Kirsty Hall  |  Artist & Curator

We had the first barbecue of the year, it’s been too wet until now. I hadn’t realised how much I’d been missing it until this evening. I was so happy just being in the garden, making fire and eating fresh food with my fingers. I need to spend a certain amount of time out in the garden every day or I get a bit cross but it’s been so hard lately with all the rain.

I loved the way the grill looked afterwards with the contrast of the white ash beneath the blackened metal.

A close up of the dying coals, taken in the dark with the flash, you can just see the wisp of flame.

The same coals without the flash, I adore the colour on this shot. I tweaked the levels very slightly to brighten the image but this is basically the same colour that the camera captured.

It was so wonderful to stand outside in the dark taking photos with the warmth of the fire under my hands and the smell of the smoke in my hair. Then as I was coming back inside, I saw a bat, which always makes me very happy. I felt quite renewed and emotionally nourished by it all.

Oh, and the food we ate was extremely delicious too!

Dear Ada is my ideal sort of blog – insightful comment on art, masses of exciting artists and gorgeous images. There’s tons of visual inspiration here and I’m looking forward to working my way through the archives.

beige, originally uploaded by Maditi.

Maditi takes absolutely exquisite polaroids and medium format photos.

She also has a great blog over at Maditi Likes – she describes it as “a collection of things I like, no words – only visuals” and it’s full of inspiring images by lots of different artists and makers. Well worth a look.

I never tire of living in Clifton. It’s a particularly beautiful part of Bristol and I love walking around the local streets. Even after ten years there are still lots of details that I’ve never noticed before, like this glorious garden gate.

Heather Smith Jones of Drawing On The Walls is doing a daily Polaroid Project during the month of August.

It’s nice to see so many other artists working with the idea of a daily project. If you know of any others, let me know and I’ll link to them.

Life Dev has a good article about avoiding entrepreneur burnout that has a lot of relevance for artists and other creative folk. Interestingly, it picks up on the point from my last post about the importance of delegating the things you don’t like or aren’t good at.

Jill Rumoshosky Werner writes an interesting blog over at Redefined.

I discovered her blog when Alyson Stanfield of Art Biz Blog linked to her very funny post, Top Ten Reasons For Becoming An Artist. Too true!

I particularly agree with her latest post about knowing when to get outside help as an artist.

“When I started, I never thought I’d need to know web design, digital imaging, search engine optimization and mass marketing techniques to become successful, but unlike most artists, I have a heavy marketing, computer and writing background…Even with all that experience, there are things I can’t do by myself and for those, I look for outside help.”

This is such a key realisation for any artist. I had a conversation with another artist last year when she told me that she always budgets for someone else to do the documentation of her work because she hates to do it. That moment was very instrumental in me deciding to pay someone else to design my website. I’d been trying to do it myself for years but just didn’t have enough design or technical skills. I’d been coming to the realisation that I needed to pay someone else for quite a while but like most artists, I was used to doing everything myself on a shoestring budget so I was quite resistant to the idea of paying for something that I thought I ought to be able to do myself. However, while it’s useful for artists to learn stuff like marketing and publicity, there comes a point when you have to say ‘I can’t do this as well as another professional and it’s false economy for me to try’.

Do this today: Make a list of the art things you know you suck at or really hate to do and work out ways in which you can delegate that responsibility.

Can you pay someone else to do it for you?
Can you share or swap hated tasks with another artist?
Can you find creative ways to make it more interesting?
If you think you could do it but just lack confidence or knowledge, can you take a workshop or learn from someone who does know how to do it?

Remember to do the maths – if something is going to take you ages to learn and you’ll never need to do it again, then it might be a false economy. Unless you actively enjoy it and it feeds into your art, it might also be an excuse for not working on your art. Remember that while you may be a ’starving artist’, your time and energy are also important and worth valuing.

I first came across Solveigh Gott’s excellent textile work when I showed one of her knitted pieces in the Knit1, Build 1 exhibition at the Here Gallery two years ago.

I’m a big fan of her project, The Textile Files. It’s a simple but very evocative project: she collects bits of fabric, attaches them to a file card and then blogs the picture with a piece of related text. I was just checking her blog and saw this picture of pins, which immediately got me excited.

Solveigh Gott: Pins from The Textile Files

I started reading the text and thought “hey great, someone else is working with pins!” – and then promptly realised that the reason the text sounded so familiar was because it was written by me! Yep, she was quoting text from this very website – thanks, for the mention, Solveigh, I’m very flattered to have been included in The Textile Files.

But really, fancy not recognising my own writing – I am such a doofus sometimes! Still, it’s not quite as bad as the time I started reading a list of livejournal interests and thought “wow, this sounds like someone I would get on with, I should friend them” before realising that I’d accidentally backpaged and was reading my own interest list. Still, I suppose it’s positive that I instantly liked myself…

Angie Reed Garner is an artist I know from her Livejournal. We’ve never met but we’ve read each others blogs for a couple of years now. I like her spirited painting style and bold use of colour.

I like her birds and buildings best but she also does a mean line in feisty, curvy, naked women.

Dancing Crow makes daily sewn postcards.

Of course, I couldn’t resist this one of keys!

I’m rather in awe of this project since I can’t imagine sewing every day. The Diary Project seems quite simple in comparison but I expect there are people out there saying, ‘ooh, but I couldn’t draw every day’, so I guess it’s all relative.