Blog

Today is the first day of my third quarter. 

Wait! What? As an artist, I never thought a sentence like that would come from me. It turns out, planning and maintaining a yearly goal is really hard for most people. According to the book, 12 Week Year, 12 weeks is a time frame that is short enough to keep you under pressure but long enough to achieve meaningful success. This is because most of us already know the things we need to do to make a major change in our life but we usually don’t know is how to do it all. I won’t go into all the details because there are hundreds of youtube videos and blog posts about this book but if you can focus on 1-3 things every quarter you will be surprised at how much you can get done. I highly recommend the book and I also recommend the companion field guide that will help you set up your first round of 12 week year.  

If you are wondering, My 3 goals this quarter are 

1. Growing my mailing list to 500 people. Officially I only have 5 people on that list.

2. Contacting 10 local galleries in hopes of showing my artwork in their spaces.

3. Social media detox

Check back in 12 weeks to see how well I did.

“I Just want to paint!”

Many of my peers and I have said that when we realized how many other things are involved with being a professional artist. I have read recently that you should spend, at a bare minimum, 30% of your time doing those other things. Last week I spent 70% of my art time working on tasks that did not include creating art. Great, right? Mentally I know the time was well spent but emotionally I feel like it was wasted time. I have spent the last 5 years figuring out how to make artwork that I am proud of and is ready to sell but now the most important thing for my career is all the other things that I wish were already done. I actually don’t mind doing any of the tasks but I just want to paint!

Coming next week is my first newsletter, new works added to my site and hopefully, my domain name will have changed to www.norcome.com

Every now and then something shakes your world and as an artist, you can use that emotional shift to fuel new art. The hard part is learning not to rely on specific emotions to create art because that has the negative side effect of you trying to find ways to recreate those feelings artificially. On the other hand you would be doing yourself a disservice not to use those moments when they present themselves naturally in life. 

For the last two weeks iv been frozen due to the murder of George Floyd and the reactions of his death. I was finally able to put my emotions into a few paintings that I am currently working on. 

I no longer rely on pain in my everyday practice but I am lucky to have a way to express my pain. 

This is a picture that hangs in my dining room titled Hail. 

Hello Art Lovers!

I guess I will now be doing a weekly blog post just so I can see how this works out for me. It will just be me telling you what iv been up to for the past week in my studio practice and I’m sure my personal life will sneaks in also.

Last week I sent 18 new paintings to my photographer and mostly worked on my website. next week I should have a lot of new content to share.

Stay tuned for the rollercoaster ride. 

Art