Lisa Call

Morning Aspens
by Stacey Peterson
Oil on Panel
9×12″
2008
reprinted with permission by the artist

Being Decisive

I think one reason I get so much done is I’m good at making decisions, meaning that when presented with choices I don’t spend days or weeks or months deciding what to do. I just decide. Then I do it.

When I decluttered my house at the beginning of the year I had no intention of moving at that time. But once the idea that I really could move came to me, I didn’t ponder it forever. I simply decided to move based on how that decision felt to me and within a week I had a Realtor lined up and got to work making it happen. I went from thinking "Hm, maybe I could move" to living in my new house in only 3 months.

One of my strengths is my intuition. I rarely sit down and make lists of advantages and disadvantages of doing something. I just listen to my feelings and pick the choice that feels right and move forward. I do journal and find writing (not list making) helps me listen my desires.

I don’t believe that every decision has a wrong and a right choice. I think there are pros and cons to all choices. So I focus on the positives of my direction and don’t let the negative aspects stop me.

This isn’t to say I don’t sometimes decide my choice wasn’t the best for me. So then I just change my mind and do something else. And once that decision is made then I just move forward in the new direction.

It’s hard to make forward progress and put energy anywhere if I don’t make a decision as to which direction to go. So step one is to decide. When I’m feeling low on energy I often find that I haven’t gotten clear about a decision that needs to be made. Making that decision releases all sorts of energy and starts propelling me towards my future.

If you are feeling like you don’t have the energy to devote to a project are you fully committed and have you truly decided that is the direction you should go? Maybe making a solid decision is the first step in boosting your energy.

Construction Zone

Tomorrow’s the big day - construction on my new studio begins. I spent a large portion of the weekend preparing my house for the event.

First up will be removal of the asbestos siding. Originally I thought I’d do this work myself. Then I decided that was a bit insane so I’ve hired asbestos removal people to do it. Once the siding is gone the builder can start and will begin by ripping the moldy shed off the back of the garage, which will create a pathway, through the garage, for the big digging thing to get to my backyard to dig a basement.

Pictures of the progress will start tomorrow and if things go as intended the artwork will also continue.

Morning Aspens

I love Stacey Peterson’s paintings of the Colorado landscape and have been saving up to purchase one for about a year. When she posted the photo of the above painting on her blog I knew instantly (there’s that intuitive decision making thing) it was the one I wanted and am happy to report it arrived at my house this week.

Stacey’s blog is one of my favorites. She’s my role model: she quit her technical job to support herself with her art and she lives in the Colorado mountains. Plus she’s really organized and hates clutter - my kind of person!

Depending on how messy it gets around here during construction the painting might have to live somewhere else for few months but right now it’s on the wall in my living room and I’m definitely enjoying it.

Now time to start saving up for the next artist’s work I covet.

Went for a hike in the Mt Evans Wilderness this weekend through a huge grove of Aspen trees. It was magical. I was completely in awe of these amazing trees.

I hope the colors looks okay in these - just calibrated my monitor and I’m thinking I’ll redo it in the morning cause it’s looking a bit weird.

That said - the golden light from the leaves of the aspen trees incredible. Photoshop isn’t believing the sky was as blue as it was and leaves as gold as they were. High on the list of todos for post host remodel - learn to use my camera and photoshop correctly.

ACEO #12
3 1/2″ x 2 1/2″
sold

 
A few unrelated topics…
 

Twitter

A series of articles I’ve read related to social media:

1) In a recent post, titled A Spectacular Way to Avoid Doing What Really Matters, Clint Watson definitively states:

Unfortunately, I keep seeing artists who seem to think that Twitter is some sort of revolutionary marketing tool that will help them sell art. It won’t.
…
Why ANY artist would think that sending a “Twit” is a better use of their time than creating art is totally beyond me.

 
2) A recent post by Seth Godin titled The small-minded vision of the technology elite:

"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home."
—Ken Olsen, ceo of DEC,

Only 31 years ago. DEC was one of the leading computer companies of the day, but not for long.

Take a look at the geek discussion boards and you’ll see an endless list of sharp-tongued critics, each angling to shoot down one idea or another.
…
PS the marketing elite have precisely the same problem.

 
3) An interesting point of view by Bill Weaver is presented in an article on his new blog The Artists Center: What’s up with social media.

I recommend the entire article and here’s a small bit:

So last year when I found out about Twitter I joined but really didn’t get it until the last few months. Coupled with my Facebook toolbar for Firefox I now get regular little blurbs that pop up on the bottom of my screen whenever one of the people I am connected with has something to say. That very action has allowed me to get to know what used to be pretty close to complete strangers. As a result, I have several potential partners for workshops or seminars each having a strong skill I am lacking in. I hinted above about communities, again this is one of the things social scientists have found occuring more and more as a result of staying connected with each other.

 
4) My twitter profile: twitter.com/lisacall (guess that makes it clear where I fall in the conversation).
 

PFD Fabric For Sale

As I’ve mentioned before I purchase the PFD (Prepared For Dye) fabric directly from Kaufman. I love this tight weave, high quality, 100% cotton pimatex fabric. It’s very dense and in my opinion some of the best fabric out there for making quilts (definitely a matter of opinion). I wrote a post about this fabric here: Kaufman PFD Pimatex Fabric

Kaufman has changed their rules for keeping my account active and I need to purchase more fabric than I can use each year. Would anyone be interested in purchasing some of this fabric from me? The cost would be around $5 a yard (including shipping). Unfortunately I don’t have the time to investigate shipping out of the US so currently this offer is for US residents only.

If you’d be interested in purchasing some fabric please send me email and I’ll see if there is enough interest to pursue this. I sure hope so cause I LOVE this fabric and don’t want to lose my account.

ACEO #12

Last night I didn’t get to my studio until about 9:00pm. I finished construction of Structures #99 before work so the next step was to piece the back and baste the quilt. I was in no mood for that so instead I decided to make an ACEO. This artist trading card is a combination of the bright colors from Structures #98 and the more somber dark gray/browns from Structures #99 as they were jumbled together on my cutting table.

If you are interested in purchasing ACEO #12 please send me email. It is $21 US and includes shipping to anywhere (I accept payment via paypal or check). It’s sold.

ACEO stands for “art cards, editions and originals”. Originally known as ATC, Artist Trading Card, and are traded between artists. When sold to the public they are referred to as ACEOs. The primary rule for an ACEO or ATC is they be 3 1/2″ x 2 1/2″ - the size of a trading card. They are created in many different mediums and are collectible, trade able and affordable art for everyone.

Backside:

Fall in Colorado

The weather is Colorado is beautiful this time of year. Warm days, cool clear nights (well except for the recent rain). It’s beautiful. This is the view from Jim’s deck up in the mountains. Visiting my boyfriend is better than going on vacation. I love living in this state (I know I said this same thing just the other day - I’m very grateful for my life!).

 
Another post in my series on Scrum and My Art Business.

My last post I talked about User Stories. I was going to write about managing tasks in this post but realized I needed to cover some more basics first.

The Team

In a previous post I introduced the product owner as one of 3 roles in scrum. The other 2 roles are Scrum Master and Team Member.

Each scrum team typically has these members:

• 1 Product Owner - who writes the user stories, brings the vision for the product to the team and prioritizes the work to be done
• 1 Scrum Master - who gets rid of impediments that are stopping the team from getting their work done (more on this role later)
• 5-9 Team Members - who do the work. From design and architecture to coding and testing.

In my art business there is only 1 person to play all roles. The past month it’s been interesting to think about the difference between each of them. I find I excel at the product owner stuff of bringing vision and thinking up things to do. I’m less effective at actually doing it, not because I can’t, but because I get distracted. So I think I could be a better scrum master and keep myself on track better.

This weekend I unplugged my computer and removed it from my studio/bedroom - the result was 16 hours spent making art. Score one for the scrum master on that decision.

Iterate

One of the key features of scrum, and most agile software development processes, is that the work is divided up into iterations. A group of work is selected to be done for each of those iterations. In scrum those iterations are called sprints (because they had to come up with new words for everything).

Scrum is a series of sprints, typically anywhere from 2-4 weeks in length, that follow this structure

1. Planning Meeting - The teams select a set of stories to complete in the sprint.
2. The Sprint - The team works on those stories during the sprint.
3. Sprint Review - At the end of the sprint the team demonstrate the complete work to the product owner for approval.
4. Sprint Retrospective - The team holds a meeting to evaluate how the sprint went so they can adapt and do better next round.

Repeat these 4 steps over and over and over without end. Every once in a while the software is released to customers and developers move onto the next release with new functionality in the next sprint.

Planning

At the beginning of a sprint the team sits down and decides how much work they can do during that sprint. The stories are prioritized by the product owner, so the team selects the highest priority stories. Each story is also estimated in size. So the team picks the amount of work, based on the size of the stories, that they feel they can complete in the sprint.

Prioritization and Estimation are black arts in the world of software development and maybe not so different for an artist so I’ll touch on these topics again in future posts.

By doing the planning at the beginning of each sprint, instead of all of it up front at the beginning of the project, it is possible to make better informed decisions about planning as the project matures. It’s a fallacy to think the scope of a software project can be determined up front and locked into place. Scrum allows for a more natural way of planning and prioritizing the work.

I think this fits the needs for an art career well. As new opportunities arise and details of existing ones are made more clear, replanning each month allows an artist to reprioritize the importance of each of the goals.

I’m trying out some of these ideas and have decided on doing sprints of 1 calendar month. At the beginning of September I selected some user stories to work on for the month by looking through all of the work I wanted to do.

Sprinting

During the sprint the team members do the work to complete the user stories. They hold a daily meeting in which each member answers these questions:

1. What did I do today
2. What am I going to do tomorrow
3. What (if anything) is blocking me from doing my work

It is through these meetings, and the amazing power of peer pressure, that the team functions without an authoritarian model. If you had to stand up at work each day and be held accountable to your teammates for pulling your own weight, the theory is you will actually do your work, vs surf the internet and buy stuff from amazon and ebay.

I’ve mentioned before that I have an artist mastermind group that I email every night answering exactly these 3 questions. While we are not a team, in that we are working towards a common group vision, having to say to other people "err - didn’t do a darn thing - again" is huge motivation to keep on track.

I highly recommend this type of group activity. I found my mastermind partners during the Artist Breakthrough Program” I took with Alyson Stanfield last spring. We’ve been emailing almost daily for months now and I know for me personally it is huge.

The Review - And Done

At the end of the sprint the team demonstrates the software they completed. Only user stories that fit the definition of done are demonstrated (see my previous post on this topic of what done means.) Almost done or close to done don’t count.

The product owner looks at what the software does and decides yes or no if it is acceptable. How do they decide? It’s based on the acceptance criteria for the user story (see the section on testing in this post about users stories for details on acceptance criteria.) If the product owner either accepts or rejects the work.

Any story that is rejected or that does not fit the definition of done is moved back to the list of incomplete user stories and is placed in a future sprint during a planning meeting.

I’m about 1/3 of the way through my first art sprint so I can’t report on how this might look but I’m hoping I don’t reject too much of my own work as not good enough.

I’ve been doing planning in iterations for my art career for a while now, and again I use my mastermind group to keep me on track. I’ve tried weekly goals and 2 week goals and monthly goals. Again emailing to the other artists what I hope to do for the month and how that month went. So I’ll continue doing that as a part of my sprint reviews.

The Retrospective

The adaptive nature of scrum is a very important piece of the process so I’ll devote more time to this later also. If you aren’t thinking about how things went and changing behavior based on those observations you aren’t doing scrum. And really, you aren’t being very smart about life.

We’ve all heard the saying: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

It’s really rather obvious, but it’s also not so easy to implement.

The Rock

The photo at the top of this post has nothing to do with scrum but I like it so there it is. Another photo from hiking in Colorado. The water looks golden because of the pebbles underneath.

Click on the image for a larger picture and more rock details (I love rocks). It looks totally cool with my LED fancy screen on my laptop, which hasn’t yet been color calibrated so who knows what colors you might be seeing.

Markings #24    ©2008    24"x 24"

Sunrise

A few days after posting sunrise photos on my blog in Janurary I was inspired to take some more. Watching the color arise and then recede from the sky is a magical thing to witness.

Markings 24

The idea of making a piece inspired by these photos popped into my head at some point soon after taking them and I needed another small piece for my show. In one of the very few occasions in my art career, I set out to make a piece directly inspired by something I was consciously thinking about. Usually I just create without preplanning the object informing the work.

It felt a bit weird at times trying to represent the layers of the clouds in fabric. It might have helped had I actually looked at the photos, instead I just worked from my memory and feelings of the even. I got stuck for a while, but since I started the piece only 48 hours before the work was due to be delivered to be hung I didn’t stay stuck for long.

 
So that is the end of new work in my show, Markings: Repetition and Pattern, hanging in Boulder through March 23rd. Next I’ll post some installation photos. Probably not tomorrow, my kids didn’t make it home tonight due to weather but they should be here by noon tomorrow.

Detail Image:
 

 
My mom has been visiting this week so we spent the last few days vacationing at a friend’s mountain home in Grand Lake, Colorado, which is located at the south entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. On monday we took a drive up Trail Ridge Road through the Park. As expected it was beautiful.

I love the colors of the dried grasses.
 

 
There wasn’t much snow, even at the top of the pass where they had the road closed for winter, just a few piles from the snow plows, which was all the kids needed. They have mastered making something from nothing.