Having just finished my mid year review for my regular job, I knew it was time to write my art mid year review as well. So far this year has been one of my best ever, and I am very excited about the rest of it. For the first time in my life, I feel like I am truly in control of my destiny, and I like being a free agent! I started the year off with a long list of goals and a lot of pressure, which you can read here. Since then, I have decided to make a dramatic shift. I stopped caring about the goals I originally set and started thinking about a new set of priorities. The two original goals that I ended up doing very well were finishing the sketchbooks and practicing daily sketching. I finished four sketchbooks so far and will finish my fifth this evening. As for daily sketching, there were a number of months I took over five days off, but it was because some (much needed) social things came up. I don’t consider that a failure at all. I did work in a series as well in my Series of Men. I am actually considering starting this back up because I got a few more ideas since then and I got a lot of good feedback.
I think my shift in attitude started when I spent that week at Snow Farm at the end of April. Spending hours upon hours working on my artwork every single day made me realize that I can hack it better than I thought I could. This year I started blogging at Cathy Johnson’s new blog Sketching in Nature, which was a real honor for me. Recently, I have also started work on the Moly_x_Portrait6 moleskine exchange. You can see my first entry here.
Even though I revised my goals, I am not going to discuss them quite yet. Epictetus sums up the reason perfectly:
Most people only know how to respond to an idea by pouncing on its shortfalls rather than identifying its potential merits. Practice self-containment so that your enthusiasm won’t be frittered away. -Epictetus
Post a Comment