Lisa Call

Structures #57
©2006 Lisa Call
33" x 66"
Textile Painting (hand dyed fabric, batting, thread)

Art For Dad

Today I took my son (a teenager – but really any age will work) to the Denver Art Student’s League annual Summer Art Fair. We had 2 purposes – first was to
enjoy the art and the second was to buy his dad a father’s day present. My daughter had previous pool party plans so was excused from the outing.

All around it was a successful event and we had a great time, saw a bunch of art and my son picked a nice abstract painting for his dad. At first he just wanted to go home but once he got into it he wanted to walk by all the booths to make sure he saw all his options first. Very cool he got into it eventually.

I bought a little ceramic house to add to my collection of houses. It’s now a collection because this is the second one I’ve bought.

Collectors in the Making

My goal, besides spending time with my son and seeing art, is to create a future art collector. As an artist I have a vested interest in there being a lot of these out there.

In addition to taking the kids to museums, art shows, galleries and other art events I also occasionally buy them art for their rooms. And of course we make art together.

I’ve now added in the element of having them buy art. Unless wildly inappropriate, I believe we will focus on purchasing art for all our future gift giving needs this year.

Support an artist – buy art for your friends and family!

Hm. That just might be a bumper sticker I need.

Progress

In addition to the art fair, I also had my second photo lesson today. The above image is another attempt at photographing Structures #57. This version is too dark because it’s now too dark in my house to process photos appropriately. But I’m on the right track as think it looks better than this version: Previous post with Structures #57.

Ironically that post is also about progress in my art career and it’s great advice based on a blog post by Seth Godin. I really recommend you click that link above and read my old post if you feel like you are never making forward progress. Seth is a smart guy.

Here’s one of his quotes from my article:

Add up enough urgencies and you don’t get a fire, you get a career. A career putting out fires never leads to the goal you had in mind all along.

It’s about making sure the things we are doing move us forward.

Today I put out a slow smoldering fire that has been blocking me for at least 6 months. I turned the website work I have done over to my builder and can now refocus on my career.

To that end look for the very first bit of content to come from makebigart.com later this week. I’m excited. Moving forward!

 
PS – If you are looking for some art to buy as a gift, I group together small pieces here: Affordable Art for Sale.

Joy

I didn’t blog last night because I didn’t feel like writing about non-art stuff, and that was all I had to say. Spent my evening enjoying my son’s high school elective showcase (where else in the world can one watch a light saber yoga performance, complete with star wars music, than at an expeditionary learning school?) and my daughter’s gymnastics class – she’s getting closer to a back handspring – yay!

Today was a more challenging day on the Joy front. I haven’t been feeling 100% lately so went to the dr and got some antibiotics and hope that improves things and I get some sleep cause being tired is not super conducive to celebrating joy.

Fortunately the day turned around after I got home from work and ran some errands with my daughter. While waiting around walgreens for my prescription she decided to buy presents for her friends from the 90% off aisle. We had much fun looking through the stuff for $.50. Twelve year olds can be quite entertaining when they want to be.

Art (Business) Related Content

I’m headed to the studio soon and hope to wrap up Lines #10 and #11 tonight so will post them tomorrow. In the meantime I recently read an interesting article by Seth Godin I wanted to pass along: The Internet is Almost Full

Ten years ago, you had a shot of at least being aware of everything that mattered. Five years ago, you had to be really selective about what you took in, but at least it was possible to know what you didn’t know. Today, it’s impossible. Today, you can’t even read every article on a thin slice of a thin topic.

You can’t keep up with the status of your friends on the social networks. No way. You can’t read every important blog… you can’t even read all the blogs that tell you what the important blogs are saying.

I absolutely agree. There are more art blogs out there that I want to read than I can possibly ever have time to read.

So the question is – what do I do about it?

Blogs

My solution was to decrease the number of blogs I wanted to keep up with. This frees up a bit of time so I’ve been checking out the blogs of my readers on occasion. I miss many of the blogs I’ve dropped but I don’t miss feeling like I was behind.

So increasing both depth and breadth and just letting it be than thinking I need to know everything everyone says every minute of the day. I’m enjoying this more relaxed approach to reading blogs quite a bit.

Keep Email Effective

My inbox is hovering around 80 unreplied to messages right now. I had it down to 10 not long ago. Sigh. I have yet to figure out how to keep up with it. For those of you awaiting an answer – sorry – and hopefully soon I will catch up.

I’ve decided to start scheduling email answering time because it is important and it takes a bunch of time. No more pretending I can just fit it in here and there.

Last year I reduced the amount of email I get by filtering anything not art related or personal related to another email address. I then diverted all art related newsletters to another email address. I almost never check the junk email address and occasionally will check the other.

There are a couple of exceptions to this – the top one being Alyson Stanfield. Her newsletter is the best and I look forward to it every monday morning right in my main email inbox. Tis a rare monday I don’t read it.

If you don’t already have it, check out Alyson’s book I’d Rather Be in The Studio, it’s awesome (and not just cause there is a quote from me int there). If I didn’t already have it, this book would be on my christmas list.

Another thing I’ve done to reduce interuptions is to turn off all email notifications from twitter and facebook. I can catch up with those things when I go to the sites. I don’t need inbox filled with friend requests when I get a notification on facebook also.

Thank You

As a blog writer, I appreciate that you have way more choices for reading than about art than ever before and I want to, again, thank all of you for choosing to spend a bit of that time reading my blog, tweets and status updates on facebook.

How do you keep up (or not) with the internet?

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!).

Structures #57    ©2006    33"x 66"

Putting out Fires

In a recent post titled Managing Urgencies Seth Godin writes:

Do you have a plan?

A long or medium term plan for your brand or your blog or your career or your project?

You can have grand visions for remodeling your house or getting in shape, but if there’s a fire in the kitchen, you drop everything and put it out. What choice do you have? The problem, of course, is that most organizations are on fire, most of the time.

In my post a few days ago about getting things done I talked about how excited I was to be making progress on projects that previously were ignored due to lack of urgency of the project.

This had become my default behavior:

Add up enough urgencies and you don’t get a fire, you get a career. A career putting out fires never leads to the goal you had in mind all along.

Last year I entered a bunch of juried shows instead of working on some bigger projects that require more effort and will take longer to yield results. Juried shows are easy, fill out a form and send off a CD and some money and there is illusion of progress when the acceptance letter arrives.

Stagnating in the Fire

Problem is these shows don’t do much for my career anymore. In the beginning they were great. They were the big goal and they got me what I was after, a resume filled with quality shows to give me the foundation for bigger things.

Thing is I’ve been doing this for 10 years – my resume is plenty long with lots of juried shows – they no longer provide much value and they are starting to look like they are my career and not just the initial step forward.

The past few months I paid the price of having entered all those shows putting out fires of the resulting acceptances. Doing paperwork, packaging and shipping work.

No time was left to work on the bigger projects like completing the redesign of my website, sending out my first studio newsletter (a project that has been on hold for over a year as it is never urgent) or lining up gallery representation. Things I’ve clearly identified as important for moving me forward.

Small Steps to Move Forward

As I said a few days ago. No More!

Basically I’m doing exactly what Seth mentions here:

I guess the trick is to make the long term items even more urgent than today’s emergencies. Break them into steps and give them deadlines.

I’ve identified the big projects that will propel my art career forward in a big way and now I’m defining the next steps that need to be taken to create my new reality. When I look at my next actions list I want to look at actions that are simple and easily doable. Things like:

• Determine List of Newsletter Articles
• Write Introduction to Newsletter
• Select template for new website
• Create header for new website

I don’t put ‘write newsletter’ on the list as that’s just too overwhelming and I won’t ever get to it.

Deadlines

In addition to the small steps I’m also setting deadlines as Seth mentions. Now I’ll make one of those goals public as it’s fast approaching and I’m committed to making that goal.

My first studio newsletter will be sent by March 31. I’ve already made some nice progress on the project and am excited about it. [sneak preview: I'm making 3 new aceos (artist cards) inspired by 3 pieces from my Markings series. These will be available to my subscribers via my newsletter].

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Structures #57

I posted an image of Structures #57 in this post a year+ ago but the color was off. I recently got this piece back from the art center where it was on display and rephotographed it. These are more accurate colors.

I love the blue thread over the red fabric in the surface stitching of this piece. Actually I just love the entire thing. A few years back I said I didn't use much red, now I'm finding I'm using it more and more and really love the results. Maybe Cathy Kleeman's influence, she uses red often and well.

 
Are you putting out fires?