Life

Follow my blog with Bloglovin This post continues my series about the purposes and goals of this blog. The overall purpose of the blog is to document my progress from an out-of-work aspiring artist, to a practicing artist with an income and a mutually enriching connection with my community. To help focus my efforts I’ve defined three areas to concentrate on: Art, Life and Community. My last article was about Art, this one is about Life. Life First off let me say that I’m not a big fan of blogs that function as personal diaries. So when I say that I am going to devote up to a third of my focus to Life related articles, I feel I should elaborate. Apart from making art and managing business matters, there’s another aspect to establishing an art practice which doesn’t fit into any neat category. To make it easy, I’ve called it Life. Life is all the other stuff that happens around an art practice- usually the stuff that stops us from actually having an art practice. Now as I’ve mentioned in previous articles I’ll be writing about this from my own experiences but I know from talking to many of my creative friends, these experiences aren’t mine alone. These experiences include: self-doubt fear of failure fear of success fear of being wrong procrastination indecision being overly self-critical lack of inspiration perfectionism being non-committal comparisons ‘shoulds/shouldn’ts’ busy social life busy work life being time-poor financially poor self sabotage easily distracted and so on. All of these issues are things that I have experienced as I have tried to make art in the past. All of them have gotten in the way of making art. Most of them still come up. Over time I’m going to talk a bit about these experiences as they’ve come up for me and some of the ways I’ve found to get past them, or to make art despite them. If you’ve got any insights of your own by all means let me know how you work around these distractions. Leave a comment below! Image: Clayton Cubitt Follow my blog with Bloglovin