Last summer I issued a 21-day journaling challenge on the blog. A number of people took me up on it. I don’t know what the success rate was, but I made it through the 21 days. And then I stopped. But I’m okay with that. I write four blogs (including those for my classes and a personal blog) and just finished a book that has about 73,000 words in it. In other words, my writing has not been neglected. There’s still something unique about a journal. I’d like to get mine to the point where it doesn’t lay bare the boring minutiae of my days. I’d like a journal that bursts at the seams with creativity. One that explodes with far-out, whacky thoughts. I want to look back on it years from now and have a really good guffaw, which is what happens when I read the Dilbert Blog, http://dilbertblog.typepad.com . Yep, I want to be that funny. Journaling can serve a higher purpose. Or can you get there without the journaling?

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How to Document Your Art using Professional Guidelines

Complimentary Recording

Are your inventory records a mess? Do you even have inventory records? Your inventory records are critical documentation for your career. You might as well get them right so you don't have to go back in ten years and try to reconstruct all of your accomplishments. In this complimentary teleseminar, Harriete Estel Berman will cover the essential information you should be keeping for each artwork. To listen to this recording, go to:
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FEATURE ARTICLE

Gather Your Brilliance

Cyndi Lavin, Calypso. Necklace featuring fossilized ammonites from Madagascar.  (c) The Artist http://www.wildestdreamsdesigns.com

Everyone was wearing black. I thought the entire staff must have gone to a funeral because it was a dark day in the Archives of American Art, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. It was about 1988 and I was researching my thesis topic on microfiche and microfilm. (Surely those archaic machines are piled in landfills somewhere.) What I was reading there that I couldn’t read elsewhere were the personal journals and letters of Milton Avery and the artists that surrounded him in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. For me, an historian by training, it was pure gold. I didn’t hold the artist’s actual papers, but I saw his handwriting. I followed his creative process and daily activities.

So much of this will be lost in the future because of our e-age. At the same time, artists are probably writing more than ever with the convenience of email and the blogging revolution. Perhaps there will end up being more words than fewer, but they won’t be handwritten. I shed a tear for that.

Last week I encouraged you to work on your storytelling. This week, I’m here to tell you that a writing routine can help you with that. However, I don’t encourage artists to keep a journal just for the sake of journaling. In fact, I don’t advise any rigorous schedule such as the one Julia Cameron lays out in The Artist’s Way. If I were to assign you the homework of keeping a journal for 21 days, your immediate response might be defensive. You can just imagine sitting down for your sacred journaling time with your special notebook and having to make yourself do the work. That scenario doesn’t work for everyone. And, yet, you need to work on your stories, improve your artist statement, and collect thoughts about your art for when you need them.

My coach, Cynthia Morris, suggests using an “idea book” instead of a journal, which I really like. No pressure to come up with long, thoughtful entries each and every day, but the permission to think about the unthinkable, the unsaid, or the unwritten.

I submit an alternative: a box. It doesn’t actually have to be a box, but it must be a single place where you collect your thoughts. You can write on scraps of paper, cocktail napkins, or cardboard. You can print from your computer. But then you put your ideas in a single location--kind of like a primitive form of filing. It can also be done with a digital voice recorder as long as you transcribe it. Let’s call it Brilliant Thoughts in a Box.

The premise behind Brilliant Thoughts in a Box is that you aren’t tethered to a specific notebook that you have to have by your side whenever the genius gene decides to come out and play. You can write on anything anywhere, as long as you’re not destroying anyone’s property. It gives you a chance to be creative and unstructured. It also provides a safe place (a lockbox, if you will) to protect your ideas until the time comes that you need to dig through the words.

By the way, there was no funeral that day at the Archives of American Art. Everyone just decided to wear black on the same day. Wouldn’t it be fun to know that some punk art-history student wearing black could be there in 50 years and rummage through your Brilliant Thoughts in a Box?