Documentation

For the past few hours I've been scrounging through my apartment, pulling my art from the walls, the dishwasher, the bookshelves, and anywhere else it has walked off too.  I've removed it from its natural habitat, placed it on an 18"x24" piece of drawing paper and photographed it.  After returning all the art pieces to their homes, I'm now settling in on my laptop to edit it all the pictures I took.

Straight from my kitchen shelves to the internet!

I'm doing this because for grad school this semester I have to create my artist's website and I've realized how little of my art I have quality pictures of.  I have plenty of snapshots of the studio, paintings in progress, ceramics before they were put through the kiln, etc., but by the time my art gets to the finished piece apparently I just let it move on.  The exception to this are the extensive pictures I took from my senior show in painting.  Because I took so many pictures of the gallery last March, making the painting section of my website was much easier.

But as I worked on my website I realized that I don't have enough creative output in any single art form to portray myself as a professional artist.  I have about ten paintings, twenty plates/bowls, three recorded songs, two books, and a quickly growing wealth of pictures of kids work.  Separately, this doesn't show the amount of time that I've spent developing myself.  However, all together it starts to form an image of a dedicated artist.

To this end, I photographed all the pieces I have left from my ceramics senior show (which are now sitting in my kitchen, thankfully they were all clean), pottery that I've painted at work over the past nine months, and the various stages of my knitted canvasses.  Adding this to the random images I had strewn throughout my over-full iphoto folder and now I have about seventy pictures to work with, instead of twenty.

I've also realized just how much I've made.  I thought when I moved to Boston my creative output had slowed down some, but now I've realized that while I don't have any new 8" oil paintings, I have generated quite a bit of everything else.  As I go back to work on my website, I can now fill in all the missing areas with concrete examples of my art, what people really what to see, instead of fluffy writing about what I like to do.

The lesson learned: document everything.  I've already made a point to do this, I have journals spilling out of the bookshelf, a 97% full hard-drive, and stacks of art everywhere, but I need to do it more and in a more organized manner.  As I plow along the path to creating my community art center (we now have an in-progress website! thestudioofpossibilities.com) I've been focusing on documenting everything, because that's what shows your competence and gets people interested.  As of now, I'm starting to practice what I preach in my own work.  Get ready for a lot more of everything!