours spent on your art business?"
on both twitter and facebook. Below is the summary of the answers (art/business).

- 20/20
- Some weeks 40/0, others 0/40
- 25/30
- 10/30
- 10-25 / 20-30+
- 25-30 / too much time promoting and organizing.
- ideally..20/20..lately 5/15
- 5-15 / 15
- 6 / 10-12
- 7-12 / 2
- 30/20
- 2/3
- 0/0
- 1/2

I pulled out just the numbers and deleted the comments, which were quite interesting, but didn’t feel it was appropriate to repost them here. If you go to search.twitter.com and search on @lisacall you can read the full replies to my query on twitter.

The info I glean from this is that the business side of art is a major commitment. Now that I’ve made that commitment it is no wonder I’m feeling the need to readjust.

Thanks to all the twitters and facebookers that answered the question as it was most helpful.

How about you, blog reader? How much time do you spend in the studio vs. the office?

More PFD Fabric for Sale

I sold 220 yards of fabric but have a bit more Prepared for Dye Fabric (PFD) Pimatex Fabric I’d like to sell. I wrote a post about this fabric here: Kaufman PFD Pimatex Fabric . I’m selling this fabric to keep my account at Kaufman open (they have a minimum purchase amount per year to order from them directly – I’m very close to meeting that minimum).

I’m selling the fabric to those with US shipping addresses only for $4.50 a yard + shipping. Total cost for different amounts including shipping:

5 yards – $30
10 yards – $55
20 yards – $100
25 yards – $125

If you’d be interested in purchasing some fabric please send me email the amount you’d like to purchase. I accept checks and paypal.

Structures #73

In addition to a couple hours of art business work, I’ve managed to get in 3 hours in the studio today. The first time in months and months I’ve been so focused on art making on a workday. Woohoo. Course it’s an hour later than I would like to be going to bed but I’m making good progress with the surface stitching on Structures #73. It takes me about an hour per square foot so I have maybe 6 or 7 hours left.

The above photo is another detail show of the textile painting.

My Taskboard on Oct 1

My Scrum Taskboard

In September I wrote several posts about using Scrum to manage my art career. In the last post I wrote about taskboards and explained how I was using it to track all the work I wanted to complete in September.

Quick refresher – the colored cards are the goals for the month (user stories) and there is 1 per row on the board. Each of the white cards are tasks that need to be completed for the bigger goals. The first column are tasks not yet started, the second column are tasks in progress and the final column are completed tasks. The colored cards on the right are goals I’m tracking but not actively working on.

Comparing the board from today from the board closer to the beginning of the month:

 
You can see I got a lot done. Certainly not everything but that big pile of cards in the completed pile indicates I did a heck of a lot art business and marketing this month. Probably the most focused and organized I’ve been in a long time, if not ever, for the business side of art.

This very visual indication of what I want to get done is a huge incentive for doing things. So I’m calling my first initial trial with scrum to be a big success.

Blocked Tasks

One thing I will add to my board is a 4th column. This is where I will put tasks that are blocked and in need of an external event for it to move forward. Such as waiting to hear from juried shows, or to get a return email, etc. I’d like a way to distinguish these tasks from the tasks I am actively working on (in column 2).

If a task is blocked for a long time it might mean I need to check in with the progress, or reevaluate the tasks and maybe find another solution.

Most of the goals (the colored cards along the right hand side of the board) are user stories where one of the tasks is currently blocked so once I add a new column these have a more natural home on the board.

Real Sprints

In scrum the goal is to put up on the taskboard only the work for a single sprint (I’m doing 1 month sprints). I obviously have much more work on my board than that so am not really sticking to that aspect of scrum.

There is a lot of value in seeing all (or at least most) of the work completed after a sprint completes so I’ll eventually get there but I’m not worried about it right now since my house is a big priority. We will hopefully begin building in a few weeks. I’m trying not to set too high of expectations during the building process.

Making Art in September

Although not managed through the scrum taskboard, september was a really good month in my studio also. One of my goals is to make art every day. Between work and kids and the house, it’s my escape and it helps keep me centered.

For September I worked in my studio 25 out of 30 days for a total of 55 hours. I completed 2 new pieces in my Structures series (#98 and #99) and made several small textile paintings.

Yay. That puts a smile on my face.

October Goals

So now it’s a new month and time to set new goals and maybe put some new goals/user stories up on my taskboard. I have some projects that ave been languishing on my todo list for months as I feel I’m still not quite caught up after moving in June. These are completed in October, I’m sure of it!

The first big goal for Oct will be to write and email my September studio newsletter. Then I’ll turn to a few misc tasks and then finally, I’ll tackle my website redesign project. I excited to get back to it.

First – The Trees

(scroll down below the pictures if you just want to read about art and success)

 
As my long time readers know, I recently moved and am remodeling and putting an addition on my house to add a studio. So in addition to my normal art writing, this blog will, at times, resemble an episode of This Old House because I’m really excited about the work so I’m going to write about it.

The remodel will be starting very soon so first step was to get some trees out of the way.

In area #1 (as marked on the first photo) were 2 cedar trees much much too close to the foundation. They made a mess, not so sad to see them gone.

Area #2 is my beautiful crab apple tree in the backyard (pictured above) that I talk about often. It too had to go, as the new studio will be sitting smack dab on top of it. It took me over a month to admit this was a reality. My builder was patient with me as I finally came to terms with losing the tree. It was simply too close to the house and there was no way to keep the tree and still do an addition. They guys that cut it down said it needed to go even with no addition, so that made me feel a bit better. They also said it was one of the most beautiful crab apple trees they had seen.

Area #3 was another large crab apple wedged between my house and the neighbors. It was ruining my driveway with it’s roots. Again, much to close to the house, and it was already rotting and was dropping limbs when I cut it down.

The trees are now gone as seen above. My yard feels HUGE and full of possibility. It’s exciting. And much less sad than I anticipated. I can’t wait for the remodel to begin!

Lesson learned – those cute little trees that we all plant in our yards. They eventually end up as really big trees. So best not to put them very close to the house or the next home owner will have to pay big $ to have them chopped down.

Success – A State of Being

In my last two blog posts I wrote about
- why I want to know my definition of success
and
- what being a successful artist meant to me.

In both of these posts I wrote about success as a destination. Success defined as a set of goals to be achieved. I’m a big believer in planning out the future and working on the those goals so I stand by that definition of success. It helps to define what actions I should take.

But success is more than that. When I wrote the first post about why I wanted to know my definition for success, I was thinking about putting in "so I will know when I have made it" as one of the reasons. But it didn’t feel right. I couldn’t find any words to say this that didn’t rub me the wrong way.

That is because I consider myself a successful artist today, even without reaching those goals. I’m so ecstatically thrilled every day I wake up and think "I get to make art today". No amount of external recognition or achievement is better than this feeling.

I’m so fortunate to have found something in my life I am so passionate about and love doing so much. Even the marketing stuff is really growing on me and I get excited about it.

The process of being an artist is the best part of being an artist. Even if I never reach the goals I set out in the last post, I will always consider myself a successful artist by the sheer fact that I am one.

Although honestly, I’m pretty sure I will reach all of those goals, and it will be a fairly effortless process because I find all of this to be pure fun. I don’t feel I’m grasping or desperate, it’s just total joy each day to wake up and think about what I can do to move my career forward.

For me, success is both a destination and a journey and I wouldn’t want to give up either.

A Natural Progression

When I thought about being an artist 10-12 years ago, my definition of success was to get my work into some juried quilt shows. It didn’t take long and I was, by my definition, a success.

So I set the bar higher. I decided I needed to get into Quilt National to be a success. That goal was first achieved in 2003. I’ve now been accepted, into what to some is considered by some to be the quintessential art quilt venue, 3 times in a row.

With some success to my name, I decided to looked a little deeper and decided I wanted to focus on finding my artistic voice and this became my definition of success:

- I am the best artist I can be
- I have solo shows in not-for-profit galleries (note that non-profit part)

My focus was almost solely on making art and a bit of time was spent showing my work. My actions were in alignment with my intent and I was content. I spent years completely focused on my art and I feel this was a wise choice. As a result I have a lot of confidence in my art and skills and I had a few solo shows along the way.

Moving On

Each time I near or reach my definition of success I feel it’s time to change it and think bigger. The other option, declaring myself a success and coasting, doesn’t suit me very well. At least not yet.

It’s not that I’ve never had big grandiose ideas about where my art can go. It’s that I never spent the time to think about them in detail, write them down, focus on them and thereby make them my new reality. I don’t think this is a bad thing. Could be it’s a natural progression for many of us – start small and get bigger as the way becomes clearer and the obstacles seem less daunting.

Adding Value

Some of the change in direction I’m now planning came about when I was willing to realize and accept that:

1. It’s okay to sell art
2. I can work to be the best artist I can and market my work at the same time. This involved learning to ignore all the voices that speak to the contrary.
3. Getting money for something I love doing is pretty darn cool

I love Steve Pavlina’s comments on twitter the other day that read:

Becoming a millionaire (through honest means) requires delivering $1 million worth of value to other people. That’s generous, not greedy!

It’s a good reminder that as an artist I am providing value to the world and as such it’s okay to be reimbursed for that value.

Cynthia Guajardo had some interesting thoughts the other day as she was pondering what value she might be adding as a ceramic artist in her blog post about living simply. I was very happy to read that she came to the conclusion that she was adding value and will continue to make her pottery.

I suspect it’s fairly common for artists to question what value they might be adding to universe with their art and craft. I know I have. And I’m happy I also came to the conclusion that we add a lot and it is essential we keep creating. And expecting to be compensated fairly for that value.

My New Definition for Success

So now it’s time to take a deep breath and think big and tell the world all about it.

This is my new definition for what it means to me to be a successful artist:

• I am creating a body of work that I am proud of and that I know is pushing me to become the best artist I can.
• I see growth in my artwork.
• I am authentically marketing my artwork.
• I quit my day job and live comfortably from the proceeds of my creative talents. I want to be very clear about my definition so I have an amount in mind but think specific dollar amounts are a bit too personal for public consumption.
• My work is valued by buyers and collectors, who are willing to pay a good price for my artwork. Again, I have a specific idea of what I want my art to sell for so I am very clear about where this career is headed.
• I create an affordable line of work for those that can not afford my larger pieces.
• My work is included in 4 or more museum collections.
• I publish one or more books about my art and my writing about art. At least one will be a big "coffee table" style book
• I actively participate in a community of mutually supportive artists.
• I am an inspiration and mentor to other artists.
• I continually learn about myself through my art and my writing about art.
• I enjoy all aspects of being an artist.

Why Do I Need to Know This?

One of the items on my goal list for 2008 was to define what success means to me as an artist. As I mentioned in that post, my definition of success has changed, so I wasn’t sure where to go with my goals for 2008 at the beginning of the year so I didn’t really write any.

This wasn’t a bad thing because turns out what I really wanted to do this year was sell my house and get out of the suburbs. That lifestyle was no longer working for me. I loved my big house and big studio but I’m much happier in the city: close to work, close to the kids school and close to everything – museums, galleries, restaurants. I’ve seen more art in the past few months than I did the last 5 years, because it is right here 10-15 minutes from my house.

But back to success. I feel it’s now time to define what it means to me to be a successful artist. I have a vague idea in my head what I intend for my career but I want to write it down and give it some serious thought.

I feel I need to do this right now for a few reasons:

1. Clarity: Most importantly I want to get really clear about why I am making art and how I want to market it. Or more accurately, why I am making art today and where I am intending for this career to go. I believe that getting very clear about intentions is the best way to ensure they become real. When I am wishy washy with my intent my results tend to be wishy washy. When I get really clear I find I get very clear results also.
2. Adapting: I don’t think it’s realistic, at least for me, to come up with big grand ideas about what success means and for it not to change over time. I wrote out some definitions for myself a few years ago and then I moved and I decided I like selling my art and so much of what I wrote is no longer up to date. By revisiting this definition I can learn and adapt and move get closer to my true desires.
3. Direction: Having a definition of success for my art career makes writing goals very easy. If I know what I think success means then I just have to do the things that will result in that success. Without a definition of success it’s kind of hard to figure out what I should be doing on a day to day basis. There are thousands of things I could do as an artist and only by understanding what my desired destination is, can I pick the activities that best suit my stated intentions.

I’ve spent a couple days writing and thinking about the specifics of this definition and when I get it finalized, or at least polished enough that it feels right and it is clear, I’ll post it on my blog.

 
Do you have a definition for what success means to you as an artist?