{"id":786,"date":"2013-04-19T15:07:00","date_gmt":"2013-04-19T15:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.belfineart.com\/index.php\/2013\/04\/19\/feed-the-artist\/"},"modified":"2013-04-19T15:07:00","modified_gmt":"2013-04-19T15:07:00","slug":"feed-the-artist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.belfineart.com\/index.php\/2013\/04\/19\/feed-the-artist\/","title":{"rendered":"Feed the Artist"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today is a beautiful spring day. I am sitting outside in the courtyard writing this. It has been an interesting week art wise. When I started this blog, it was basically a daily record of whatever I was making. A few months ago, I gave up my physical &#8220;studio&#8221; and stopped taking commissions. So, there has not been any &#8220;art for sale&#8221; kind of art in my blog since November. Since then, as you can see on the blog, mostly I&#8217;ve been making short little sketches, drawings, cards, and such. There are a couple of things that happened recently that have shown me something both about myself as an artist and about the purpose of this blog. <br \/>This past week, I&#8217;ve had the chance to work on a couple of art projects in my role as a missionary in LAMP. But, I have not posted these &#8211; even though they fall under the heading of &#8220;art I made today.&#8221; I feel like these things A) already have their audience, and B) don&#8217;t exactly belong to me. I just haven&#8217;t felt right about posting them.<br \/>The other thing that happened is that about a week ago I realized that regardless of whatever else is going on, I need to &#8220;feed the artist&#8221; in order to stay sane. What do I mean by feeding the artist? I mean taking a deep breath, feeling the part of me that likes to make things, and then responding to it. This is scary. Why scary? Because I don&#8217;t know what my artist is going to want. This is also fun. Why? Because it&#8217;s a surprise. Today, my artist wanted to draw designs. So, I went on google and looked up &#8220;early Christian motifs.&#8221; And then, realizing that a lot of early Christians spoke and wrote Greek (as well as had Greek in their mosaics and frescoes and things) my artist thought maybe I should learn to draw Greek letters &#8211; not to learn Greek, but just for the aesthetic. I ended up drawing the Greek alphabet and then copying a Celtic design from another Google images photo. <\/p>\n<p><center><a href=\"https:\/\/picasaweb.google.com\/118156346472653949126\/NewsFromTheStudio?authkey=Gv1sRgCPW4vtT3yIvxFQ#5868574705087989906\"><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/lh3.googleusercontent.com\/-z8IzevafBmE\/UXFdmeqcyJI\/AAAAAAAACq8\/89C11So3E-o\/s288\/48.jpg\" border=\"0\" width=\"400\" height=\"300\" style=\"margin:5px\" \/><\/a><\/center><\/p>\n<p><center><a href=\"https:\/\/picasaweb.google.com\/118156346472653949126\/NewsFromTheStudio?authkey=Gv1sRgCPW4vtT3yIvxFQ#5868574727467308610\"><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/lh3.googleusercontent.com\/-IYrULzd8vcQ\/UXFdnyCGFkI\/AAAAAAAACrE\/D0n96MZtXMA\/s288\/54.jpg\" border=\"0\" width=\"272\" height=\"400\" style=\"margin:5px\" \/><\/a><\/center><\/p>\n<p><center><a href=\"https:\/\/picasaweb.google.com\/118156346472653949126\/NewsFromTheStudio?authkey=Gv1sRgCPW4vtT3yIvxFQ#5868574755170904850\"><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/lh4.googleusercontent.com\/-VzpEHWF9dE4\/UXFdpZPJaxI\/AAAAAAAACrM\/3J7z5Xl3yos\/s288\/50.jpg\" border=\"0\" width=\"295\" height=\"400\" style=\"margin:5px\" \/><\/a><\/center><br \/>Will I ever use this information on a commission or on work for LAMP or any other public sort of art? No, probably not directly. But, it satisfies my artist, and I have to keep my artist happy if I want her to work on the other kind of stuff for me. That is what I mean by feeding the artist.<br \/>And, I think that has to do a lot with what this blog is for. Feeding the Artist. Maybe my artist just likes to have an audience. (Even though most of my hits are from Russia. What&#8217;s up with that?) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today is a beautiful spring day. I am sitting outside in the courtyard writing this. It has been an interesting week art wise. When I started this blog, it was basically a daily record of whatever I was making. A few months ago, I gave up my physical &#8220;studio&#8221; and stopped taking commissions. So, there has not been any &#8220;art&hellip; <span class=\"read-more-span\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.belfineart.com\/index.php\/2013\/04\/19\/feed-the-artist\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Feed the Artist&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.belfineart.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.belfineart.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.belfineart.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.belfineart.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.belfineart.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.belfineart.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.belfineart.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.belfineart.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.belfineart.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}