Oh Hey!
No visual diary to share this month. It still exists but to tell the truth I’m catching up with it. I’m in a really active spell, doing lots of new things to push my artistic work out into the world and birth all my ideas (I’ll never birth all of them, it would be a litter of Grecian proportions, hundreds of arms and legs...). This alongside the multi-headed process of finishing up the teaching year with our brilliantly creative College students, is arguably too much stuff altogether for my pea brain to hold.
I’ve talked this year already about working at my digital and visual thinking skills (reading, internet-stalking artists I admire, taking courses and doing gruelling quick-fire drawing tasks). This last month I have also been battling that sweaty, lumbering recalcitrant horse of a website of mine: at making it feel like an illustrator-for-hire resides there, inch by inch re-visiting and changing things. It feels like the classic insurmountable task at the moment and difficult to gauge how to get it organised. Addressing its issues has been on my to do list for a long time and I’ve been eating daily avoidance cakes about it. But (go me) I’m now doing it.
I’m in re-iterating and adjusting mode with the website. It all takes me so long and feels like it represents me but it also feels like it really doesn’t. It needs to toe the line and look commercially acceptable without me feeling like the woman it’s talking about is a grinning alien even I wouldn’t want to hire. The weird little video above might be my headshot. Can’t decide. Having re worked the site more times than I can possibly count since my first version with Moonfruit (Remember Moonfruit?!) about 14 years ago I know this process works through making a page then binning it over and over until it feels right (or at least that’s how I do it, there’s definitely an easier way). I’ll get there, some darlings need to be murdered, that’s all...
Sometimes working in the margins at things around a peculiarly demanding day-job feels so incredibly frustrating, it can feel like such slow progress is happening on the thing you are desperate to nourish more and grow. I’m not at all unappreciative of the great wealths of my life - having work is a privilege, having a home and regular meals, glorious outdoor space and an IRL community on my doorstep - also a great privilege. Working in the margins can sometimes feel like a series of flops. Shattered concentration and micro- confusions: ‘Er, what was I doing? Where was I with this?’ All the time. Nothing quite getting off the ground in a timely way, it can feel like always just missing the boat, never quite completing things. Wrangling my disorganised portfolio into shape for website display has been a great reminder that I have produced a tonne of art work over the years I’ve been teaching. All those late nights and weekends definitely count. It’s the launching it all bit I need to get better at.
I loved ‘Yofishboy’s take on all of this (link below). It reminded me that sometimes slow can be golden. I completely agree that participation in and contribution to the ‘regular’ world through doing a ‘regular’ job is really important for artists and creative people. How else can we make work about the world, that communicates to people outside the inner circles of the art world if we are not in amongst it? It also makes me think about bunkerising artistic pursuits and artists, making it/them somehow separate. I have more uncooked thoughts about that bunker and who gets in and out of it. But I can’t pin them down just now. I must attend to the stroppy horse.
Over and out for now. More really soon.
Susannah
Oh Hey PS! Did you know my illustrations are available to buy as Ts, Sweats and Totes?
Susannah
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