2019, A New Year
Last year was an interesting year for me. In same ways this
blog would suggest I didn’t do that much art (or certainly not as much as I had
planned on doing) but I think that was just because I struggled to write posts
about what I was working on. Looking back on the past year for me, I feel like
I have definitely progressed what I am doing and feel more secure than I ever
have been about the path I am on. I’ve already started taking steps towards new
opportunities this year (booking more craft fairs, art fairs and exhibitions
etc.) and I feel capable to continue to take more steps as the year progresses.
But before I look to far into the future, lets look back on
2018.
I wrote 26 blog posts last year, an average of once a
fortnight. It is just slightly fewer than I managed in 2017, which is a pity,
because one of my goals for 2018 was to post more. Nevertheless, there are a
number of posts that stand out to me that I want to reflect on as my favourite
posts of the year.
This happened due to some late snow that fell in March last
year. I’d never done it before, but I was willing to give it a go and see if I
could come up with anything interesting. Turns out, I ended up loving the
results of the process so much that I framed four pieces and exhibited them
last summer.
This was something very different for me to try out, but the
results were so exciting that I’ve fallen in love with it. In this example I
used diluted vinegar, but I have since tried it out with tea, which worked
equally as well, but with a different final result.
This was a very different post to my usual traditional mixed
media art, but was an opportunity for me to go back to my roots as an artist
when I was a teenager, messing around in photoshop. I’d forgotten how much I
enjoyed playing around with colouring and layering and so to give myself the
time and freedom to do that was liberating.
Two Workshops: Lynda Monk and Poetry of Decay
I did two workshops last year. One, a one-day workshop with
Lynda Monk, focused on using Tyvek, and the other a five-day mixed media course
with Christine Chester, looking at the subject of decay. Both were hugely
inspiring and beneficial in progressing my ideas and work along. I managed to
finish a piece of work that has been in my WIP pile for too long after the
Lynda Monk workshop and have a stack of pictures that are awaiting mounting up
and framing from the Poetry of Decay course. I definitely wouldn’t have done
the things we learnt about on that course under my own steam and so I am so
grateful for the opportunity to try those new techniques out under their
guidance.
I ended up, unintentionally doing a couple of series of
posts. The first one, at the start of the year, was about collage and painting.
Abstract Collage Art, Pressing and Printing Paint and Collage and Paint Mixed Media are the three posts that became part of the series. It was the
first time I’d really joined processes together on this blog. Normally the
posts I write are stand alone, with work that only relates to one post, but in
this instance, it was an evolution of an idea that spread across three posts.
In a similar but different vein,
I did three posts on fluid art over the course of the year, with a brief
mention in a fourth: Trying Out Fluid Art (Again) on Canvas, Fluid Art with Acrylic Paint and Water, Painted Plant Pots
and Painted Rock Sculptures. This was a process that I was really
interested in exploring, especially since I didn’t get the results I wanted
first time around, and once I found something that worked, I really wanted to
see what else I could do with it. I still want to do more of this, at least to
try it out once more with pouring medium, to see if that creates more interesting results.
I focused more on Etsy this year. It is still a slow process working out what does
and doesn’t work for that platform and trying to figure out how that informs
what I do, to find the balance between making things I love and things that
sell. On the whole, though, I do feel like I am getting there and it is
gratifying knowing that people like my work, especially enough to keep coming
back for repeat orders.
Once again, I have been struck by how fickle inspiration can
be. As much as I wanted to commit to posting once a week, that didn’t happen.
Although it’s something I plan on doing this coming year too, the truth is it
might not be realistic. I’ll keep trying, because I think if I don’t have that goal
in mind, I might not bother at all, which would be a shame.
As I said at the beginning of this post, I have already made
plans for the first part of the year and it is my goal to keep that up moving
forward. I’ve learnt that without deadlines to focus me, it is easy not to
produce finished work (case in point: the stack of canvases lined up in my art
room that need more work doing to them) or get finished work mounted and
framed, so no matter how stressful it might be, I want to keep creating
deadlines for myself and keep creating art and we’ll see how it goes.
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