Lisa Call

 
The last few of years I subscribed to several art/craft related magazines:

Raw Vision
American Craft
Surface Design Journal
FiberArts
Art Calendar
ARTnews
Art in America
Art Forum

The result is I have piles of unread magazines about the house. I felt that I should care about the art world and so I subscribed to the last 3. What I discovered was that the articles were interesting enough if I took time to read them but in general I don’t care about this stuff. Fascinating as it may be, and relevant to my career as an artist, I can’t drum up true interest.

Those 3 expire in February and I’m going to be happy when they don’t arrive anymore. Especially Art Forum, that thing is big and thick and heavy and interests me not one bit. Mostly it sits around the house still wrapped in it’s plastic protective wrapper making me feel guilty. I’ve gathered up the full 2 years worth (the last one arrived today) and I will be taking them to the recycle bin sometime in the next few weeks. No more "I should read and be fascinated by these" guilt!

Art News and Art in America have been more useful and provided me with some great images that I’ve used to create an idea book. The image above is a page from the book. I’m using a spiral bound sketchbook and gluing images from the magazines into the book. It’s a fun project when I’m traveling or not wanting to work in my studio but still wanting to look at art. I only cut out images of artwork that I like.

I’ve been subscribed to Art Calendar for years and realized I quit reading it a while back. I get all the marketing info I want from Alyson over at artbizblog.com. I also dropped this magazine.

Today I renewed Raw Vision, Surface Design, Fiberarts and American Craft. I don’t read many articles in these magazines but I love flipping through and looking at the images. I think I’m going to start cutting these up and gluing them into my ideabook also. Otherwise they just sit around and take up space, and I have no plans to ever go back and reread them so no reason to keep them.

 
What magazines do you subscribe to? Do you read them? What do you do with them when you are finished?

 
Some more ideabook pages:

 
I have an amazon affiliates account, which means if you click on a link from my account to amazon and then you buy something I get a small percent of the sale. Last year I made a grand total of $0 on this because I’m usually too lazy to generate the links correctly for this to work but if amazon wants to give away free money I’m all for signing up for that plan. Just thought I’d let you all know I’m doing this.

Page From My Sketchbook (click to see larger image)

Tracking Studio Time

Sylvia asked me to talk about how I determine the hours when I posted that I spent 865 hours in the studio last year.

I started doing this when my accountant told me that he thought that it was very important to be able show that I was treating my art as a business should I ever be audited. He felt the number of hours spent engaged in the activity was important information to track.

I’ve tried different formats for tracking this information and the above image from my sketchbook is what I did last year. I like the hand drawn page better than doing it on the computer.

Incorporating it into my sketchbook keeps me connected to the sketchbook on a near daily basis. Good for both keeping the tracking current and for using my sketchbook as I intend for ideas and sketches. I keep the book accessible and open on a table in my studio at all times.

I write down the number of hours spent each day and a brief note about what I was doing.

A few years ago I decided that by setting specific goals for what work I wanted to complete was creating stress when I failed to meet the goal so I decided to switch to setting goals on the number of hours spent in the studio and not worry about what I specifically accomplished. I blogged about this in June of 2006.

For a while I found this to be the solution and it helped me balance my life but last year I found myself right back to the same place being stressed by that magic number of 20 hours in the studio.

No More Ego

In retrospect I realize I did not address the real problem. The real problem is my ego and my judgment of my performance. Last year there were also some additional issues of hiding behind my arbitrary goals to avoid situations I should have dealt with in a healthy manner insteadt of pretending they weren’t a problem.

For 2008 I will continue to track my studio time because not only does it provide useful records for the IRS I find it helps keep me accountable and in my studio. But this year I’m going to approach it in a healthier way. I am not going to set any specific goals for the number of hours to spend each week. Instead I will just write it down and total it up for the month.

I’ll place no judgment on how I did. No more "hurray I made the goal" or frowny faces if I don’t spend time in the studio. Those value calls are unnecessary. I don’t need to label it either good or bad. It is what it is.

I will not keep a running total from month to month and I won’t track the number of hours short or extra I have done. That’s just a recipe to make myself feel bad or boost my ego, which needs no encouragement.

My true desire is to work in my studio and I know that will happen, I trust my intent is enough for it to happen. I know when I spend that time that I am happy. Spending more hours spent does not make the happiness in some way better. It’s just my ego wanting to feel good about itself. I don’t need or want that.

At the end of the year I’ll total up all the hours and irregardless of the outcome I will be content knowing I put in the hours that were right for me.

Goals

All this doesn’t mean I’m not going to set goals for my studio. I will continue to do this in a healthy way of setting intent. It keeps me focused and focus is a great thing. Action is good. I’m not going to judge how things go - if I don’t make the goal I’ll just keep working on it. No ego - just pure joy.