Art and Creativity: The Creative Juices Are out of Practice!

And so, we've arrived in the middle of April — the days are longer, there's more daylight and sunshine hitting my little corner of the house where I do my creative work… and I keep thinking to myself that I should be busy doing something!

It will be only a little over six to seven weeks before the first outside events and festivals we're going to attend this year are going to start, and I realized that I really haven't done very much in the way of starting to build up some inventory to bring to these events.

Two years of COVID-19 seem to have taken me out of of the practice of creating and prepping for events!

That is, since all these events we normally would have gone to were cancelled for a solid two years straight — not a single event for two years! — I appear to have lost a good bit of my "edge" and sense of urgency about creating things because... well, I haven't exactly been selling anything.

It's not much fun to work and just watch your work pile up... so I've gradually fallen into a pattern of working very much. I keep a (paper) art journal of sorts, and looking back... I'd say I'm pretty much running at about one quarter the pace I was working at, by early 2020.

But that has to change!

I started feeling a little bit better about it yesterday, when I was doing my rounds online and discovered that I'd actually sold a couple of things over the weekend!

It was only $43, but still... it served as a psychological boost, more than anything.

Our vendor space at one of the last events we attended, back in 2019; my wife minding the booth

As I've said before, a lot of people expect artists to just be content "creating for creation's sake," but it does give you a little bit of a lift when you sell some of your work. Simply receiving kind words from people who admire what you're doing is nice, but it's not the same as somebody actually being willing to lay down some of their hard earned cash to acquire your work.

Ironically, this somewhat modest sale came from the Amazon Handmade site, which is perhaps the online sales venue I pay the least attention to because I've never felt all that enthusiastic about "getting in bed" with Jeff Bezos’ evil empire. But it does offer tremendous exposure, and whether you love or hate Amazon, you have to give their marketing machine a lot of credit for pretty much being everywhere!

Regardless, it's time for me to bring out all the big flat bins where I keep my already finished work, take a look at what I already have, and decide which holes in the collection need the most to be filled.

The fact that I even need to do that is perhaps testament to the fact that I haven't been looking in those bins all that often, as of late!

And that also has to change!

So in the next few days I shall start taking the first few functional steps towards getting ready for show season!

Thanks for stopping by! Do leave me a comment if you feel so inspired — interaction and engagement are always welcome!

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2022.04.19 AS-TXT-096/062