The “little book” I did as part of the Sketchbook Project has now gone on-line. You can find it over at an Art House Co-op near you (or by following this link.)
One of the things I love about being an artist is that you sometimes never do know when your prior work is going to sort of “pop up” again. What I mean by that is, once you send stuff out and it goes on exhibition, you never know if old images will get rotated in (or out) of exhibition again, old catalogs get picked up and granted a new life, even sometimes old shows come back and find their own sort of resurgence. Sometimes, art has a life of its own.
In a way, this can be a good thing, because you never know when or where or how your work is going to pop up again. I’m kind of glad that I was not a beginner in the days of the Internet, however, because I could see cringing as many of my old mistakes come back to haunt me. I guess there are two sides to that coin, right? I mean, on the one hand, it’s great that artwork can take on a life of its own but, on the other, we sometimes get little to no say in *which pieces* get picked up and travel into the next life. That’s kind of hard to swallow sometimes, especially if you’re one of those artists who like everything perfect and really try to protect yourself from mistakes getting out of the studio.
Even so, it’s kind of fun to re-live old stuff. I’ve been doing it a lot lately, so I probably should stop but even I have to admit that it was fun digging through my old slides and it was fun checking out my little book from the Sketchbook Project.
I’m probably going to do a sketchbook next year as well, although they have the paper issues sorted out a bit better (or so I’ve been told.) I’m really happy about that because, as you can see from the link, I really struggled with the paper being too thin and I had a lot of “bleeding” going on in my Sketchbook. If they give us better paper, as promised, I’ll probably be able to do more “real” watercolors and less dabbing on of color (all the while secretly hoping it doesn’t bleed right through to the other side of the paper.)
Photographers can participate in this project too. I used some glue to glue my images in the Sketchbook and that really helped (in some cases) with the paper bleeding. To sign-up or participate in the project, follow the link to Art House Co-Op and add the “Sketchbook 2012 Project” to your shopping cart. This year, friends from Europe and Australia can participate as well, so it’s a bit more global in scale.
Until next time…
