The Business of Art & Creative Strategy

I took a break from my blog lately, only posting a few things that I truly found worth sharing, which incidentally were about inspiration in creativity.  I have been thinking long and hard about the way my life has been shaped by my experiences and by how I have handled those experiences, what I learned from them, and how I applied those learnings to improving my understanding of myself.

I enjoy sharing interesting art, creative expression, inspiration and mostly, I want to contribute to others’ success through my own experience and learning. 

Admittedly, over the last 8-10 months I got quite caught up in the technicalities of sharing, since I began teaching Online Community Development. What happened was that I had to give structure, form and logic to something I had done intuitively, loosely, and organically. In teaching structure, I thought I should practice what I preached, and thus I applied some of that to my blog and my social media channels.  

After some time, I began to grow quite weary of it all, bored, disenchanted and disinterested. It became mechanical, it became work. I was doing it without passion, without the presence of mind and intention that is the glue that makes anything one does, worth doing. And it is the secret, so to speak, of marketing and communication. True passion pervades everything and comes across loud and clear, even over a computer screen.

When I first started this blog, I did so with the intention of sharing what I knew, what I liked, and what I found interesting. My hope was that I would be able to help artists to achieve even a little of what I was able to build for my sister, Camilla.  We have had a lot of success, tempered with learning experiences and redirects, and we plug on, always onward. It isn’t easy, but it is rewarding because we do it with heart and genuinely because we want to and love to. 

I don’t blog professionally; I don’t blog for money. I do this as a means of expression. It’s also why I chose Tumblr.  And so, I feel liberated to going back to that. I am perhaps a little nervous about being more personal, but I know that it is exactly that - the personal experience - that is meaningful and that what I know and have known and continue to learn is more valuable than anything else.

My pivot, as I stated in the title, is to approach my blog the way it was originally intended to be: sharing my mind’s eye on life and what’s out there (and there is so, so much!).  My mind is totally random. It is not scheduled, it is not linear, it is not mono-subject. I am an innovator, a disruptor, a creator with traits of obsessive compulsion, attention deficit, and laziness (gasp!). My insatiable curiosity, my ambition and my drive benefit from those traits. My success has come because of my varied interests, because I go off on tangents and learn about things that are completely new and different. In so doing, I can apply that knowledge to the tasks I am entrusted with or to projects I start. And I can share those inner thought processes and the cool, interesting, fun and inspiring stuff and hope others will find also it useful and inspiring, even though it may be random in it’s content and timing.

I don’t have the answers to the mysteries of marketing art or being successfully creative. I am fumbling around in the dark like everyone else. Somehow, though, I have a gift for finding my way around. And if anyone can benefit from my experience and journey, I will feel gratified in knowing that I somehow contributed to someone else’s success. And grateful that anyone is spending their time reading my musings.

No one does it better than Italians - starting a conversation, opening a parenthesis within the discussion, then another, and another, and finally circling back to bring it all together. They also do this when writing.  When I first worked in claims accounting for hospital liability there was one particular doctor who would write out his medical analysis and at time his parentheses would be half a page long!  

Since moving here over 8 years ago, I’ve learned and even begun to master the art of speaking in parentheses.  So fair warning to everyone, when I start to write my posts, I’ll be opening many parenthesis in my posts, which I will break out into other posts, but you’ll just have to trust that everything has it’s place in my mind - my mind web - and that each is a piece of the puzzle that I’ve been building with Camilla, her career and her brands.

I sincerely hope you’ll enjoy the forthcoming posts, and will go back to review some of the posts I’ve written over the past couple of months.