Making plans - and the part that's often forgotten

2019 is here and it’s organised! All my scraps and random pages of notes filed in three ring binders by subject. Love that order out of chaos thing.

This includes info on art fairs for new artists; checking out submission costs and deadlines. That gives you pause-with VAT that’s a chunk of change for youngsters or newbies on a budget.

Looks seriously at my Excel finances tracker.

Which I’ve had going since October 2018.

And ignored.

Ouch. Must do better.

So I did a serious overhaul to ensure there's money in the art kitty when needed. Progress.

Looking at the promo videos, most of my sculpts seem quite small compared to what’s on show.

It’s helpful to see what kind of work gets selected for fairs or appears in galleries – not to compare with others and not that I’m desperate for gallery representation either (their commission is too much unless your prices can handle it), but artists need to constantly evaluate how their work sits in certain environments, especially if you work in isolation.

So I’m working a bit bigger for a possible Spring show and have also started playing with a free-er style recently. I need to combine the technical side with the expressive element to hit the spot. Quality always has to be pushed up to the next level. Review regularly - weed out anything that's not your very best work - it's surprising how quickly you'll become very selective about that.

What I haven’t been doing…until now…is what’s been largely missing - the mental preparation i.e. a really clear vision of where I’m going and how I envision myself there.

Two things on that. The first from a forum where someone said she only saw herself as an Artist with a capital A when she started selling her work. Before that, she was a 'hobbyist' and didn’t take herself seriously. Point being, you have to take yourself seriously before you start selling. Do what you have to do to become good enough, do what you need to do to get your work out there, do what a professional would be doing in the way they would be doing it. That’s how you progress to selling (bit of Steven Pressfield there; I don’t agree with a lot of his ‘resistance’ stuff but this, I get).

The second is an Albert Einstein quote: “I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be.” Might sound odd but think about it - how many people are carrying around a self-perception based on things from decades ago?

We grow up, learn new skills, gain wisdom (hopefully), maturity (most of the time) and experience (unless we lived in a cave) but I often hear people dismiss their capabilities based on a primary school version of themselves. If we reviewed and updated our self-image regularly, we could then see ourselves in a more realistic and positive light. But hang it, we cling to what we think we are even when it doesn't serve us. Humans are strange like that.

But if we want to change our life in some radical way (I hear Joe Rogan’s voice when I type ‘radical’ - he loves that word), we often slam to a halt because we don’t see ourselves as ‘that kind of person’ or someone who can learn how to do xyz (just like everyone else had to do).

So. I’m just playing ‘what if’- building a picture of where I want to be and how it will feel to be the kind of person that lives in that reality. I’m making it a daily exercise. Apparently our brains can’t tell the difference between what we experience and what we imagine (maybe they’re both the same thing anyway) so even if you can’t experience something right now, you can still create the experience - in all its detail – in your mind. And live there for a bit until it becomes ̶s̶e̶c̶o̶n̶d̶ your nature. My daily watch word from now on – FOCUS!

I'm just chucking out things I've found useful or learned along the way. If you read this stuff and agree/disagree/know much more than I do/recognise a bit of yourself, drop a comment in below. Feedback is useful and the exchange of different ideas and perspectives make us really think about...what we think. There's always more to learn.