Finding Space

This weekend, I finally got tired of moving things around or trying to remember where I left something. Where is my planner? Where are any of my charging cables? Why can’t I find a pen? Can I just take a picture of this collage with my phone and hope I can edit the picture to look like the real thing or should I go through the annoyance of moving everything down to the scanner? 

Enough was enough.

I was going to claim another space for myself.

Or rather, reclaim a space I’d had a few months ago for a different purpose.  I know how important it is for my art practice to have my materials organized in a space that’s easy to access, but given that same attention to the business side of my creative practice.

As I wrote in my newsletter this week, making art is the fun part of being an artist, but there’s so much more involved. Artists don’t just get to make art, send it to a gallery and wait for payment. Social media and content creation, marketing, websites to maintain and stock, research, and about a million other tasks take us away from the studio.  

If I wanted to take selling my art as seriously as making art, I needed a place to work. I needed to stop writing on the couch, or on the floor with the coffee table as my desk. I needed to stop wasting time trying to find things by having them all in one place. I needed an office space. 

So I made one.

I repurposed furniture from all over the house and gave myself a desk and some storage. I found all my cables, moved the scanner out of the basement and added little things to make the space both functional and pretty. I created a place that makes the work that I do out of the studio as important as the work I do in the studio. 

Here are my two suggestions for you. Find a space where you can keep all your art supplies so they are accessible and ready to go. If you have any sort of art business, or aspirations to have an art business, make yourself a space for that as well. Take what you do seriously and maybe everyone else will as well.