Lately I’ve been hearing quite a bit about this or that artist having the potential to “grow”. What does that even mean, anyway? That said, it made me wonder whether I’ve grown as an artist myself.

Take the case of this one artist, who I don’t know personally. (Forgive me if you’ve heard this one.) I was speaking to a certain gallery manager (who was also an artist) not too long ago, and this manager was telling me about how this particular artist seemed to be fixated on a certain insect.
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​I don’t know about you, but 2023 was a real banner year for me ~ not. Just when you think things couldn’t get any worse, life kicks you in the sleeping bag and finds another way to make you remember your place in the universe, i.e. an insignificant, infinitesimal speck.

But while it’s easier to see inkblots on a clean page, it’s just as easy to see stars against the deep blackness of space. That’s what the Potatostars above are all about ~ finding even the smallest points of light in the darkness all around us (and even within ourselves) ~ and being able to draw even a little happiness from them.

As the year draws to a close, I’m going to focus on the latter and pick out just 10 (because there were more!) of the good things I can be thankful for from this past year, specifically those relating to my art practice.

The thing about paintings~mine for me, anyway~is how they remind me of what was going on with me at the time I was painting them. Unfortunately, that’s not always a good thing, but like *Sir Ulrich* said, we need to ‘take the bad with the good’ ☺️

I find it amazing how they remind me of things more vividly than any photo or journal or anything~the same goes for drawings or doodles in my notebooks. It’s a little bit scary, that way, and sometimes when I make things I wonder what the thing I’m making will remind me of, one day. With my luck, it’ll be everything, lol.

Anyway that’s what crossed my mind very recently when this nice new gallery very kindly invited me to join their opening exhibit. Being large, the gallery needed works of a size to match, and they needed them in a relative hurry.

Even if I chugged all the silver and blue cans in the world, there was no way I was going to be able to finish even one piece that I’d be able to live with showing in public.

Long story short, they’ve agreed to take on some pieces I did a whopping 16 years ago, and they’re asking me for a write up to go with them. So I figured I’d murder two avians with a single concretion and share the lowdown on the works from this old Romp with you.

​Last year I was in a group show called Breaking Barriers, to which I submitted the painting above (rather unimaginatively titled Breaking Tikbalang). I remember I arrived rather early at the opening, feeling very awkward because I didn’t really know anybody else there.

So there I was, floating around like a lemon, looking at all the other works when one of the other artists came up to me and asked me which piece was mine. Jillamonsters have zero social skills, so, *stutter-stutter*~ so the kindly gentleman looked around, saw a Georgia O’Keefe-esque painting of a flower, and asked me if that was it.

He seemed kind of surprised when I pointed at the horsey above. ‘Whoa!’ he said, or something like. I didn’t know what that meant, but I gathered he didn’t figure me for the type who would paint something like that. Must’ve been the stutter or the skirt. Anyhow.

In preparing for this month’s post I did a little looking around (i.e. Googling) and saw there didn’t seem to be a whole lot about inferring the personality of artists from their work. Can’t say I researched very thoroughly, or anything, of course, but all I seemed to see was about the personality of collectors based on the paintings in their, well, collection 😅 (Here’s a quiz if you like.)

So everything else you read here is based on, well, how I read into a painting~for what it’s worth. I’m not a psychologist or an art historian or a detective 😊 or anything like that. I’m just someone who likes to get to know people (in a detached, third-party, outside-looking in kind of way 😅 ) who just happens to have an art degree and paints, too. And someone who’s obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, lol.

Just thought I’d share in case it helps people look at art or, enhance their experience or appreciation of it. I’m talking here, of course, about visual art, but it miiight be applicable in sooome way to other art forms, too.

The customer is always right~or well, that’s how the saying goes, although I seem to remember the opposite posted here and there around the internet.

As a ‘baby copywriter’ almost 30 years ago, I was trained to do anything and everything to make the client happy. There was no such thing as going the extra mile because that mile was part of the trip, and customer delight, not satisfaction, was the be-all, end-all of our existence at the agency.

I get that. I really do. If I hadn’t learnt it at the agency, I would’ve learnt it at school before that, anyhow (indeed, one of my teachers owned the agency I got my first job at).

But does this apply to commissioned work from artists?
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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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It’s been two weeks, as I write this, since I took the children to the gallery ^_^ I did prepare some exhibit notes, which I’m not sure how they’re going to be used; in any case I’m not going to go into concept here.

But with my Rogues’ gallery set to be unveiled toward the middle of next month, I thought I might do what I did this time last year and share the stories behind the monsters who were kind enough to sit for me.

In so doing, I’m sort of hoping that you’ll give them a chance or rather, give yourself a chance to get to know them better as persons who, like yourself, have feelings, personalities, issues, insecurities, idiosyncrasies, hopes, dreams~you know ^^
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​So I freakin’ ❤️ Sherlock, right? (As in strictly the books, although I do love Jeremy Brett and Basil Rathbone ❤️) And in the memoir where he introduces Mycroft, he and Watson talk about atavism~Watson says Sherlock’s gifts must’ve been the result of his own systematic training. But Sherlock says~


'…my turn that way is in my veins, and may have come with my grandmother, who was the sister of Vernet, the French artist. Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.'

'But how do you know that it is hereditary?'

'Because my brother Mycroft possesses it in a larger degree than I do.'


In this jillablog post, I’m taking another one of my ‘not too deep down the rabbit hole’ looks into that whole ‘nature vs nurture’ thing (or ‘talent vs training’, if you like). Are some people really just born with it? And can people who aren’t (if others are), acquire it somehow? Does it even really exist? Because there are those who say there’s no such thing as talent. I don’t know. What do you think?
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Don’t ask me why I love to paint dem horseys~I’m not sure I would be able to give you an answer. Drawn on my own (i.e. without a kind horsey to sit for me), they don’t even look like horseys, really, and I’m quite sure they’re nowhere near anatomically correct 😸

And not just horseys, but anything horsey, i.e. horseys with horns, wings, human body parts; horseys on carnival rides, horseys in the nursery~except hobby horses. I don’t know, for some reason, it has always bothered me to have just a horse head on a stick 😥

I have a vague idea of when I started drawing and painting them, around the time I was 12? Not exactly sure because I had been heavily into bears until I was about 15 (I still love bears, though). (That’s me~kuma’s and uma’s 😹).​

‘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.