Lisa Call

Structures #99    ©2008    33" x 39"
 

A Studio Day

Hurray! There is no construction and no teeth to distract me this weekend so I’ve been making art most of today.

I completed 5 ACEOs that I started last week that are inspired by Structures #99, shown above. I really love this piece and wrote about it in my October studio newsletter. It’s inspired by a painting of buffalo at the Denver Art Museum. My textile painting isn’t about buffalo, it’s about the colors, and my usual fences and barriers.

Potholders?

The new ACEOs will appear soon on a webpage for an upcoming holiday sale I’ve decided to participate in, along with several other artists. Look for a posting on that in a few weeks.

I also worked on 5 small 3″ square pieces that I will be mounting onto these very cute little 3″ square stretched canvases. I’m going to play around with ways of presenting my smaller work on canvases and even with frames.

I like my larger work to be unmounted/framed as I really like how the work hangs on the wall, ie not perfectly flat, but pretty close. It’s fiber, it drapes, it has movement. For me this is a part of the artwork.

For these smaller pieces they are very stiff as a result of the extensive stitching I do on them so they aren’t effected when mounted and framed. Nothing is lost and maybe much is gained as they no longer look like a potholder. Course I don’t think they ever looked like a potholder but that’s the common phrase we textile artists tend to say about why we frame smaller pieces.

This is the first time I’ve gone down this path. Not sure how this will go but you’ll see it here first I suspect.

November Planning

After 5 1/2 hours in the studio I’m now taking a break to get November off to a good start by paying bills and setting art and art business goals for the month. I share this list with my mastermind art partners and we help keep each other on track every day. I’ve also decided to share this list with my blog readers so you can see the type of goals I set for a month.

I’m not sure how construction will go on my house this month so I made a list of goals on the assumption they will be working outside the majority of the month. If that changes and they do work inside the house I’ll just have to be flexible and see what I can get finished.

I will take the items on this list and break them down into tasks and put them on my taskboard. Then I’ll track how I’m doing via that method. At the end of the month I’ll review how I did.

My November Goals

General

• Work in studio daily
• Work on my art business daily
• Track time on business (# of hours per day) as I already do for studio time
• Blog 3 times a week or more

Studio Goals

• Complete Structures #73
• Complete Home #5
• Design Structures #100
• Complete 4 or more small works (8” square or smaller)
• Complete 4 or more aceos
• Investigate mounting small work on stretched canvases
• Investigate framing of small work

Art Business Goals

• Go live with new website design
• Website for holiday art sale
• Create postcard and mail to mailing list for small art sale/museum shows
• Send list of available work for Danforth Museum Show
• Send info those that have requested artwork info
• Complete 3 requested interviews/featured artist blog posts
• Visit galleries in town at least 1 day
• Read/Review Personal Development for Smart People
• Write article for Christine’s blog for word of the year

The big big goal is the new website design. I started this many months ago (too many too count) and the move and remodel have distracted me. Time to get this finished as it’s holding me back for many other things. Instead of aiming for perfection I’m going to get up and running and I’ll worry about perfecting it later.

I’m sure that I get in my way much too often with my need for everything to be perfect. So when the website goes live, please excuse anything that is broken about it cause it’s just me trying to get over myself.

More Construction

They did a bunch of digging around and messing with my sewer on thursday and on friday they poured the footings for my basement on friday. I’m so bummed to have missed the cement pumper truck but I had to actually go to work and do that thing I get paid for. They pour the basement walls on tuesday and you can be sure I will be home for that event.

The photos for Thursday and Friday are now on smugmug:
Thursday Construction
Friday Construction

In addition I got all of my "before photos online" and they are here:
Before Construction

I’m not done with the captions on for thursday and friday and I’m sure I’ll rearrange them a bit. See that perfectionist thing. But in a effort to avoid that, and to not be late to dinner and a movie with a friend, I leave it like this for now.

The Achiever

I am a type 3 on the enneagram, The Success-Oriented, Pragmatic Type:Adaptable, Excelling, Driven, and Image-Conscious. So I come by my energy partly to fulfill all of that success-oriented drive that I have. Definitely that is the upside of being a three, but just like all of the types, there are plenty of downsides.

All the image oriented stuff. Ugh - yeah - at times that can be me. And the "never ever admit you might have a flaw" stuff. Yep - me also.

Threes are excellent at getting things done. I have a ton of energy and am always up for doing stuff. The flip side is I’m less adept and relaxing. This year I made creating space a priority and in addition to my (near) daily yoga practice I look for ways to slow down and relax. Finding a boyfriend that lives in the mountains has been a big help in that direction.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

The photo at the top of this post is of 3 new catalog covers that feature images of my artwork (Structures #14, Structures #11 and Structures #46). The catalogs are teaching resources for a company that does a lot of Myers-Briggs training and testing.

I love this personality type stuff so was thrilled with they asked for images earlier this year. I just got the completed catalog covers in the mail this week.

I’m an INTJ the Myers-Briggs world. Which explains all of my planning and list making skills. And my geek side. My natural preference is to be organized and efficient which amplifies my energy as I rarely waste much of it:

INTJs are ambitious, self-confident, deliberate, long-range thinkers. They dislike messiness and inefficiency, and anything that is muddled or unclear. They value clarity and efficiency, and will put enormous amounts of energy and time into consolidating their insights into structured patterns.
…
INTJs have a tremendous amount of ability to accomplish great things. They have insight into the Big Picture, and are driven to synthesize their concepts into solid plans of action.

Playing to Strengths

There are a lot of people that find these personality indicators to be a bunch of junk and admittedly there is no scientific proof they are accurate. But I believe they are useful in helping to identify patterns and preferences and when used to aid in personal growth they can be extremely valuable.

This information can be used to identify the positive parts of my natural inclinations. Knowing what I might be good at is helpful in taking those those strengths and expanding them.

Not an Excuse

Even more helpful is understanding my weaknesses so I have a reference point for how to move forward past those potential road blocks.

It’s easy to read personality type indicators like the enneagram or myers-briggs and use it as a way of staying stuck. Easy to think "Oh well I a _____, might as well accept this is the way I am" and just be that way.

While I don’t think I can change who I am fundamentally, I know I can change my thoughts and my attitude and the past year I’ve done a lot in that direction.

Using these tests as an excuse for bad behavior or using them to limit my choices or abilities is not acceptable.

 
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.