Lisa Call

 
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.

Structures #80    ©2007    15.5" x 15.5"
 
I haven’t had much success in getting things done this week, other than attending the museum opening. I rarely go to a social type event like that alone, so I spent the entire day telling myself how much fun I would have and sure enough I really enjoyed the evening. Amazing what we can convince ourselves of if we think positive.

I’m not much for walking up and talking to people I don’t know but I chatted with several of the volunteers and one of the exhibiting artists. Something that normally I would never do. The internet/email is generally my domain, but I’ve decided I’m not going to get very far in this art world unless I become a bit more social. I’ll never be an extrovert, INTJ that I am, but I think socializing is probably a learned behavior and if I can jump off a bridge I can probably learn to make small talk.

 
I’ve only put in a few hours in my studio so far this week as I’m still lacking focus after my dad’s memorial service. I’ve designed a few new small pieces but they aren’t ready for prime time yet. After I finish this post I hope to get a few of them a bit further along.

I’ve had work at the Lux Center for the Arts that past year that is shown in rotation in their new fiber art classroom. I asked them to send them back so I could send in some fresh work and they’d like mostly smaller pieces.

I need to sit down and see what I have given my other obligations this fall/winter. My mom is coming out to visit next week and then in November I hope to have the focus to get back to work.

Structures #80, above, is one of the small pieces I completed earlier this year.