Bridge the gap between making art and making a living,

… one tip at a time

Your smARTip for the week:

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Edges and Lumps 
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I don’t know about you, but when my workspace gets too cluttered, I can feel my brain shutting down and my creativity tanking.

A certain amount of useful clutter is okay. But I have my limits (and today I’ve definitely reached one of them!).

So I went back into some notes from the Organizing Queen,

I’m imagining that you have no trouble with concentration as you are producing a piece of art. The flow, at whatever point in the process it manifests, is natural, effortless.

But once you slip out of the studio door and into tasks of administration, business, and marketing, that’s when concentration becomes an issue.

Jennifer Hofmann, the creator of “Gentle Organizing for Creative Spirits” has a thought I think

Bridge the gap between making art and making a living,

… one tip at a time

Your smARTip for the week:

==========================
3 Things No One Told You About Copyrights
==========================

Here are 3 surprises about copyrights that came straight out of Attorney Leonard DuBoff ‘s smARTist Telesummit presentation:

1. If you are living outside the USA, these are the 3 multinational treaties that govern 135 countries. To find out if your county is one of them,

go to:

Bridge the gap between making art and making a living,

… one tip at a time

Your smARTip for the week:

==========================
Protect Your Originals
==========================
I don’t know if you’ve ever performed a leading role on stage where you were in every scene and interacted with almost every player.

If you’ve never been there, done that, it might seem romantic or thrilling – all that attention focused on you.

That was never the case for me, even though I loved the entire process. I loved finding a voice, a character, and body language that wasn’t “me.” It was a toot!

If only I didn’t have to do it center stage, it would have been perfect.

The load of all that expectation put

Bridge the gap between making art and making a living,

… one tip at a time

Your smARTip for the week:

==========================
Expansion
==========================

My whole sense of spring, as the daffodils rise out of all those leaves, which I still haven’t raked out of the back yard (yet), is the effusive expansion of everything.

The sky seems wider and more open. Air currents flow more freely. Tree buds are waking up in new jackets of spring green. Bird songs trill their joy.

An abundance of life expands all around me.

And, isn’t this exactly what your art does: expand life?

Are you aware of how vital the

Bridge the gap between making art and making a living,

… one tip at a time

Your smARTip for the week:

==========================
Let’s Do the Spring Swing!
==========================

One of the most powerful influences we humans have is how we navigate the seasons.

Even areas of the world where the temperatures are flat lined (San Diego, CA for example) and you could mistake these as mono-seasoned, compared to full out four-season areas (Portland, ME, for example), the rhythm of the summer, autumn, winter, and spring still exist, albeit in a more subtle version.

Our human body, on all levels (mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual) is hard wired to be responsive to rhythms.

Only here, in the 21^st Century, in what we call the “first” world countries especially, our

Bridge the gap between making art and making a living,

… one tip at a time

Your smARTip for the week:

==========================
Opportunity
==========================

One of the things I miss most, after stopping the smARTist Telesummits, is the revelation so many artists had about opportunities for their work that they had never before considered.

I remember one year in particular, there was a painter from Boston who had never considered Art Fairs. They just weren’t on his radar.

Until Connie Mettler’s presentation on Art Fairs.

Suddenly, he heard information that dismantled his limited view of Art Fairs—a view that had, in turn,

Bridge the gap between making art and making a living,

… one tip at a time

Your smARTip for the week:

==========================
Completion 
==========================

I know… completion…a bit of yawner.

But hang in here with me because I think you’re going to like this smARTip:

From Seneca, the Roman Stoic philosopher: “It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult.”

The **third principle of any artist’s ongoing

Bridge the gap between making art and making a living,

… one tip at a time

Your smARTip for the week:

==========================
Courage
==========================

The word, ‘courage,’ has roots in the Latin word, ‘cor’—which means heart.  And heart, way back when, referred originally to the passions, all of them: anger, greed, love, lust—the entire range of big feelings.

It wasn’t until the 17^th century that the French hooked up ‘corage’ with the concept of bravery.

For me, what I notice about courage is that it’s first and foremost an act of choice.  As an artist, you make choices all the time that reflect the bravery of your heartfelt passions—often in the face of disparagement.

As I see it, there are three areas where your bravery shows up. For today, let’s just

Bridge the gap between making art and making a living,

… one tip at a time

Your smARTip for the week:
==========================
Tax Time (Part 2): How To Keep More of Your Money
==========================

We’re staring down the tax tunnel (just 20 days more and yours truly needs to heed her own advice!) and I wanted to give you three more 3 foundational pointers from Peter Jason Riley’s smARTist presentation: – Watch Your Wallet! Strategic Tax Planning for the Visual Artist:

Bridge the gap between making art and making a living,

… one tip at a time

Your smARTip for the week:
==========================
Tax Time (Part 1):  How To Keep More of Your Money
==========================

A subject dear to all our hearts: keeping the money we work so hard to earn.

Thank goodness I discovered Peter Jason Riley, a certified public accountant who has spent his career fine-tuning the best tax strategies ever for artists.

Here are 3 foundational

Bridge the gap between making art and making a living,

… one tip at a time

Your smARTip for the week:
==========================
What Do You Do When Grief Takes Over?
==========================

I remember when my mother was dying. I was getting ready for my orals in graduate school and the one thing I couldn’t have imagined, since all mothers are invincible, is that my healthy, 83-year-old mother would die.

Time stood still as the nurse put me through to her hospital room. Only, the woman who answered the phone was not my mother. Until I realized she was.

The woman who answered did

Bridge the gap between making art and making a living,

… one tip at a time

Your smARTip for the week:

==========================
Are You Sabotaging Your Success?
==========================

For years I thought my to-do list was the measure of success in any one day, or at any one point in time. (I confess, I had a very limited idea of what success was!)

Check off something on the list, and I was positively giddy.

Like any “fix,” it lasted a millisecond and then I was looking for the next item on the list, getting geared up for the next check mark.

My to-do list was losing its effectiveness as a simple tool and becoming

Bridge the gap between making art and making a living,

… one tip at a time

Your smARTip for the week:

==========================
Why Do You Do What You Do?

==========================

Most of the time when I ask this question, I get a blank look from the artist.

It’s as if I’m supposed to know why they do what they do.

If I press the questions, I’ll often get variations of: I love to paint (sculpt/pot/weave, etc.) /  it’s what I’m good at  /  people tell me they like what I do  /  I have to or I don’t feel completely me / I want recognition …

And none of these answers are wrong. In fact, there isn’t a right answer; there is

—————————————-
This week’s smARTip:

Kindred Spirits: Social Media & Artist Statements
—————————————-

I’m not really a fan of the truism “nothing new under the sun” (one example being that there was no book about artist statements until I wrote it).

But I do find it curious that what’s at the heart of social media and artist statements is the same thing…