Constant Vigilance!

One of the things that was a common occurrence when I was an undergrad was talking to other students and have them show me a piece of theirs and then say, "What do you think? I hate it." And I think there are two reasons for this. The first is that when we spend along time working on a single piece, we stop seeing it for what it is, and instead we project all our anxieties and frustrations from the process onto the finished piece. This is a temporary thing, and after I've put a piece aside for a while, it tends to go away. The second reason is part of the nature of being an artist and looking at things with a critical eye. When we look at a piece of our own work, we remember what we had intended it to look like, and every slight deviation from that plan is visible to us. While other people may see the work for what it is, we see it for what it could have been. And this isn't necessarily a bad thing! By recognizing that a piece isn't perfect and seeing the ways it could be improved, we have the potential to become better artists, better object makers. You cannot improve on perfection, after all.

So, in the spirit of constant improvement, I've been working on things! You may notice, over to your right, a little sidebar with images of my work on Etsy, for example. I saw one of these on a fellow jeweler's blog and decided that I absolutely needed one too. So I installed it, and then I tweaked the layout of the blog as well, because it was badly centered, and I am nothing if not a perfectionist about the spacing in the layout of this blog. (If you've been reading for a while, you'll remember the many many times I struggled with the width of my photos compared to the width of the main blog post section. Epic!)

But that's not all! Saturday I gave a class on enameling, and since I had to go in two hours early to heat the kiln up, I spent that time rephotographing a good portion of my work for my Etsy page. I've been reading up on some of the Etsy how to pages, and they have a lot of good advice for improving your shop, and one of the things I've been struggling with was the photography element. In calls for entries, you want as simple of a background as possible, completely not distracting. But Etsy has a different aesthetic, more quirky, more individual. And while the goal is the same: to show your pieces to the best advantage, there's a lot more leeway. A plain white background feels too sterile, too impersonal on Etsy. So I retook my photos, and then spent last night editing and uploading them. Here's the result. I still have a lot to work on, since some of the photos aren't quite as good as I'd like them to be, but it's certainly an improvement. The shop has a much more cohesive feel now.

I've one last bit of news before you go on your way! On February 5, 2010, the first show I'm in this year has it's opening reception. It's the 23rd Annual Meterials: Hard & Soft exhibition. As it's in Denton, TX at the Meadows Gallery in the Center for the Visual Arts. If you're in the area, you should go! The reception is from 7:00 - 9:00 pm and there'll be hors d'oevres and spirits, according to my invitation card. You can visit the Greater Denton Arts Council website for more information.