If you’re like me, or literally anyone else on the planet, you’ve probably made a New Year’s Resolution at some point in your life. But I’m here to tell you that the generic “I’m gonna lose some weight” resolution is no more than a recipe for a binge-eating cake session in less than a week.
Thing is, the person you were on December 31st is the exact same person who wakes up in your bed on January 1st. We have to stop kidding ourselves into believing that we are brand-new (insert your pronouns here). Because we aren’t. The diet may have started, but the person you are still loves cake, and you’ve already been invited to two birthday parties in January.
So what are you to do? Just give up and eat the cake?
I mean, if it were me, I’d eat the cake.
But if losing weight were a really important goal for me, for health reasons and for the sheer fact that I no longer have any pants that fit me, I would focus less on the generic “lose weight, diet, exercise” mentality and focus more on forming a habit that will lead up to my goal. Like, maybe I could form a habit of doing 20 minutes of yoga each morning, or maybe I could form a habit of logging into my fitness pal every day after lunch. The goal then becomes less about losing weight, and more about establishing the routine that will eventually lead up to the weight loss.
Forming habits is not easy, and you’re going to have a few days in January where you either forget or say “today’s not the day” but once that habit is established you won’t be able to do anything else at 10am besides roll out the yoga mat. In fact, your day will be weird without that action, and you might even find yourself doing it later in the day so you can achieve some normalcy.
So, stop giving yourself these generic New Year’s Resolutions. Instead decide what it is you are trying to improve upon, and then think of the habits you can form in order to achieve this goal.
But Lina, you say, isn’t deciding to form a habit kind of like a resolution? Sort of! But it’s less “I will” or “I will not” and more “these are the habits I’d like to establish in the coming months.”
Instead of “I will do better in school,” form a habit of studying for an hour each day at 5pm.
Instead of “I will be more optimistic,” create a habit of writing in a gratitude journal every night before bed.”
Instead of “I will stop smoking,” form a habit of repeating a mantra each time the craving kicks in, or form a habit of going to a therapist each week to learn some great methods to fight the urge.
Having some trouble forming that habit? Try a habit tracker. You can find them in planners, journals, and there are dozens of phone apps with habit trackers as well. Make it fun. Treat yourself when you get to 10 days, 50 days, 100 days, etc.
One final bit of advice…avoid trying to change something that relies on external forces. For instance, “getting more followers” or “making more sales.” Goals like these are a slippery slope that will most likely leave you feeling resentful. You can definitely form few habits that may lead to more followers/sales/etc., but these habits are not a sure thing and on the off chance that you just so happen to make these goals at the beginning of a year like 2020, well that just uproots the whole plan.
Your goals should be something that you yourself can change, without relying on outside sources or the public or your audience. Goals like these, achieved by establishing a daily habit, are going to be the most successful, and leaving you feeling the most fulfilled.
Until next time, may your New Year be exciting and full of endless possibilities.
The Lina of the past wrote in the beginning of her 2022 Passion Planner that she wanted to “establish herself as an intuitive artist” by May. She also wrote that she wanted to finally start showing in Columbia, show in St. Louis, have a large-scale series, and to move to a new house with a studio space (with lots of natural lighting). While not all of those things happened this year, I can say, as Present Lina, that I had a pretty decent 2022.
But it wasn’t without its mishaps, trials and failures, and good old fashioned life. There was no way we could have predicted the massive inflation here in the U.S., the drunk moron who would total our second car in June, or the death of our beloved Canary, Apple. We, as a family, also caught Covid a week before our vacation, something we had tried so hard to prevent with vaccines, masks, and hand-sanitizer. Is it time to quote John Lennon here? I think it is:
“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
That might actually be my biggest takeaway from the year 2022, that no matter how well-planned you are, Murphy is still right around the corner, waiting to throw you a curve ball that will send you down a completely different path. 2022 added new therapists, med regimes, and a second car payment. If I could change anything, it would be only to bring Apple back, so I can hear him sing during the sunrise, and while watching musicals on TV.
I think it’s important for all of us to take a moment to reflect on this past year. What popped up that was out of your control? What did you accomplish and what did you mess up? Did you learn any important lessons? How are you different today than you were on January 1st? Doing this kind of reflection is a great way to prep you for the impending 2023.
Here’s mine:
Successes of 2022
Art in the Park: This was an event I had been getting accepted to since 2020 but due to the pandemic was unable to participate as it was canceled each year since. Except this year! I finally got to see what it was like to be a part of a huge, multiple-day art festival. Not only that, but it was a big eye-opener as to what the public is drawn to and how to give my booth a more “professional” look for next year’s event. I even gained some networking points and am now part of the 1st Fridays in Columbia.
Columbia Art League: This is one of the art galleries in Columbia, and the one I had been wanting to submit to for so long but could never work myself up to it. This year I decided that since I was going to be a part of Art in the Park, that a membership to this gallery was a must, and I have since been a part of several of their exhibitions and have even made a few sales and won an honorable mention ribbon.
The Eccentric Chai Podcast: Perhaps my biggest success of the year is my podcast, Eccentric Chai. I had been tossing around the idea of starting a podcast since 2020, but it wasn’t until this year that I finally decided to go for it, and it wasn’t as hard as I thought! Just like everything else, it’s a learn-as-you-go process. With the podcast I had to learn how to use Audacity, how to get my podcast on multiple platforms, and how to prevent myself from spending the entire week working on one episode. I have big plans for the podcast in the year 2023 and I’m excited to get started.
This painting was a fail for me, but that’s common with intuitive art.
Mishaps
I don’t want to call these “failures” because technically you never “fail” at something unless you give up entirely. These things are more mishaps, and so that’s what I’m calling them.
Doubting Myself and My Art: This isn’t necessarily a preventable mishap, as this is practically in the job description of an artist. At some point we will doubt ourselves, our art, our “brand”, our “style”, and everything in between. We will worry that we aren’t contributing enough to our family when we don’t sell enough. We will worry that we are spending too many events “working” and not enough events just spending time with our families. We will get overwhelmed with FOMO and Impostor Syndrome and existential crises and all those other fun issues we deal with as creatives. But it’s important to not let these issues bog us down, rather remind us why we chose this career path in the first place. Why do you do what you do? I’ve only just recently figured this out and it’s the end of the year. So don’t beat yourself up if you’re still confused.
Patreon: I don’t know why I keep trying with Patreon (I suppose I should read above), but I gave it another go this year and it has still barely gained any momentum. My hope is to better my marketing skills in 2023 so that I can get more patrons. A steady paycheck is very important to this career, and Patreon is one of the only places—other than teaching—that I have found to give me that option.
Marketing: Which brings me to marketing. This is yet another learn-as-you-go process. You find what works and what doesn’t. As Andy J. Pizza would say, you have to “write while onstage.” But my issue is that I didn’t add any further research to my marketing tool bag. I need to focus on my professional development in 2023, read a few books on business and maybe even take a class. The better I am at marketing, the better I will be able to prevent the previous two mishaps.
Lessons Learned
There’s too many to write about, so here’s a list:
How to better set up my booth at events
How to make flyers and brochures for marketing
How to host a podcast
Consistency is KEY
When you finish a painting, FOLLOW THROUGH. Scan it, post it on your shop, frame it, don’t just toss it in your portfolio and move on.
Take a break (the world won’t end, and neither will your career)
Your best moments in this career will not be monetary. Instead they will be the time your student called your intuitive art class, “finger painting for grow-ups,” the time a mother cried because her son was so passionate about art camp, and that evening you taught intuitive art to cancer survivors.
To-do lists will change your life
Goals for 2023
I’ve already mentioned a few, but let’s get specific.
Podcast Interviews: I have always loved listening to artist interviews on other podcasts, and have wanted to do the same on my own podcast. 2023 will be the year I finally start interviewing other artists.
50 Patrons: It’s not a huge number, but it’s a specific one, and specific goals are always much more obtainable than general ones. Once I add those marketing skills to my tool bag, my goal is to get this number before the end of 2023.
Watercolor Classes: I have given them in the past, but now I want to give them weekly. Because of the lesson I learned that “consistency is key,” I know that weekly classes, held on the same day at the same time, are far more successful than the occasional, sporadic classes. I also want to start doing my intuitive art classes weekly as well.
Work Larger: This was a goal for 2022, and while I did work larger, I didn’t finish anything large. But I have some new ideas and I can’t wait to get started on some big surfaces. It will be one step closer to my career goal of painting a mural in the city.
2022 had its flaws, as does any year, but damn it was a good one (and busy). The amount of events I did in 2021? Two or three. The amount of events I did in 2022? Over FIFTEEN (and I still have two more scheduled this month)! I exhibited in new places, taught kids’ camps, won 1st place in the Chalk Art competition, and became a part of the Art Heals project here in Jefferson City. My family and I went to St. Louis to see the Van Gogh exhibit (Goo said it was one of the best days of her life), traveled to Cedar Point (on a plane!) and rode a busy subway to downtown Chicago.
Don’t get me wrong, we had our shit days. We struggled with the inflation and gas prices. We had to watch what was happening in the world on the news and feel completely powerless. We buried Apple beneath a tree on a cold January day.
But my hope is that I can take these moments and put them in the “I lived through it” file. I don’t want to dwell on them, but I don’t want to forget them. And I want to give the fun stuff more focus. A lot of times we only remember the bad stuff, but it’s the bad stuff that makes the good stuff good. Right? That might be the biggest takeaway from the year.
My 2023 New Year’s Resolution is to pay more attention to the good stuff, the good memories, the good feelings, the fun days with the family. To not let them be overpowered by the bad stuff, but rather enhanced by it.
Until next year, may your Holiday food be hot and filling, and you and your families be happy and healthy. See you in 2023!
Every year I hope to get a nice, consistent body of work when putting together my top nine. But I’m beginning to learn by now that it’s a lost cause. After four years of attempting this, my end-of-the-year grid is still a menagerie of experiments. But that’s okay because I, myself, am a menagerie. And an experiment.
Instead of using the grid I could generate through a few apps, I decided to put together my own top nine. I wanted to see what my favorite works/projects were from the year, hoping it would provide a compass for next year’s shenanigans. It took some work, but I finally put together my nine favorites from the year. To make them less hodgy-podgy, I used a framing app to give them all their own showcase:
Some of these pieces are merely a symbol of a project, while the others are stand-alone works. Still, I figured it would be fun to share a little tidbit from each to help you get to know each of them and why they were chosen for my final grid of the year.
“Winter Sunset” is the newest piece from this bunch. I created it at the end of a long–and fun–day of experimenting. I had splashed out a few composition ideas on some sketch paper and once I’d chosen the best one I grabbed a 9×12 sheet of Arches cold press. I wanted to get some serious granulation so I used transparent red oxide and a turquoise shade from one of my Watercolor Confections palette boxes. For some reason mixing those two colors creates an explosion of granulation, as you can see at the top of the paper.
And speaking of the top of the paper, that actually used to be the bottom. Once the painting had dried, I decided to flip it to see it in all four directions and I liked the painting better upside down than its original right side up. I felt the composition was stronger this way.
“The Blue Dress” represents a series of mixed media pieces I had scribbled out during a particularly scribbly phase in the summertime. I had recently finished my basement studio and had taped up 10+ mixed media sheets of paper on the large empty wall so that I could just experiment with whatever medium I grabbed. Most of what was grabbed was oil pastels and pencils, which made the scribbling even more fun. As a lot of you know, intuitive art is one of my favorite ways to create, because I never know what I’m going to come up with, and because afterward I can often see something that was hidden deep within my subconscious. This particular piece is connected deeply to my childhood, as were a lot of the pieces on this wall.
“Dance of the Baleine” was another intuitive piece that I created after watching the documentary, Seaspiracy. It was a heartbreaking thing to watch, and so I followed it up with a few more cheerful sea-friendly documentaries, such as My Octopus Teacher. Despite the sadness in my heart, this piece became more of a celebration of sea life, and to this day it’s one of my favorite intuitive pieces because of it’s sea-bubbly shapes and expressive lines.
Because of what had inspired the piece, I wanted to donate my earnings from this painting to an ocean foundation, but to this day it hasn’t sold. Still, I hope to put it back up on my shop next week and give it another go. I feel this piece deserves more than to sit in a dark portfolio for its lifetime.
“Nature Photography” is from a small group of digital pieces that I’d created for my poster project. The idea behind it was that film is not dead, and was something of a gift for my #believeinfilm friends on Twitter. They are so much fun and are like a second family! Not only does this piece represent that community, but it also combines two of my loves: photography and nature. This one was my favorite of the bunch because of its colors, and because of the Canonet-like appearance of the camera.
This untitled piece was part of another #bunnified project on Twitter, during which I bunnified several cameras for my #believeinfilm tweeps. Someone had uploaded an adorable cat among the sea of cameras and I couldn’t resist bunnifying the kitty. Because of its expressiveness, the naïve-like and sketchy style, and the colors, it almost immediately became my favorite piece of the year. It was definitely a breakthrough piece, for sure, but what really solidifies my love of it is that it almost symbolizes this year for us, as our biggest life change this year was taking in a very sick stray cat, who we named Coco. Despite the odds being mostly against him, he’s now a rambunctious and psycho young cat who runs around the house with fuzzy toys in his mouth and meows incessantly to be pet at all hours.
To view the bunnified camera thread, you can click here.
“Levitate” was part of a photography project called “These Woods are Haunted.” I explored a variety of different methods with this collection, from using a very slow ISO 8 film, to long exposures and trick photography. All of these works were shot on film, making it even more of a challenge (the fun kind). The idea was to create eerie photography that started with thumbnails and ended with a finished piece. One of the pieces from this collection, “Sisters,” actually won first place in photography at a local exhibition.
This particular shot was created with my Rolleiflex on Portra film. The idea behind it was to use trick photography to create an illusion of Goo floating. This technique is actually really simple, and only required two shots to make the final image. After setting the camera up on a tripod, I took one shot of my husband holding our daughter up, and a second shot with nobody in the frame. Then it was just a quick masking in Photoshop to remove my husband and voila.
“The Roots Grow Wider” is a digital piece inspired by a small collection of paintings I’d done in 2020, in which the roots of the tree would be the main subject instead of the tree itself. The idea was not only inspired by the Yin-Yang philosophy, but also the concept that tree roots are often wider than the tree branches themselves. This same concept is true for us humans, as we are more than we appear. The roots of our personality have traveled through dark places, small crevices, hard stone, to make us who we are. We are also much more than we appear, our external selves showing much less than what is within us. Who we are at work, for instance, pales in comparison to the vast flora of our true selves.
This Bunnified version of Goo represents the entire #bunnified project that I started in July on Twitter. What was meant to be a bit of weekend fun wound up being a months-long project during which I bunnified anyone who posted their picture to the thread. I had so much fun and I loved seeing everyone’s reaction to their bunnies. Many profile pictures turned to bunnies during that time–and many still are bunnies to this day–and my tweeps even coined the hashtags #bunnified and #cottontailcult. The local newspaper even did a story on the project! Because of the fun it provided to not just me, but to those who participated and/or enjoyed, I hope to embark on an even larger series of projects in the coming year, including a #bunnified365 in which I will bunnify something each day. Just for fun.
To read more about this project and to see all 140 bunnies, click here.
“Wind in the Prairie” is a collection of freelensed photos I took during a recent walk at the local conservation center. It had been so long since I’d taken my deconstructed 50mm lens out to freelens and we were not only close to the golden hour, but the wind was just delicious. Windy days are MY FAVORITE and I made it my goal to take pictures of the wind. Getting the dreamy images in this little series reminded me of how much I not only love this lens, but freelensing in general. I have made it a goal to do more and celebrate this side of me.
And there you have it, those were my personal top nine of 2021! I wonder what next year will bring, if it will be more photography than paintings, or more abstracts than representational. What I do know is I no longer want to hold myself to pesky labels, and I want to do more fun things that get the community laughing and sharing, even when things on the planet are just ridiculous. I also want to do quieter things, like freelensing the wind and maybe going on walks without any art tools whatsoever. What about you?
Until next time, may your supplies be endless and your lenses be free.
Scribble Chai 