Scrabooli Studio

As I mentioned in my last post, over the last little while I have been doing a lot of thinking and talking about art and what is art and what is my art like….

The last couple of days I have been trying to figure out what to focus on next. How to find a focus?

I have mentioned before that I have had trouble focusing on any one thing because there are so many different things that catch my attention…

well there has been more to it than that….

a lot of it is wrapped up in fear. Fear that if I take a part of my art and try to make a ‘business’ out of it, that it will become work and eventually boring…. and that it will make all things creative seem like work. Somehow, in my head, work=nasty/boring. However, my current day job is far from nasty/boring. I am still loving it after more than a year and a half. So why should art+work=nasty/boring? At risk of sounding Vulcan, its just not logical.

The other roadblock has been too many ideas and a general lack of focus. New ideas have displaced the last idea and then the next soon comes along…  and any focus I had is all washed away in the flood of ideas and  focusing only on the now and the new and the intensely immediate. Balancing against this has been the idea that lack of a signeture ’style’ leads to lack of exposure. What I am trying to get at there, is the idea that ’successful’ artists/creators are the ones that get known for a particular style (see post: Branding & ’success’). Which is not a bad thing…. its just that there is then the possibility of getting trapped in that style by the demand of your audience.

So I have had the crazy mix of ‘knowing’ that to be successful I should have a recognizable style, yet not wanting that because I don’t want to give up all my other ideas – and which one should I pick anyway? And then there was knowing that to create a recognizable style I would have to treat it like ‘work’ and in comes  the fear that it would become boring…

essentially it all boils down to the fear that success = boredom!!

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After a gook chat with my mother today I have realized that it doesn’t have to be that way. So I have come to the following conclusions.

• As long as you are still coming up with new ideas and finding new inspiration in other peoples work, art will never be boring.
• Art as work needs to be put in a different mental space and time needs to be set aside for it that is different time from general fun art. Art created in fun however, might move over into the ‘work’ area.
• ‘Success’ is not going to happen overnight and definitely won’t happen if you don’t get your work ‘out there’ into the public eye.
• Art should be whatever you fancy at the time and be as varied or as focused as you want. However, you might take one aspect/style to develop, create a focus for, and maybe a separate website from your other work.
• For the purposes of display of work it is probably better to keep different ’styles’ on separate websites / in different galleries / in different exhibitions.

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Despite all that, Scrabooli Studio is probably going to remain a mixing pot of everything I do. There is a new website in the pipeline though. . . . . so watch this space!