Artist’s Daybook: Wednesday
Day three in a series of five
A record of my daily practice
I'm starting the day with one of my least favorite tasks. Scanning anything larger than 9" x 12" on my flatbed scanner is painful; even more so if the piece has lots of whitespace. Many of my pieces are too large even to scan in sections, which means I have to use my IPhone for pictures. This brings up issues of cropping, achieving even edges, chasing down good natural lighting, color correction, and cats who want to be in the picture. I'd love a dedicated wall where I could hang any size collage with studio lights to illuminate it for high-quality images that could even be reproduced as prints. Or maybe, even better, I could be making enough money to hire a professional photographer to do all of this for me!
I take a break and post to Instagram with a call to action designed to attract people to my newsletter. It's tough to continually create content that will lead people to share their email address, but that's way more important than simply having followers on social media.
This is the kind of day that makes weeding the gardens appealing.
As each piece is scanned/photographed, I upload the images to Artwork Archive and my public profile. This populates to my website, so my new work is out in the world before it hits my newsletter or social media. At this stage, I have to come up with titles.
I should start writing sticky notes with title ideas when I'm working on a piece. I like to read what's on the back of the papers I use and I'm often struck that a phrase would make a great title. But I never remember them and writing them down and attaching them to the back of collage would make this titling task easier.
Let's see- I'm looking at the piece and my mind is blank. Spinning around in my chair, I look at the cherry trees through the open sliding glass doors, hearing birdsong, back to staring at the collage. The piece is pink. Cherry blossoms are pink. I'll title it Whistle Down the Blossoms. The flowers bloom and fall so quickly that it's like all the birds have to do is sit in the trees and sing and the blossoms fall.
I'm annoyed with several of these new pieces. They don't look as good as they did when I made them, some of them weeks ago. Should I revise them or let them be? I don't have to seal them today, but that means I'll have fewer pieces for the Colorado show. I decide that two pieces really do need revisions.
It feels like I've accomplished nothing today and I'm feeling discouraged instead of proud of having made all these new pieces.
*****
In record time, I'm back after completing necessary errands. I try not to go out during work hours, but sometimes I can't schedule appointments and errands for the afternoons. And if I want to chaperone my son's field trip, the trip to the police station for a background check has to happen.
As I drive, I think about why I resist and dislike the scanning and photographing days. Seeing the pieces out of the artificial basement light of the studio, and up in my sun-filled living room, changes how I see them. The colors shift and I notice lumpy layers that pop out in the photographs. I bring the new pieces upstairs after I make them as part of my revision process, but time changes how I see them and I notice new areas I don't like. I remind myself that artists often aren't the best judges of their own work.
*****
Back in the studio, I revise the first of the two 16" x 16" pieces. I'm able to layer more papers over the lumps, which smooths those out and creates another place of small detail.
The second piece results in a "seriously, Sarah" moment. The areas to revise are in the same section as the first piece because I somehow create paired pieces with matching grid structure compositions. The lumps in this one are more serious, and I take out a T-Square and Exacto knife and excise a large section. Flipping through the flat file drawers, I cut and audition multiple papers before settling on a solid block of gray.
*****
Fast forward a few hours and I'm at my son's soccer practice. My car doubles as an office with my laptop, notebook, and my cell phone creating a mobile hotspot. Practice lasts for an hour and forty-five minutes, and it's a good time to write. Before I leave the house, I receive an email from the commercial project manager who needs the piece they purchased delivered by Monday. I find the collage, write the thank you note, and the certificate of authenticity from Artwork Archive that I had color printed at Staples a few weeks ago. If I pack it in the morning and get it to the CVS UPS access point first thing, I'll have it to them by the deadline.
As I type notes for another writing project, I suddenly feel panicked. I close the computer and write in this notebook on unrelated topics to give myself time to process that feeling. I've committed to a major writing project and it's so much work without knowing if it's going anywhere. It takes a moment for me to connect that feeling to making a collage. I get to the messy middle of a piece and despair of ever figuring out how to finish it. Then I have to trust myself to make it happen. I have the same feeling about my writing project. Having written about the middle stage of art making in this notebook helps me to make this connection.
The bullet point version of my day:
Post content to Instagram with calls-to-action to build newsletter subscribers
Upload completed artwork images to Artwork Archive which populates to the artist's website
Faces difficulty coming up with titles for artwork, drawing inspiration from surroundings (cherry blossoms)
Feeling dissatisfied with some pieces when seeing them in different lighting conditions and decides to revise two 16" x 16" pieces
Juggles errands during work hours, including a background check for chaperoning a child's field trip
Uses car as mobile office during son's soccer practice
Experiences sudden anxiety about a major writing project
Makes connection between the "messy middle" stage of collage-making and writing—both requiring trust in the process
Check back tomorrow at noon EST for the next Daybook entry.