​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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​My posts seem to be a lot more, ‘reactionary’ these days—I understand being reactionary isn’t considered a good thing in general. In any case, this post comes as the result of the ‘happiness meeting’ we had at my nice new job last Thursday. That ‘happiness meeting’ is one where we get together and talk about stuff that made you happy over the last week.

Very briefly, in a previous post (and other posts since) I’ve spoken about how I’m also a writer (the kind that works in advertising and marketing). And very recently (eight working days ago, to be precise) I started another job that brings people together from literally all over the world on the internet.

Anyway, during that meeting, Erikka, one of my new co-workers (who’s the only other one of us from the Philippines) shared how she was currently country-hopping all over Europe. And one of my new bosses (who’s from Germany but is currently ‘digital nomadding’ all over South America) remarked on how, once we were able to meet, I could maybe do like a company painting out there or something.

​Windy Day, Detail, 48 x 36" (with frame) /121.92 x 91.44 cm, Watercolour on Paper, 2006

​People who know me might laugh when they hear me say this, but I really have a hard time asking anybody for help, for anything.

Just this past week, for instance, at my other job, I was forced to realise that my backlog had grown to unmanageable proportions. Blame it on my bad time management or what you will, but blaming wasn’t going to get the tasks done. I was embarrassed to ask the others on my team to help out, because I was hyper aware that they had tasks of their own, too.

In the end, I asked for help, and hey, presto! The tasks were done in a day, when they had been sitting on my to-do list for weeks.

So I admit—I’m like that as an artist, too. But I guess now I’m having to recognise, formally, that asking for help with your practice isn’t a bad thing.

As the voice of experience in that hit 80s gangster movie, Sean Connery tells Charles Martin Smith that stamping his feet will keep him warm—something he learned in his 20 years of walking the beat. I haven’t been practising that long, but I guess you can’t help picking stuff up here and there that hopefully will help you ‘the next time you return to the woods’.

I’ve always said every show for me was a learning experience, and that every show always feels like the first. I may’ve worked on themes and exhibited in some places more than once but really, it’s never the same experience twice and there’s always something to learn.

I was asked recently if I could maybe share what I’ve learned and I thought, meow, I’m still learning, myself. But I’m thinking maybe, it might be a good exercise for me to reflect on this, so I can better remember all these things, and maybe it’ll help other people to avoid making the same mistakes I did.

So, here we go in no particular order and I’ll try to keep this short.