Lisa Call

Shaded Walk    ©2007 Stephen Carl
Reprinted with permission from the artist

Artist Breakthrough Program

The last 4 weeks I’ve been participating in the Alyson Stanfield’s online Artist Breakthrough Program.

Today is the last day, the last phone call. Time to evaluate how things went.

So to start here are the goals I stated for the month:

1. I work 5 or more hours a week in my studio making art.
2. I complete the rewrite of my website and blog and go live with them by May 12, 2008.
3. I update my resume to include jurors for all juried shows.
4. I create a complete resume for my personal use with every show in my career listed. This list also includes a list of which pieces were included in each of these shows.
5. I design a portfolio package to send to galleries (the package does not have to be complete but I identify all the parts and the format of the package)
6. I start a list of potential galleries to contact for representation. The list has 30 or more galleries listed.

In addition to the above, I was also working on getting my house ready to put on the market. Cleaning, packing, hiring contractors, yard work, etc.

How Did I do?

1. I worked in my studio 19 hours over the 4 weeks - very close to the my original goal.
2. Nope - the website is coming along nicely but it needs more work.
3. Didn’t even start
4. Didn’t even start
5. Didn’t even start
6. I have between 15-20 galleries on my list with contact info.

In addition I got a lot done on prepping my house. This weekend I completed the last of the decluttering, and have done a bunch of packing, cleaning and yardwork. I’m almost done getting contractors lined up to do the big stuff (paint, carpet, refinish hardwood, etc). This was a larger job than anticipated, getting estimates, rescheduling, etc, etc. I’m certainly learning a lot about how to deal with these guys (number one tip - don’t have expectations about getting anything done soon).

How Do I Feel About It?

I’m super happy with how things went. I probably stayed focused about 70-80% of the time I had available to "do stuff", which is a lot more than normal. Although I didn’t complete everything on my original list I didn’t really think I’d get it all done so that’s fine (more on this later).

I knew I’d be super busy, not just because of all I had going but also because my kids were with me almost the entire month since I didn’t get to see while they were in Europe for 3 months. Not every weekend was as crazy as the one I outlined in this post, but we were still busy. Staying this focused for a sustained period of time, with my kids at home, was probably a first so I’m very happy about that.

I got some really great ideas from other participants in the program for my website so I have more work to do than originally planned. I’m writing a custom plugin for wordpress to display my artwork images, as I couldn’t find anything out there that did what I wanted. I haven’t written code in a while so I’m excited.

What Did I Learn?

I set my goals higher than was realistic. I did this to keep myself motivated. But what I found as the weeks went on is that I wasn’t taking the goals quite seriously enough. I’d list 6 or 7 things to do in a day and only have time for 4 or maybe 5. So I set myself up from the start to not finish everything.

I think this is how I normally operate. It’s safe - because I know I never get everything done I fall back on that as the excuse every time to not do stuff. Eventually I start to think I don’t really need to finish things.

This month has shown me this is maybe not the most optimal way of doing stuff. I love my Getting Things Done project and tasks lists (from David Allen’s Book) as they are great at capturing the big picture. Yet this month I’ve found I need to get more specific, and more realistic, about what I am doing TODAY.

So in addition to my big lists, each morning I started to pick at most 3 things todo. The super most important things that absolutely have to get done. And I put my focus on getting those things done. At the end of the day it’s awesome to say I’ve completed them all.

Learning this new way of approaching my work was the best thing I got out of this class. Taking the time to think about how I get things done and to try some different approaches.

Where Does Blogging Fit In?

Obviously I stopped blogging about 1/2 way through the program. I’d find myself with an hour of time to work on my website or to write a blog post and more often than not I’d blog. So I decided to drop the goal to write and spent my free computer time on my website.

I don’t intend on making this a habit. Living my life at a pace where I don’t have time to blog is not okay with me. I love writing and I find it a great way to process information about my art and myself. So something else is going to have to give because I’m going to continue to blog 2 or 3 times a week throughout the process of selling my house.

One fun thing about this class was watching other artists work on their goals. Steve Carl (photographer - the above image is his work) had a goal of starting a blog and it’s been fun watching him and remembering back to when I started mine 3 years ago. I think he’s off to a great start. You can check it out here: Works by Steve Carl

What’s Next?

The other important thing I feel I learned is that trying to do 3 things at once (make art, build a website and get a house ready to put on the market) is too much. I think if I would have focused on just 1 thing at a time in the end I would have gotten more done.

Time to focus on the house and get it on the market. I’ll have a few moments here and there to do some art/art business work but at least 2 of the 3 must do items on my list each day are going to be house related. While I’m not excited about losing momentum on the website I think in the end this is the best choice. I’ve been feeling a bit too scattered the last few days not really making huge headway on any one thing.

Markings #19    ©2008    56" x 58"

Beta Bloglines

For the last year I’ve let my blogroll mostly stagnate - not just on my blog but also in my feedreader. There is a proliferation of excellent blogs out there and I just couldn’t keep up. The dual maintenance of adding a blog to both my feedreader and my blogroll was too much to think about.

I want to catch up to some of the great blogs I’ve run across out in the wild and also by many of you that comment on my blog. The first step was to make this a manageable process and find a feed reader that would do these things:

• Keep track of my read vs. unread articles for me as I travel between home and work. This pretty much required it be webbased
• Have a simple mechanism for organizing the feeds, preferably drag and drop organization.
• Provide a mechanism to share my list of feeds so I could avoid dual maintenance.
• Provide an efficient mechanism for reading through my unread articles quickly.

Beta Bloglines is the only reader (out of the entire two I thought about) that fulfilled those requirements. Google reader is nice but it doesn’t provide that type of sharing I am after. If it had, I would have selected it.

This morning I finished moving my current blogroll over to bloglines and I’ve updated my sidebar.

My Blogroll

What I’ve left on my website are just a handful of my most favorite links (I wasn’t ready to nuke the entire blogroll!) That’s not to say I don’t love and read tons of other blogs and I recommend all of the blogs on my list.

I feel my blogroll is out of date. I know I ran across some really great blogs the last year and I failed to subscribe to them. So as I find them again, I will add them. Consider this a work in progress.

I’m not so sure about my organization of the folders. I had too many people in the ‘artist’ category so I broke it in 2 parts - it’s not very intuitive. So I suspect that will be changing when something strikes me as more useful.

What am I Talking About

If you have no idea what a feed reader is or how you might use one. Or even more importantly, how to make sure your blog can be read by a feed reader, check out Katherine Tyrrell’s, as usual, excellent post on how to do this. And don’t worry - by default blogger and wordpress.com blogs have feeds so you are probably fine.

Full or Short Content

My only caveat about her post, as I mentioned in her comments. I really don’t recommend posting only a short summary of your posts in your feeds. Interestingly I was planning to post on this exact topic as soon as I finished my blogroll update.

People are lazy. We spend inordinate amounts of time at my day job thinking about how to reduce the number of clicks needed to do anything in our products because people don’t like to click. They tend to stop doing things that require too much effort. In my opinion having to click an article and leave a feed reader to see the content counts as too much hassle.

I don’t share Katherine’s concern about the dangers or risks of content scraping. She has valid points for her - I just view it differently. Yes - people steal my content - but I do not believe it harms me. My images are hotlink protected so it’s just my words floating around out there on splogs and I just can’t get excited or worried enough about it to care. I don’t track them down and I don’t see it being a big deal. Maybe I’m blissfully ignorant, but blissful is the keyword and it’s working for me.

The big names I read, such as Seth Godin and Gapingvoid, all publish their full content. So I figure I’m in good company.

So as a reader that is lazy - I request and recommended your feed always be the full content of your site.

Markings #19

This is one of the 3 pieces completed in 2008 included in my show Markings: Repetition and Pattern, which closes on March 19th in Boulder.

I love this piece. I know, I’ve said that about many of the pieces in this show. Once I got the show hung my fear that this series was not so good evaporated. I’m pretty excited about many of these pieces and have ideas for more.

I love the red here. I love the small piece of blue-gray interrupting the pattern and making it more interesting. I love how I moved beyond straight horizontal lines between rows. It was a trick to construct this piece but it made for a fun challenging puzzle, part of why I love working with the construction processes I use.

 
Detail image:

Structures #15    ©2005    12"x 13"

Blogiversary

Today marks the 3 year anniversary of my first blog post, which roughly corresponds to the purchase of my first digital camera. According to wordpress this is my 425th post.

Some numbers (because I like numbers). Assuming an average posting time of 45 minutes, which is probably on the low side, I’ve spent at least 320 hours writing blog posts over the last 3 years. That’s an average of 107 hours per year.

In comparison I spent 865 hours last year in my studio and probably around 1800-1900 hours at the day job and at most 20 hours watching TV shows for the year.
 

What I’ve Learned

After all that time I feel I should have some profound words of wisdom about blogging so I thought I’d make a list of what I think I’ve learned during this process. You can decide if it’s profound.

1. I make a lot of typos.
2. I rarely feel a need to correct typos that are not found within the first hour. I appreciate all my kind readers that gloss over my mistakes.
3. There are 2 types of posts that generate a lot of comments. Those that stirred up controversy and those that were very honest about my work and myself in a way that is somehow universally felt. I prefer the later and have been looking to avoid the former as it causes me to feel unhappy.
4. I’ve learned more about myself and my art through my consistent writing on the topic than through just about any other method. I have no plans to stop anytime soon.
5. I feel I belong to an amazing community of artists as a result of my blog, which makes this an extremely rewarding experience.
6. I change my mind a lot. If you read this entire blog you’ll see at one point I strongly advocated using the term quilt. I now use the term textile painting. The old me would have had an argument with the new me. The new me isn’t concerned with defending my choices nor getting others to agree with them or even like them. The only post I have ever deleted was on this subject because I decided I didn’t need to explain myself and it was generating controversy I had no intention of stirring up.
7. There is too much stuff in my sidebar. It makes me feel claustrophobic. When I redesign my blog very little will remain in the sidebar (much of it will move to separate pages - like the archives). It’s part of my decluttering - it’s invading all parts of my life. Simplify, organize, categorize, only keep what is really serving me and get rid of the noise.
8. My categories and tags are a jumble. They stress me out sometimes thinking about which to pick. This tells me I need to rethink them all. I think simplify, organize and declutter will be the motto here also.
9. My cat likes to sit on my monitor while I blog and she puts her paw down over the screen when she wants attention. Actually, she’s not particular, I don’t have to be blogging for her to do this. She’s just as happy interrupting my reading of random wikipedia articles.
10. Forcing oneself to be profound when writing a blog post doesn’t usually result in a very high quality post.

Structures #15

The above piece was included in my very first post. It’s the one and only Structures piece that has hand sewn surface stitching. The piece sold during the opening night at Quilt National 2005 from the gift shop to the collector that purchased my piece in the show, Structures #31. He had me sign the back of both of them in sharpie marker. Kind of freaked me out.

Check out this detail image of the stitching. I think it turned out totally cool.

 
Tomorrow is the artist reception for my show, Markings: Repetition and Pattern. I’m super excited! I can’t wait to see all the work hanging in the gallery.

Markings #14    ©2007    35"x37"

 
One time consuming aspect of being an exhibiting artist is the need to supply an artist statement explaining the artwork. While I’ve heard many artists bristle at the need to write/supply such a statement I have learned to enjoy the process. I figure this is yet another chance for me to engage the viewer.

Spending 2, almost 3, years writing about my work on this blog I’ve found it much easier to write an artist statement. Writing is definitely a learned art that I’m just beginning to understand, but I’m better than I was 3 years ago. I consider these to be some of the biggest pluses of blogging: both the writing skills and the better understanding I have of why I make the work I make.

I’ve been exploring my Markings series for 2+ years and have only exhibited work from this series 2 or 3 times so I’ve managed to avoid the need for a specific artist statement.

Until now.

One of the juried shows I entered asked for one, and they wanted it asap for the show catalog they are printing. So last night I sat down and pulled together my thoughts on the series and came up with the following as my first pass, which I emailed to the organizer last night.

Studying the effect of closely spaced parallel lines, known as cross hatching, in my abstract pencil drawings led me to experiment with drawing lines with fabric. Looking to capture the beauty and quality of a hand drawn line in a different medium, the work is a translation of basic mark making into textiles. The Markings series investigates both straight and lyrical lines, both tightly spaced and with a more open figure ground relationship.

The works in this series evoke the comfort humans derive from repetition, a well known pattern. They also raise the question of how we handle the unexpected, a break in the pattern. Disruption is often inevitable, no longer making it unexpected but part of the pattern itself.

Color is of primary importance and is combined, intuitively, in unexpected ways, employing a unique palette of cotton fabrics I hand dye. Extensive stitching adds rich texture to the work by echoing the composition underneath or by creating a complimentary secondary pattern on the surface.

It can take weeks or months to make a single textile construction, as the individual elements in the composition are freehand cut, one at a time, without a pattern. They are then placed onto a flannel-covered studio wall, where I work improvisationally, planning as I construct. The design continues to mature as the lines and shapes are manipulated to be fit together.

 
I will be having a solo show of this work in February and will revisit this hastily written text beforehand but it’s a start.

I’m thinking about including some of my drawings in that show also, I just need to figure out how to frame or otherwise present the work on paper. I never frame/mount/etc my textile art so this is a new scary area for me, as in I don’t have a clue how to approach it and it sounds expensive. I should find out if they will let me just pin the paper to the wall, not likely given their wire/hook hanging system but I should at least ask.

These are the drawings that inspired the Markings series:

Plains #4    ©2006      11" x 8"

 
Also see Plains #5, Plains #3, Plains #2, and Plains #1

 
The work at the top of this post, Markings #14, was completed earlier this year. I have to admit it did not photograph well, not sure why, I’ve tried a few times and it still looks dull and out of focus (the raw image is in focus) - I couldn’t figure out how to fix it. Maybe it’s the contrasting colors of the stitching, or the vibrant colors next to each other. Or more likely my complete lack of photography skills. It looks much better in person.

This detail shot captures it’s true colors: