When nothing else works, there's the art
I'm poised to embark on an impossible journey, and I have no one to blame but myself.
A couple of weeks ago, I tried to do the right thing and get myself into an organizational habit. I signed up for a service called Click-Up, which is an online task management system. Maybe you’ve used Trello or Notion—it’s like that, but more robust.
I wanted the organization because I was trying to accomplish too many tasks at once, and running out of time each day because I didn’t have any sense of daily accountability.
Click-up was new territory for me, so I started slow, and as I got more comfortable, I added more reoccurring tasks to my to-do list. I felt accomplished, at least by looking at my calendar, but there was an intrinsic problem.
Everything seemed pointless because nothing I worked on was working for me.
Sidenote: This is the moment where I judge whether to overshare or only give you enough information to empathize, but knowing me, I’ll probably end up doing the former. We’ll see at the end.
The thing is, I’ve been struggling for months to maintain a consistent income, for whatever reason, and now that the inflation is out of control and most of my investments are in the toilet, I’m at a precipice, looking down.
Despite the immense dread, I feel as the 1st of the month arrives each month, there’s always one thing I can rely on to calm my nerves—making art.
Nothing chills out the nervous system quite like putting paint to canvas, pen to paper, and glue to random pieces of paper in an effort to make sense of the mess laid before me.
But of course, I can’t just make art, can I? I will always use these moments to overextend myself and turn an art objective into a ridiculous challenge.
On the weekend of October 15th, 2022, I’ll be participating in the Long Beach Open Studio tour, which is a month-long event where artists from all over the city open their “studios” to friends, family, patrons, and fellow artists to visit, see the work, and hopefully buy everything off the shelf.
From the time of this post, October 15th is 107 days away, and I had this particularly insane idea to make 100 small art pieces between now and then.
That may seem like a difficult task, but it’s definitely doable. What makes it challenging and nutty is my thought about documenting the entire process. That also wouldn’t be that challenging if it were the only thing I was doing, but as mentioned above, I’ve got a lot of stuff on my plate.
So this post isn’t just an announcement of all the things I’m doing, but also, a way to give myself permission to cut loose some of the things that aren’t working for me.
I’ll be the first to admit that I put myself into this mess, and I know I am the one that needs to find the way out. I don’t know if I have the answer, but I do know that there’s not much sense in putting energy into self-imposed obligations when they don’t give me any joy and don’t bring in any money?
I guess the short story is to stay tuned to see if Dave explodes. Welcome to the party!