Ongoing

I thought I’d post links to some practical websites that I like and have found useful — in the hopes that I’ll then remember to look at them more often. Here’s my first favorite practical site:

Getting Your Sh*t Together

This is an artist-run company that (I think) grew out of a great series of workshops on business and career issues for artists. They still offer workshops, and have a blog, and have developed software designed to keep you organized and on track.

I am tempted to spend some of the grant money on the software: even though it does things that I already know how to do (keep track of shows, keep track of my work, organize images, make plans), I also know that I am not terribly disciplined about doing all those things. It seems like the software might provide enough structure — and make it easy enough — that I’d take care of more of those practical things.

Now that the show at Franklin is up, my next project should be getting people (meaning people, but also curators and gallerists) to see the show. I’d love to arrange some studio visits, but am not sure the best way to go about this.

The best studio visit advice I’ve seen so far was posted by Edward Winkleman on his blog. He’s setting aside Tuesdays to answer practical art career questions. Useful bits from his post: Realize that a studio visit requires a big investment of time from someone with lots of demands on her time — so, do your research first, and make sure you make your request at a good time and for a good reason. He really stresses the importance of knowing and being on friendly terms with the curator you’re inviting — otherwise, you’re just someone calling/emailing out of the blue, which is what I end up doing.

So - should I follow up an email with a phone call if I don’t hear anything, or is that just pushy?

I’ve been interested in samples and examples in books. Color samples are especially appealing: they seem so fugitive.

From the history of colors: Chinese, Buddhist

From the history of colors: Van Gogh

These pages come from the Historical color guide, primitive to modern times, by Elizabeth Burris-Meyer, published in 1938.

Here’s my favorite passage from this book:

…[I]t is yet possible, indeed almost inevitable, for a thoughtful telescopist — watching the moon night after night, observing the sun rise upon a lunar scene, and noting the course of effectsthat follow till it sets — it is almost inevitable , we say, for such an observer to identify himself so far with the object of his scrutiny, as sometimes to become in thought a lunar being. [Nasymth, The Moon, 1885, p. 178]

All of the photographs in the book are beautiful — the edition I am borrowing has incredibly detailed tipped-in images — but I am intrigued by the images of the imagined lunar landscape.

What I have read is that Nasmyth made plaster models of the surface of the moon, then photographed those models. So he was not just dwelling on the moon in his imagination, he was building imaginatively inhabitable three-dimensional models of his other earth.

I tried out the new camera — it works. I’ve posted some of the images from the exhibition here — check it out.

I took my new camera to the gallery — obviously, I did manage to finally spend a bit of my fellowship money on a new camera, and have already put it to good use. Anyway, here’s a view of the gallery:

It still looked beautiful — space, placement, and lighting make such a difference. I’ll put up a gallery of more images soon.

I wrote about Delia Brown’s Precious paintings on the Walker blog already, but the paintings are still bugging me. Brown and her child-free friends are the models for these mothers – none are actually parents. It doesn’t bother me that children are being used as accessories, but maybe it does bother me that a glamourous art life doesn’t or can’t include actual children.

Though if I spend a bit more time thinking about it, while I am a fan of beauty and glamour, I like art because it is interesting. And children certainly make things interesting, if not glamorous.

Friends who have received the McKnight grant have me paranoid — they all say that the money goes so fast. It’s hard to imagine that much cash before you get it, but it apparently disappears surprisingly quickly. It took me at least a week just to put the check in the bank, but now that it’s in my account, I am trying to figure out responsible ways to spend it. Actually, I’d like to balance the responsible with the extravagant: it would be responsible to buy a serviceable $150 digital camera, but maybe for making and documenting my work, a $700 digital camera, while extravagant, might be justifiable. Or would it?

Here are some things I am thinking of:

Travel

Camera

Lots of art books

Computer

Some of these are practical — I really need a new computer, as this one is nearing retirement. Travel is starting to seem ridiculously expensive, but is something that I could never do without a grant, and it seems important to do something that would otherwise be impossible. I’d get to see new work, visit museums, make contact with galleries, connect with artist-friends — there are lots of good reasons to travel.

I still can’t quite believe that I was awarded a McKnight fellowship. I asked around a bit for advice when I was applying — should I show only recent work, should I show a variety of work or a single series — and, when I learned that I was a finalist and that the panelists would be doing a studio visit, I asked around again — how should I set up my studio, what would the panelists be expecting to see. Of course, I still don’t really have any idea of what worked. Here’s some of the advice I got:

Show a consistent body of work — not necessarily a single series, but a group that shows some consistency and progression. And recent work is good — but “recent” can mean in the last couple of years, not just the past few months. (I actually showed a few older works (2005-06) and some very new work (2008) in the images I sent).

Use the statement to address issues that you think might come up with the panelists – for example, if your work is similar to someone else’s, define how you’re different, or if you’ve been working with a single media, explain how you plan to expand or achieve greater depth in future work. (I didn’t need to submit a statement until just before the studio visit. I dumped my boilerplate statement that talks in general terms about my work, and wrote one specifically for the work that was going to be in my studio).

For a studio visit, your studio should be as much like an exhibition as possible. White walls, clean space, no clutter, no work in progress. Make it easy and very clear for the panelists to focus on the work you really want them to see. I did this — I spent a couple of days stripping the studio as bare as I could get it, and setting up only a very few works.

None of this is news, I suppose, but it was helpful to re-hear all this when I was preparing. And here’s a link to MCAD’s announcement of the fellowships, with a bit of info about each of the recipients.

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This is the “after” view of my studio. It was all cleaned up — really really cleaned up — for a studio visit by a grant panel. The Franklin Art Works show is in just a couple of weeks, and everything that will soon fill a 1500 square foot space is currently filling a 200 square foot space.

And this “after” is also a “before” since before long, it will be after this, and this will now be the new before.