I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Writing, I consider my writing practice and skills and how to improve upon them.
Money is not the only measurement that can corrupt your creative practice. Digitizing your work and sharing it online means that it is subject to the world of online metrics: website visits, likes, favorites, shares, reblogs, retweets, follower counts, and more.
It’s easy to become as obsessed with online metrics as money. It can then be tempting to use those metrics to decide what to work on next, without taking into account how shallow those metrics really are.
Austin Kleon, Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad
I haven’t been publishing essays on Things Men Gave me recently because I’ve been working on a book manuscript that incorporates those memoir stories into a nonfiction guide to finding romance at midlife. But I browsed to the site recently because I wanted to link to one of the essays and I was shocked to see that the visits have broke the thousand barrier, which has never happened on my other Substacks. A thousand isn’t a lot, especially when I’m getting very few subscriptions out of it, but it was more than I expected. And it kind of distracted me a little.
Here’s Kleon’s to do list for his chapter “Ignore the Numbers”:
- Leave money on the table
- Forget to take things to the next level
- Let the low-hanging fruit fall off and rot
I love it! This is my creative manifesto… for now.
In the chapter immediately preceding that one, “Protect Your Valuables,” Kleon argues against turning every creative hobby of yours into a side hustle:
When you start making a living from your work, resist the urge to monetize every single bit of your creative practice. Be sure there’s at least a tiny part of you that’s off-limits to the marketplace. Some little piece that you keep for yourself.
I’ve decided I’m going to give my art as gifts for Christmas. I have a poppies painting that my mom loves; I need only sign it, glaze it, clean up the edges, and wire it for hanging then it will be ready to give to her. For my kids, I’m planning on taking photos of some paintings they like and turning them into framed prints. The paintings themselves are likely too large for their apartments. But I think they’ll appreciate the framed prints.
Meanwhile, Ray has renovated his main bedroom and it looks absolutely amazing. He painted the walls and ceiling with Benjamin Moore White Dove (my suggestion — my interior house walls are Sherwin Williams Alabaster which is very similar, a warm yet grayed off-white, very pleasing — but he wanted to use Benjamin Moore). He laid down luxury vinyl plank flooring in a honey oak. He bought a beautiful, mountain chic mango-wood King bed with the most comfortable mattress ever to go on top. I contributed by gifting him a Pottery Barn Belgian Flax Linen Diamond Quilt in Flagstone. And he hung a 65 OLED tv on the wall, the better for us to indulge in watching our favorite show Reign, about Mary Queen of Scots.
Let me get to the point: his new room needs art, and I am just the woman to provide it. He bought a very modern rug that has warm grays, charcol, ivory, and rust tones in it, so I might like to do something to go with that. Although I could probably do whatever I want as far as color scheme goes. The rug is neutral; the bed is desaturated orange-toned wood; the walls are white.
I’m thinking of doing his bedroom painting series in this style, painterly brushstrokes creating large areas of color with some mark making and scribbly areas. This is very similar to the kind of painting I do already, but that artist has more energy and confidence than I have, I think. I’ll do maybe one very large painting for a blank wall and two complementary paintings for above the bed.
It is very rewarding to do creative work as a gift rather than thinking I will sell it.