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.
Curating: Well, nothing yet. Gotta spend the first month of "doing" before I have anything to curate.