Dave.

One of the benefits/challenges of having a broad art education is that while I know how to do almost all fine arts, and many craft arts, I am not a deep expert in any. The first part of this journey is filtering down my knowledge into a few things that I can focus on to increase that depth.

I'm rejecting painting and drawing. I'll still do them - drawing in particular is a great foundation for other things, even if only to sketch out designs. But I'm looking at moving father from "fine arts" and more into crafts. Building out a path of always working in 4 categories: What am I learning? Experimenting with? Doing? curating?

The idea being that I'll always be researching and learning something new. I'll be experimenting with what I've learned until something grabs me as worthy of a bigger project. I'll then do a project. And finally, I'll curate the results of it to decide what move forward into the art I present to the world as my actual work. (Here, wip)

So this being day one of it all, my initial list is probably going to land at:

Learning: Upholstery. Taking some classes.

Experimenting: Fused Glass. Working with new molds and firing schedules to make household goods.

Doing: Photography. Late summer is absolutely the right time to go outside and take pictures. The theme is going to be what I call "details" - go out in nature but don't take landscape shots, nor macros. Seek out textures and patterns. Capture the material of nature, not the visual of a scene.

Long ago, I got a degree in Fine Arts. Then decided i did not want my creativity to be dictated by someone else, so i worked in tech. decades later, I kinda hate tech. And I kinda love creating things. That is what kept me in tech so long anyway... not the code, but the creation of something new.

It is time to move that energy back to art. I've been dabbling for decades, but I have never sat down and dedicated significant efforts to specific projects, cultivating both ideas and craft at the same time, trying to truly put out good work.