Pressing pause, taking time to reflect
I’ve now finished three pieces which will be submitted for consideration at an upcoming art fair.
This has been an intensive period of sculpting. I’ve completed five new pieces since New Year and have another two which are almost finished as well. Pretty crazy way to work really. There’s a time for this kind of effort but it’s not something you want to make a habit of. Though I do.
I attended a pricing workshop last week. Have to say, it was a bit of a relief to find some very experienced artists and makers there who were still asking the same kind of questions I have!
It was both informative and frustrating. The cold, hard arithmetic of covering living and business expenses, retail price, mark ups etc. was very clarifying, but price isn’t what you need to charge to cover your costs. It’s also about how to determine the value of a piece of work, and that’s a moveable object. Unfortunately, we could have maybe had our many questions answered but it was not to be as there seemed to have been a double booking so our session was cut short by thirty minutes.
Another thing covered was time allocated for creating, researching, marketing, selling, admin etc. One sliced cake graphic was very heavily skewed towards making with everything else squeezed in the remaining portion. The workshop leader – Alyson Branagan of The Essential Guide to Business for Artists and Designers fame (great book -2nd edition out now) said that one was totally unrealistic…but...see above. I had to say ‘actually no, that’s pretty much how I operate!’ Ah. That hit home. I have a part time job and feel compelled to sculpt as much as I can in the hours available but that can create a sense of overwhelm; of needing to work constantly in order to have a decent body of work to show.
What I’ve realised recently is that the seven days a week rate of making is not generating creativity but inhibiting it. With no time deliberately set aside to really sit with my business plan, or consider which other areas I want to explore or just to spend time working with all the various media I have on my shelves (and I have quite a lot that I’d love to use but…don’t have time for), I’ve become aware of feeling restricted rather than eager to expand. There’s so much more I want to do and I’ve not been allocating any time in my day to day life to do other media or consider how to take it all forward in the time I have available.
We all could benefit from setting aside some time in our lives to give room for our firm ideas to take hold and flourish and to allow the seeds of newer possibilities to sprout and grow. There are flashes of insight, teasingly intriguing suggestions tickling the edge of our awareness but they cannot be captured and heard if we are too busy to listen.
Recently, I’ve really thought a lot about painting but have been too manic about sculpting to find the time to start, barring a couple of acrylic pours (a bit like the writing – something I want to do more of but…time). Stopping what I’m doing every mid-day to go and earn my rent has become incredibly frustrating so after these final pieces are done, I’m going to press pause on the sculpting, put paint to canvas, revisit the business plan, see how my ideas have evolved and try to find a way to be at peace with where I’m at right now.
