I haven’t ever applied for a grant before. It always seemed an inefficient way to gamble. But when Arts Northern Rivers offered their fast turnaround Micro Grants – $1000 to help alleviate the direct impact of Covid – I thought it wouldn’t hurt to try.
Ok friends.Who wants to come up to Gympie on the 21st of March, a Saturday afternoon, and drink champagne with me to celebrate this exhibition? It sounds like the gallery has an afternoon of it planned. so it should be fun. I haven’t seen some of you for an age, so if you’ve got the…
They say that getting out of one’s comfort zone is “good for you”. I say that Variety – yes, capital letter there for emphasis – in whatever form, is the spice of life.
Twice recently I’ve been asked about how to write an artist cv. The first artist applying for a grant for a workshop, the second needing one to complete an entry for a juried art show. Time, it seemed, to share some info from my “Success and the Business of Artwork” professional development workshop that I’ve been teaching for a few years now.
Being an artist isn’t just starting at the beginning and moving forward in steady measured steps. (Though it can be, if that’s how you are). For me it’s a pattern of learning to notice what I’m attracted to, and running with that idea for as long as it takes.
In any business, there’s an ebb and flow of crisis and calm, overlaid with the day-to-day strategies that plod along getting things done. I realised that allocating time to the garden – a less important job in my week – took the worry of it not being done, and gave me more time for everything else.
Other days have their purpose within the broad scheme of the week. Sunday morning, with its short time of stillness, is as vital to the week’s productivity as the days of busyness.
When the producer of Radio National’s The Arts Show decided she wanted this image for the web-page, to complement the radio program I’d been in with Ed Ayers, (listen here) she emailed me. “Can you tell me more about this one?” she’d asked. “Is it still the hundredth shed? Where is it located?” I’m sure…
It’s easy to get sucked into the vortex that is you-tube searching for all the answers before we even take the first step. But there are advantages to making your own mistakes.
Six years ago, in September 2012, I was the judge of the first Holy Name School Art Show. Judging children’s art is always problematic, so this blog, which is a transcript of my opening night speech, addresses issues of competing and being an artist, even at primary school age. It gives advice to children and their parents’, that is relevant to all artists.
Susan Webster sat across from me at the cafe near the old gallery. She’s an Ag-journalist, but we we weren’t there for work, though we’d talked about her novel, and my paintings and the state of the dairy industry and more. Suddenly she said something about using photos in art. “Wait” she said, as I began, ” let’s record this”. So she did. This is a transcript of what she heard.
There are people in charge of curating private, corporate and public collections, but there is something very special about the personal collectors that Christine knows. This is a comment about how people collect, what it feels like to be collected, and how a collection is the intersection between one person’s creative episode and other person’s life episode.
I live in a place known as “The Wok” My car, at lunchtime today, parked down town, told me it was 43 degrees Celsius. As I got on the road it came down to 36 which is still a bit warm, but about typical for summer here in the part of the sub-tropical north affectionately…
I am a storyteller, as are all artists. Some tell stories of what they imagine. Others tell stories of where they’ve been, or how they feel. Artists in academia tell stories that have footnotes [1] Like many of my contemporaries, I tell stories about what I see. I tell visual stories about the sheep and…
While I’m thinking about ‘the artist as writer’ I want to tell you about the first time I came closed to being a published author. I know that there are degrees of being published, and hierarchies within those degrees. But in the 1960’s the world on on-line publishing was not even the twinkle in the eye of a programmer (who was not yet even the twinkle in someone else’ eyes). For me, in grade six, the promise of a publishing contract was enough to get me scribbling…
I thought I’d google “professional artist”. You know the feeling. It’s a middle of the night thing. This time it was dawn and my brain would just not stay asleep for a moment longer, even though my body craved it. I thought perhaps, with all the times I’d written “full time professional artist” in intros…
