I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Marketing, I research, plan, and evaluate my marketing and promotion activities.
I seem to rotate through different interests: first my art, then writing about finance, then working on my memoir-turned-personal-essay-collection project, which has love and relationships as the subject. That project intersects with my art, because as I turn each chapter of my memoir into a personal essay, I am creating a painting to go with the essay.
Right now I’m feeling inspired by working on my art. I’m getting ready to submit a piece to the exhibition for the plein air festival I recently participated in. I like the painting that I completed at the festival and I’ve already framed it, with hope it will be accepted.
Meanwhile I have a chance to have an artist’s bio shared with a Facebook art group I belong to. So it’s time to update my artist’s statement, a key element of any artist’s marketing and promotion efforts.
Art biz coach Alyson Stanfield is offering a downloadable guide with 28 Prompts to Shape Your Marketing Message on her Art Biz Success website right now. I downloaded it, and now I’m going to tackle a couple of the prompts right here.
What are you working toward that excites or scares you?
My memoir project excites and scares me. After getting divorced in 2012, I experienced a series of exciting and challenging romances. A few years in, I began documenting these with the goal of producing a memoir. Tentatively titled Things Men Gave Me, the memoir shares the gifts I received from men, both tangible and intangible, and how I grew through these relationships and interactions.
Recently, I decided to turn the chapters of the memoir into personal essays, so that I could bring additional cultural commentary and scientific research into the mix.
At the same time, I decided to create a painting to go with each essay. For example, the essay Something Blue, which shares the story of an aquamarine ring I received from one man, is paired with an abstract mixed media painting of the same name featuring swirling texture and shapes in metallic sky blue.
I love to do art projects that link different forms of media (writing and painting, painting and photography). I did that with my project Snow Bound, which paired abstract paintings with photos from a ski day edited so that they look somethiing like the paintings. It shows how seemingly pure abstracts can surface imagery from memory.
What’s a signature element in your work—and how did it come to be?
I begin many of my acrylic paintings by priming a stretched canvas with a dark brown-black made by mixing burnt umber with ivory black. I extend this color onto the sides of the canvas. I let this color show through in various places in the finished painting. This color reminds me of the color of evergreen trees in Colorado’s mountain landscapes. It’s the color of memory for me, a color that was in the background of every hike I took, every ski run I did. I’ve tried other background colors, like raw umber mixed with titanium white, and they just don’t speak to me like my standard undercolor.
I also use a custom mixed neutral in many of my paintings: titanium white mixed with a bit of ivory black and a bit of diarylide yellow. In the right proportions this creates a gorgeous alabaster white. It can also create light olive green and various shades of warm neutrals. It could also make a bark color that suggests aspen trees, another constant from my past.