It's Friday, have an art related cartoon from the excellent Sheldon Comics by Dave Kellet.
Blog
Poking technology with a stick
Since launching the site I've become hooked on Google Analytics and check it daily to see how the site is doing. It's like a little competition with myself, did I get more visitors yesterday than the day before, do I have someone from a new country? Partly I'm trying to work out if my (very slow and rather laid back) promotion is working but mostly I just find it fascinating. You can see which site people came from, which countries people are from, which pages they looked at and how long they stayed - it's absolute heaven for a nosy person!
For instance, who is the single visitor from Hong Kong? Or how about the person in Portugal who's visited three times? I don't think I know anyone in either of those places, so how did they find me? See, it just sets the brain wondering. (If you happen to be either of these people, please do leave me a comment because I'm dying to know!)
In less than a month I've had 139 visitors from 12 different countries, many of whom have been back more than once. Of course, I'd love loads more but I think that's pretty good for a brand new site. So a big thank you to everyone who's visited and those of you who've been kind enough to mention me in your own blogs, I really do appreciate it.
I've also learnt so much about blogging since launching, which is a little bit odd since I've been blogging on Livejournal since 2003. However, Livejournal is such a self-contained world that blogging outside it is quite different. I have to think about things like 'how many visitors am I getting' and 'are the settings working, can search engines find me'? I never had to think about any of this stuff on Livejournal: my LJ is more of a personal space and I never really conceived of it as being about promoting myself as an artist, so numbers weren't important to me there. In fact, I still have no idea how many people read my LJ, nor do I particularly care because it's just not about that.
I'm currently mystified by the fact that Google found this site within days and I quickly got to number two in their listings*, yet The Diary Project site, which has been running over at Blogger since January doesn't comes up until page 16 despite the fact that my name is in the profile. Last night I spent about an hour researching how to get better search engine visibility: I changed various settings and added my name to the blog title. I've just checked and in less than a day it's gone up to page 3 - boy, those Google spiders work fast.
Oh, and I've changed the comments on here too, so you no longer need to have your first comment moderated. We'll see how that goes - if I'm drowned in spam then I may need to change it back but I thought the moderation thing might be off-putting.
*I'm knocked off the number one spot by another Kirsty Hall on Bebo, which is undoubtedly good for my ego!
Diary Project update
I've just finished a mammoth Diary Project update and it's all up to date again. This is my favourite envelope out of the 9 I've just scanned.
For those of you who haven't checked out the rest of my site and seen the 'work in progress' section, The Diary Project is a year long art project where I'm drawing on the back of an envelope every single day for 2007. The envelope is then filled with something secret and posted back to myself before my daily midnight deadline. Hopefully next year, I'll get an exhibition where all the envelopes can be shown altogether and people will be able to open them and investigate the contents. It's like a very, very slow form of blogging! If you happen to know a gallery who might be interested in showing the work, please let me know: I need to start organising that part soon and any useful suggestions or contacts would be very welcome.
Idris Khan
The Guardian had a small piece about photographer Idris Khan today. I can't find that particular piece but here's a long, more reflective article that they did on him last year. I hadn't seen his work before but I think it's wonderful. He scans and layers photographs to produce beautiful blurred, mysterious images that seem to relate as much to drawing as photography.
Idris Khan: every... page of the Holy Koran, 2004
This image is every page in the Koran scanned and layered. Khan grew up as a Muslim and apparently he made this work to reflect the importance that the Koran had in his childhood. It took him 2 months to make and he followed the correct procedure for handling the Koran whilst making it - I love the implied ritual of that. I think it's an amazing piece, I particularly love the blackness in the centre of the image. Even though that's obviously an artefact of the scanning process it makes me think of the mystic void at the heart of spirituality - the ineffable nature of the divine.
Here's another piece called every... stave of Frederick Chopin's Nocturnes for the piano.
Idris Khan: every... stave of Frederick Chopin's Nocturnes for the piano, 2004
When I look at this piece, I get the sense of the number of times it's been played. It seems to take the ephemeral experience of making or listening to music and fix it in time.
Happy Little Firebug
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
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.
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.
Red Gate
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.
A Polaroid a day keeps the doctor away
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.
Don’t burn-out!
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.