How’s it Hanging?

I love art in all its many forms, but I have a soft spot for painting and drawing. For me, drawing is the foundation of all visual art, possibly even composing, writing and film-making too, if you count outlining and story-boards and the act of drawing little squiggles on a page to represent thoughts and sounds. Oh, it’s divine when you think of it that way…

So, to get back to my original question; How’s it hanging? And where? Your artwork, I mean. Where are you showing (or shipping) your work? A side note on shipping: just when I’d become accustomed to ‘shipping’ referring to fan-fic relationship imaginings between characters, I now understand it as a term to mean how you’re showing your work to the world. David Kadavy introduced me to this term through his great podcast, Love Your Work. I had to google “what does it mean to ship my work”. Aaah, ‘past-me’ was such a doofus.

I started shipping after listening to David. I signed up to Medium and paid my yearly subscription. All in, I said to myself. I started posting, followed by clicking publish on my novel in March (even though it wasn’t ready), then created this blog. I’m shipping like a crazy person! To be fair I do have the advantage of having been a shipper from way back, even though I didn’t know that’s what I was doing at the time. As a visual artist, I am well-versed in running stuff up the flagpole to see who salutes. It’s not as bad after a while, but I think it’s also very important to get impartial feedback. Rather than asking your family and friends, Facebook has groups for everything now, including writing and art critique. Be aware that some groups are nasty and predatory, so avoid those. Seek out people who will give you unbiased but supportive critique and SHIP THAT WORK, NOW!

You never know what might happen!

I used to work in a very nice art gallery. People would come in all the time and sigh, saying some variation of ‘my work is just as good/better’, whatever… I would just encourage them to show their work to the gallery director by way of sending 3 images to a certain email. Send it, then get back to making art.

Are you shipping? If not why? If yes, send me the links below and I’ll check it out.

Happy art making, peeps. Make this new earthy cycle of Uranus in Taurus work for you. The next eight years are going to be AMAZING!