Preface: I apologize in advance,this is an embarrassingly self-indulgent bit of drivel, whose only purpose for being submitted is to get it on the page, and out of my system (at least temporarily, but still I know I’m likely to do it again, so….
The act of drawing has always been an effective way to disrupt my feelings of anxiety… always. As long as zero outside expectations are attached, sitting down with a sheet of paper and making marks on a surface has proven itself as a reliable strategy for attempting to maintain a sense of mental health as well as self-respect.
A new nugget of insight into myself has clued me into an element of my personality that I really don’t care for, it’s an element that I recognize as unarguably true and feel that I must embrace if I want to make this whole “life” thing work… It’s just that I simply resist being told arbitrary what to do. In ceramics, this has manifested as a resistance to being asked to produce work with an expected end result in mind. The problem is that the easiest way to run a craft studio is as business model is as a service industry, making works on speculation is chancy as it is, but to make work on speculation that serves self interested idyllic notions of romanticism are a folly.
this is a fundamental element of business and that in typical customer/gallery dynamics where they request a product and Im being asked to fill that expectation, I simply choke at the finish line.
I haven’t run into this problem with my drawing and knowing what I know now, reenforces a strategy for moving work out of the studio, which is to allow patrons to pull from existing work and strictly shutdown requests for commissions.
Fetishghost Studios 