Goals for 2007

Ha! If you thought I was going to present you with an itemized list of goals like Lisa's, think again. I am thoroughly impressed (and cowed) by what Lisa has planned for the coming year. But I have been thinking about it (yeah, working on the procrastination thing, too) and here is what I have so far:

1. More time in the studio doing art. Keep track of the time spent on art. But wait - does sewing on a sleeve count as art time? Or is that business time? I've made a chart with 4 divisions: art, surface design, business, and other. Surface design is really a subset of art, but I want to keep track of that also. Business includes maintaining my database of artwork and show listings, preparing entries, meetings (and travel time if it's any distance), show openings, photography of artwork, processing images, etc., etc. It's more difficult to break the art activities down: design and stitch. But wait, I often take photographs as inspiration and play around with them on the computer - where do I put that? So now I can get bogged down in trying to categorize the amount of time I spend on an activity. Maybe I will just aim for a total number of hours right now, keep track of what I'm doing, and in 3 months revisit this task. So okay - my goal is 30 hours per week.

2. Use a sketchbook. I have lots of sketchbooks, all with some of the pages used. But it's not something I keep at hand and jot in frequently. Needs to be a more concerted effort.

3. Exposure - seek out more mixed media shows; seek out public art and percent for art calls; seek out solo show opportunities. I have already sent out one application for a solo show and I subscribed to artdeadlines.com. Previously I was getting Art Calendar but I'm dropping that. I've also been building a collection of postcards of my work. Every time I finish a piece, I get 100 postcards from VistaPrint. Once you get something from them they start sending email offers for free stuff, in particular 100 postcards for free. It's not totally free because you have to pay for shipping and uploading the design, so it's actually about $10.

So for today, I'm going to spend quite a while ripping out quilting on my current piece that I don't like. I guess that goes into the art category, although it's more like un-arting. Then I also have an appointments for a haircut, a mammogram, a Dexa scan, and then I will go to the gym. That pretty much takes me to dinner time.

Seasonal note: today is the latest sunrise of the year, at least here in Baltimore. From now on the sunrises get earlier and the sunsets get later and the lengthening of the days will become noticeable. If you're wondering why the earliest sunset and the latest sunrise are not both on the winter solstice, read about the Analemma. I'm not going to explain it here.