Before anything else, I have always sucked at portraiture. So take everything that follows with a salt mine.

Weirdly, if you think about it, though, a greedy lion’s share of my work could be said to be portraiture, although I have never once thought of myself as a portraitist.

But like all my recent posts that have been just, reactions, basically, to what’s been going on in jillaworld, I thought I’d share a thought or two about portraiture and why doing it the slow, old fashioned, by-hand way is still worth trying to do in an age when you can just shoot people with your phone.

I mean photography was invented a bazillion years ago, but people still painted portraits and made busts of other people after that (although probably not as many). (I’m just writing off the top of my head, by the way; lazy jill’s not looking anything up.)
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You know how some folks say when accidents happen while making art, you should work with them to create something beautiful and unexpected? We’re not talking about those kinds of happy accidents.

This month I’m continuing on from my last post (and continuing to rip off that hardware blog I was working on for a client at my day job).  I had meant this post to be a list of safety tips for avoiding booboo’s while you’re painting (or sculpting, and so on). But instead, I ended up recalling all the accidents (one or two of which really were quite serious) I’ve had in the painting factory over the years.

The sad thing is that when it came down to actually listing the tips for avoiding these mishaps, it really only came down to just three (super basic and obvious) things. Anyhow, my hope in sharing these experiences and bits of advice with you today is so that you can avoid such things in your own practice so that you can stay safe.

(Although really, unless you’re as clumsy x accident prone x Calamity Jane as I am, I trust you won’t need them.)
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So we have a client at the agency who’s a hardware store, and last Friday I was preparing an article for them. The article was basically a list of tools for beginner DIY’ers so I thought, I could so make a list like that ~ for artists ^^

So here’s a list of things you’ll find at your local hardware that you’re bound to find real handy in your studio ~ if you paint (more or less like me), that is ^^ I’m aware that your practice may be different so you may need different tools or hardly anything on this list ~
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~ but, just sharing the babies without which I’d’ve found it well nigh impossible to live over the years (okay, some, just recently ^^). Just on the off chance that anyone might find this useful ^^; See if you can find numbers 1 to 17 in the photo above (*answer key* comes after the list) ^_^
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​A friend once asked me how come I was always so stressed whenever I was prepping for a show. (Come to think of it, I used to get that question a lot, lol.)

I told her it was because of the deadline and she said something to the effect of, ‘Oh, I kinda thought you just made things and you had a show whenever you were done.’

My dear Kathy (wherever you are now), if all artists did it like that ain’t none of us would finish jack spit or ever even have shows, LOL.

I write this now at a time when I want to sort of break away from what I used to *fondly* refer to as ‘painting factory mode’ ~ I want to just, take my time and, come to think of it, do it just like that friend of mine thought how things went with folks like me.

I sort of have this idea now, that if I wasn’t so fixated on getting things done as quickly as I could, maybe the work would turn out better, I don’t know.

I sometimes wonder how painters from way back felt when photography was invented. They probably thought they’d be out of a job! Kind of like how a lot of us *creative* folks feel about AI, lol. Or wheelwrights when they invented cars or film camera humans when they made camera phones.

It’s just how it is, I guess. I mean if things like that didn’t happen we’d all still be digging holes whenever we needed to go to the jon or hitting the jungle for lunch (or something to wear).

That said, I’d like to say a few things about painting for memory. This does involve painting from memory, but I wanted to go into painting or drawing something to save it for a time when maybe our memory cells don’t work so well anymore. Or to save it for when things change so drastically that the thingy you’re saving isn’t likely to ever for never no matter what forever happen again.

So that when you look at the painting, you remember ~ and maybe even relive it.

You know how you have bad hair days sometimes? Me, sometimes I have “bad drawing days” ~ I can’t draw a bloody thing x nothing I draw looks right x everything I draw looks like a bad tattoo or one of those “delusional artist” pieces.

What do you do when you’re in a slump? 

I’m writing about this now because well, I’m kind of in the middle of one, so I guess I couldn’t help noticing a couple of other artists I know who’ve been in a slump recently, too.

So in this post I thought I’d go into what a slump is, exactly, for artists ~ what happens during a slump, what causes it to happen, and more importantly, what to do if and when you’re in one.
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​Not too long ago, I’d been getting enquiries about my work on paper ~ not the first of their kind in my somewhat long and modest practice.

Reminds me of when a famous artist back here once told me that if I wanted to be ‘taken seriously’ by collectors, I shouldn’t do work on paper. This was back in 2021, so I had already been practising for some time (and the funny thing was, I wasn’t even asking for his advice lol).

Throughout the years, I’ve understood how many collectors ~ in my corner of the planet, at least ~ tend to avoid works on paper. Many collectors regard art as an investment, and if diamonds are forever, so is a marble statue or say, an oil painting on canvas.

And because these collectors are pretty much the hand that feeds for many artists, if the collectors don’t want art on paper, then…  Anyway I’m not going to go down that rabbit hole; a Jedi’s gotta do what a Jedi’s gotta do to pay the bills.

But I would like to spend this month’s post on putting my insignificant word in for works on paper ~ and not just because a hefty chunk of my own work is. It’s just, if you’re a buyer or collector or, maybe have a certain opinion about work on paper (that you may not even know you have), I’m hoping to maybe get you to start thinking differently.

Here are the usual five main gripes I hear about work on paper and corresponding ‘counter-reasons’ for each of them.

In doing my homework for a client I was working on not too long ago, I came across this article (which actually had nothing to do with the client or what I was doing for them lol).

It was called 10 Reasons Why You Should Not Become an Architect by Michael Riscica, and though I am not an architect (although I’ve known my fair share both within and outside of my family), I could so totally relate.

Many of the items (if not all) on the list are so completely applicable to artists. After all, architecture is an art in its own right~and I could really feel that the author really dug deep when it was written.

So much so that 1. I felt like giving the author a hug after I read it, and 2. I felt like coming up with my own list. It had crossed my mind recently to write a sort of ‘open letter to aspiring artists’ in the same vein, but this is probably *neater*. Some of these reasons are adapted from the article, while some of them are so totally mine.
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‘In the zone’ is the term people use, if I’m not mistaken; the term I’ve been using is ‘stopping time’. That’s sort of a semi-secret I let jillafriends in on a little while ago, and when I did, I wondered whether there was any ‘serious science’ behind why it was so effective~for me, at least.

Turns out, there is, and I found out quite by accident quite recently through an almost completely unrelated channel (this Fast Company post, in case you were curious). Seeing as I was one of the last people on earth to own a mobile phone or get on social media, it shouldn’t be too surprising for me to be one of the last to find out how experts refer to my ‘stopped time’ as a ‘flow state’.

As it turns out, I’ve had to do a little impromptu reading today on flow states which very naturally roused my curiosity~considering the not unimportant part it plays in my ‘painting factory operations’. So I thought I’d look a little closer into ‘the state to be’~all the time, if it were up to me~at least, whenever the painting factory is up and running.

…that is, after working all day and without pulling an all-nighter. 😛

Anyone who knows me personally knows how I’ve led a *double life*, i.e. working as a writer during the day and *arting* at night, for a really long time. For good or ill, it’s been the only way I’ve been able to keep the *painting factory* going.

Thing is, the older I get, the harder it is to keep it going this way. But I want to keep it going ~ and I think I can, too. It’s just, I’m having to find other ways, other things to help me do it.

I’d like to share these six things in the hopes that they may help anyone who’s got art or anything they’d like to work on but can’t during office hours. These six seem the most viable to me now that end-to-end all-nighters for months on end aren’t such a good idea anymore. 😅

I mean I hate to admit it, but I guess even jillamonsters need sleep like everybody else. 🤣
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