I don’t know about you but I get frustrated a lot about time and the lack of it. ‘How is it June already?’ I sighed yesterday. ‘Nearly half the year has gone and I haven’t done half the things I had planned.’ I know this is a feeling for nearly everyone out there and especially if you run your own small business or hustling hard doing your own thing.
Starting out on your own is tricky and it is something that no one (especially in our education system) teaches you how to do. Firstly you have to be the wearer of many hats. Most important, ‘Maker’ (of course, your passion, your ‘art’), social media expert (distracting you from the making), accountant (too many numbers), head of distribution (visiting the local post office 5 times a week), office manager (where is that pencil), head of HR (which is just organising yourself), mental heath consultant ( I can’t do it today)…… you get the picture. Not to mention this year I wanted to add ‘blogger’ and that ‘hat’ has been gathering dust for the last couple of months. * sigh * ‘Small Steps’ If your lucky, you can employ/bribe/exploit an intern to take on some of these roles but for me, well….. it’s just me and like most, that’s a lot to manage in very little time.
I constantly feel like I’m not working hard enough, I’m not good enough, not doing things right. It’s just me on my own (I have an artist husband but he has his own shit to deal with). I don’t get holidays, performance reviews or pay rises. My mum sometimes calls and says she likes something I posted on Facebook but I’m not sure that’s a great measure of the contemporary art world - sorry Mum, love you.
But I wouldn’t change it.
Now, at the start of the summer I’m making plans of things I want to try and achieve, the things I want to say and the artist I want to be for the rest of the year. When your working so hard in the present and focusing on the future, you forget about the small steps that you have already taken and how far you have come. And not all those steps have been forward. I’ve made a lot of mistakes, weeks of work that have become failures, galleries closing, lost artwork, companies ripping me off. I’ve been backwards, forwards, side stepping, running, laughing and crying over the 10 years I’ve been making art and fellow creatives I know and love, feel the same and are on that same journey too.
So don’t linger in the past, but take a little look back and see how far you’ve come. Imagine what can be achieved in the next couple of years… what will all those small future steps add up too? For anyone who is hustling today, making it on their own and wearing multiple hats - I see you and ‘Good F**king Job’
Progression over 9 years.