Lisa Call

Home #43 (informed by Home #11)
©2010 Lisa Call
2.5" x 3.5"
Textile Painting (Fabric hand dyed by the artist, cotton batting, cotton thread)
$40 + shipping

Create Denver Expo

This saturday at 10:45am, I’ll be giving a workshop, Time Management: The Artist and The Internet, as part of the Create Denver Expo. I’m excited about the content of my talk and have created my first art related power point for it.

If you’re in Denver, I highly recommending attending the Expo. I’ve been every year (I think this is year number 4 or 5) and always learn much to help with my art career. This is the 2nd year I’ll be speaking and am looking forward to that also.

At some point I’ll be turning this into online content, so watch the blog at makebigart.com for details on that project.

More information here.

Mini Textile Painting Give Away

Don’t forget to leave your comment on my previous post, celebrating 5 years of blogging, to be entered into a drawing to win a mini textile painting of your choice.

More details here.

Studio Update

I’ve started work on 2 new BIG textile paintings this week. It feels great to be back on that horse riding again. I’ll post some in process photos soon. Right now I’m busy creating and not photographing.

I’ll keep writing about the obstacles I faced and how I got going again as that’s been most helpful, infact the next post in that series will be around blogging.

Markings #5    ©2007    66"x 57"

No Pressure

My show, Markings: Repetition and Pattern, opened today. The work is done. My artist talk is outlined and ready to go for saturday at the artist reception. I’ve got a detailed list of things to bring (cookies, updated portfolio, camera, etc). The deadline for shipping work for my next show, Fencing in or Keeping Out, isn’t for another month. My kids are still in Europe. Taxes are done. Bills are caught up. Plants are watered. Cats are fed. Laundry is done.

I’m in a very rare state of my life. I don’t feel the pressure of any looming deadlines I need to rush to complete.

Wow. What an amazing feeling.

Used to be this situation would rarely last long. Some deadline will sneak up on me and I’d start feeling I have to do things in high gear again.

My intent is to not let that happen that way anymore. I don’t want to live my life feeling I’m just putting out one fire after another.

Spinning My Wheels

My normal M.O. would be to make an excuse to myself that I needed to do nothing all week, for several weeks. I delivered the work for my show monday, obviously I deserve a month off. Then I’d waste the entire time online doing nothing. Then I’d feel drained, annoyed at myself and back under pressure to crank out the work at the last minute.

The result being only the immediate deadlines are met and things like decluttering my house, which is a huge job and needs to be done in little chunks, never ever gets finished because it never gets started because I’m either doing nothing at all or running around like a chicken with my head cut off.

I know I have a reputation for being super organized and good at managing my time but the reality is I work really fast and can pull off amazing things when under pressure. But only the big splashy things get done. The other stuff gets ignored and I don’t talk about it although it frustrates me a lot.

No more!

A Better Way

My plan is to keep track of upcoming commitments for the next 6 months and each week pick a few items that I need to focus on that week so my goals will be met in an effortless manner.

This week my priorities are

• Preparation for my artist reception on saturday
• Decluttering of my house
• Making steady progress for the work for the show in April

So tonight I cleaned out 1/2 of my linen closet, wrote the outline for my artist talk and made a shopping list and I spent a hour in my studio.

This doesn’t mean I won’t take time out to relax. I think it probably means I’ll have more time for slowing down and enjoying a break.

I’ll let you know how it goes.
 

Markings #5

I said in my last post that there were 2 pieces that didn’t make it into the show up in Boulder. This is the other piece. I really love this piece but it was too big. I had 2 pieces that were very dark and the other one fit into the space better. So this one came home to keep me company instead.