Painting I started in March or April that was left incomplete for almost half a year
I've been thinking about this for awhile and this problem even comes through on this blog. I started this in the summer while I was traveling with the intention of having a way for me to post my progress on certain creative projects. Since then I have found that keeping something like this up to date was harder than I expected. Since I was not in my place of residence or even in my state of residence, I didn't always have access to the internet or a power supply. Not that far into my travels the battery for my laptop went bad so it put me into a situation where I had to have my laptop plugged in at all times in order to use it. Even now, half a year later I am still using the same laptop while I save up for a new one. After my summer adventures through this interesting country (I use the word interesting loosely) I found myself back in my city without a job much like a good number of people throughout this country. With a bit of money I saved up from the last destination from my summer travels I spent close to 3 months applying to as many jobs as I could, sending out my resume and looking on various websites for job postings. In essence my job search became a job in and of itself. With the time I was spending looking for a job, I found myself using the rest of my time working on making a better portfolio for graduate school. Through this process I was more stressed than ever because I was worried about my constantly diminishing savings from my adventures, my living situation, whether I would be able to complete my grad apps on time and finding a job. My decision to major in art in undergrad began to be used against me as time went on and I received no call backs from these places I applied to. "It's because you majored in art and employers can't quantify useful skills from that major." Someone close to me constantly hounded as the days went on and my prospects for employment were not increasing. I'm not going to lie, it almost started getting to me and the fact that I wasn't receiving as much as a call back was really getting to me, but I didn't stop because I knew in my mind I couldn't stop.
Final Product as of December 2011
The last thing on my mind through this whole ordeal was keeping my blog updated. There was something in the back of my mind, however, that kept telling me to write a blog. I wanted to keep my blog related to projects I was working on. This also proved to be a difficult thing due to the fact that I only work on so many paintings or projects at a time and I can only write so much about them. I think it was in November that I made a blog posting about the series I was working on and I described each of the paintings that were either complete or in progress. I thought about writing something about individual pieces but I realized the redundancy that would come from such a posting. I let the monster of non-creation win in terms of my writing. What I didn't realize is that even though I wasn't making art, I was still making short videos on YouTube at the time that were completely unrelated to my art, but I could still have totally blogged about it. I mean it's my blog and even though it's called Dane Artwork, I can still make posts about whatever I want. I mean it's never going to be anything inappropriate for a blog but I have my own creative freedom and over the years I have slowly been limiting it.
December was a month where I had many different ideas for blogs, but for one reason or another I stopped writing them and as a replacement I posted nothing. Life happens often and there were some crazy things that I wanted to discuss and I may discuss them in the future depending on if my feelings about those particular writings I started change and I work on completing the entries. I think one of the things about being a blogger is that there sometimes is an unspoken intensity and a level of insecurity when creating posts. Sometimes you are comfortable with putting yourself out there. Sometimes through certain discoveries you make that you feel are worth writing about, you begin to realize through writing about a certain topic you are putting yourself in a light that you may not be comfortable putting yourself in.
Fast forward to now, I'm still in the process of getting my video productions back together. I have to buy new filming equipment, new software and a new computer. I finished all that I needed to complete in terms of graduate applications and I have a number of projects on the horizon. Will I blog about all of them? Possibly not. Can I blog about them? SMURF YEA!!!! I'm still making videos and while it's not the type of stuff I would rather be making at the moment, something is better than nothing. I have learned my lesson and will not let small things evolve into bigger things that inhibit my creativity. The only thing that was really stopping me was me and as I work towards gaining the momentum I lost, I am going to work harder to make sure I don't get in my way again.
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