#artistsjournal

Wednesday brings a full workday for me. I aim to create a watercolour to refine my digital sketches for a series of paintings I'm currently working on. Additionally, I plan to draw the landscape outside my window using white pen on black paper, as the frigid -10°C temperature makes outdoor sketching impossible.

Being in Estonia is a wonderful experience, and I would regret not capturing Estonia's beauty in my artwork. Over a year has passed, yet I haven't drawn a single thing, despite the stunning landscapes revealed during my daily walks.

An invitation has arrived for me to spend three hours at a spa – Estonia is renowned for its delightful Nordic spas. My month-long subscription is ending soon, and a spa visit might be a tempting option. However, it would likely encroach upon my full workday and disrupt my drawing plans. This has happened to me far too often.

I need to make progress on my paintings and adhere to my scheduled work time. Only by doing so do I have a chance to complete ten paintings in four months and also create a dozen drawings of Estonia.

But then, a question arises: can I truly call my artistic pursuits "work"? Here in Estonia, I have no exhibitions, no income from my artwork. This brings my activities back to the realm of a hobby.

The "hobby" label sticks in my head, eroding my motivation. "Spa, or anywhere really," I tell myself, "since I have no actual work, just a hobby."

Yet, I know I will regret not painting. Procrastination and an inability to say "no" to temptation will gnaw at me, diminishing my self-esteem and professional integrity as an artist. My drawing technique still requires refinement, and I'm not seizing this chance to be surrounded by nature, create multiple drawings, and progress in landscaping—crucial for my upcoming paintings.

I just found out that Ello, a social network for artists, shut down a few months ago. I wasn't using Ello a lot, but the news made me think about how things work in the world.

Ello was a well-made platform with a strong community of dedicated artists. It tried to run it without making a lot of money, unlike most popular social networks. Ello didn't have ads or promoted posts, which was great for artists but probably a financial problem for the owners. Maybe because of this, Ello stopped working one day, showing that you can't survive without making money.

Ello's story showed me that it's not enough to create great things if you want them to keep going. The economy is important. If you don't pay attention to the business side, you're going to fail! Just like many great artists throughout history have failed because they didn't know how to manage the business side of their art. It's crazy to think about how many great works of art we've never seen because of this.

On the other hand, there are a lot of artists who focus more on business than on their art. That's why there's so much mediocre art around today.

Focusing too much on business means you don't have enough time to develop your artistic skills. It also often leads to making the same kind of art over and over again, which gets boring quickly.

It's 10 o'clock. Time to get to work on my paintings. About a week ago, I decided to plan out my work schedule, hoping to boost my progress and improve my organization.

In a typical week, I have six working days. Saturday's my day off, the only one when the whole family's free, so we spend it together. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Sundays are my most productive days. I've calculated I have ten hours to work on those, so I call them "full-working days." Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays are "half-working days" with only three or four hours available.

The plan's still rough around the edges, but it's already cleared my head about work organization. Even though the same question keeps turning in my brain, "What for?". I've been staying in Estonia for a bit more than a year now, a country I deeply appreciate, especially for its stunning Nordic nature. But Estonia's too small for a robust art community or market. Making art here feels like, as the French say, "pissing in a cello."

Art is a form of communication. If it's not shared, it becomes just a collection of molecules sharing space. Like anything in this world, it becomes nothing without a conscious mind to observe and give it meaning.

Creating art in a place where art barely exists is tough. But the possibility of moving to London next year fuels my painting, driving me to finish my series with cubic figures and houses. I don't want to arrive in London empty-handed, and finding a studio space there worries me—it's an overcrowded and expensive city.

It took me a few hours to find the perfect bush, an element crucial to the middle ground I sought for my painting series. The middle ground separates the white figure made of cubes in the foreground from the white houses in the background.

I'm talking to you about the series of paintings with cubic figures and their houses that I'm currently working on. Sometimes, the sheer length of artistic research like this surprises me, especially when I consider if viewers will even notice the bush!

So, I wanted a bush typical of French gardens, as I made sketches for this series in the French town of Niort. I envisioned it with cold green leaves and dense foliage to cast contrasting hard shadows, highlighting the white cubes of the figure through the stark contrast between light and dark.

I also desired a variable top contour for the bush, allowing me to adapt it to different backgrounds in future paintings. My requirements proved challenging to meet. Perhaps research would be easier if I were in France now, exploring directly instead of relying on the internet.

Regardless, I scoured online images. Google kept pushing Estonian websites, offering little information on French gardens. It's a curious thing—we often think of the internet as global, but research platforms and social media track our location, restricting us to content from our immediate area.

I employed various tricks to immerse myself in the French online space, like VPNs and fake locations, but they yielded little success in easing my research.

Finally, I turned to BARD, a Google AI language model I find helpful at times. BARD's solution worked magic today. I found my ideal bush: the Laurus Nobilis. It seems to tick all the boxes. A quick digital sketch suggests it's a perfect fit, but only transferring it to canvas will tell for sure.

I am 39 years old and feel like everything is too late for me. Writing is too late, my new artistic path in London is too late, developing my art technique is too late. And what for?

These days, artists become famous young because there are people who can make a lot of money from a young artist and half as much money from an artist of 39 years old.

We all love what is young and new. We love freshness and innocence, not old and sad. We are attracted by the energy of life, like by young trees, not by half-lifed trees.