Making space for personal projects

Things are changing

One of my 100 collage landscapes repeated on a wooden board

The practice of art helps me to focus my mind and writing is an essential part of my practice, but what I realised is that my priorities shift and currently I need to make more space for larger and more complex work.

Some of my ideas and experiments still need to develop behind the scenes, such as my larger compositions as I have written recently:

Studio Notes: Beyond the 100 days project

Apart from that I am also figuring out how to draw upon the work I did for this year’s 100 days project and how develop the ideas further, including experiments with scale and format.

Sketchbook Tour 7

Another big project is brewing in the background, but the idea is quite complex and also very personal, so it is in a stage too early to share something meaningful about it, although I am planning to start sharing more in August.

This change in my art practice also means a change in my writing. I feel the need to have a deeper conversation about art and I want to develop new shorter formats to stay consistent.

Back in 2023 I wanted to start showing up more regularly on Substack, so I introduced the monthly inspiration list and later also the monthly creative prompts. This strategy helped me to have clarity on two out of four posts a month I was aiming for and it really helped me to stay consistent.

Making space can come in different forms, and several months ago I started making less numerous lists of monthly inspiration - I was publishing 10 links each month, but I realised that it was overwhelming both for me and the readers, thus, I decided on reducing the number of links to 4-5.

I am planning to retire the creative prompts from August¹ - after a full year of publishing prompts devoted to 12 different topics. The reasoning behind this decision is that initially I started the project to systematize the numerous ideas I have been collecting and I am actually running out of material. I don’t think that it makes sense to try and come up with prompts each month just for the sake of publishing them. Instead I want to focus more on sharing my new projects and essays (I have quite a few drafts that still need to be finished).

All things said this space will change somewhat in the coming months allowing me to focus on new projects and on discussions around art that have been brewing inside my mind for some time. I feel that I finally found a direction I want to go deeper and explore more and I am excited to share it with you.

Thank you for reading and being here! I really appreciate your time reading and would be glad to hear from you in the comments. As always - feel free to share my publication with a creative friend.

Until next time!

Lisa

1. I have some plans using the existing prompts and maybe going through them together once again in a more meaningful and interactive way. This is once I figure out all the other things that are shifting in my practice right now.