Lisa Call

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!

Structures #95    ©2008    52"x 34"

New Artwork

Publicity images were due today for my solo show at the Lux Art Center, Fencing In or Keeping Out, so I’m very happy to show this piece, newly completed and photographed. I sent off my resume, artist statement (newly revised), bio and images so I can check yet another item off my todo list.

According to my spreadsheet I started this piece in 2007, although I don’t recall doing much more than select the fabrics. I did most of the design and construction work middle of January. When doing this type of work, the design/creative stuff, I either keep my studio silent or I listen to music. No books on tape because it slows me down and distracts me.

Repetition

I get a bit obsessive at times with the music and I’ll put my CD player (no ipod here – I live in the dark ages) on repeat and listen to the same album over and over again. Or the same song. For this piece I listened to She Don’t Like Roses by Christine Kane, on her Rain & Mud & Wild & Green album, over and over again while constructing the composition. I love this song.

Over and over again, for about 6 hours one day. Repetition – it’s soothing.

When I do this the artwork becomes permanently linked in my head to what I was listening to. This piece will always remind me of this song, and the book A Version of the Truth, which I listened to while doing the surface stitching, a meditative repetitive process itself. The book was fun and felt like it fit the piece, as does the song.
 

Detail image of stitching:

Taxes!

Next up on my to do list are taxes. By end of this week I’ll have the packet in the mail to my account plus have budgets and spreadsheets for 2008 up to date and ready to go, for both business and personal. I actually like doing taxes and the financial stuff. I’m good with money and it’s fun to add up the numbers and see how the year went.