A New Year of Opportunity

Inspire Me Thursday’s theme this week is New Year Resolutions…

The new year is always the perfect opportunity to review the past year, and see what next steps we need to take to bring ourselves more inline with our overall goals. Yet, while I’m a firm believer of setting goals, I’m also think it’s just as important to listen to intuition if not more so.

Last year when I sat down to write down my goals for the year, I never would have imagined that by the end of the year I would have my artwork displayed in the Tampa Museum of Art nor I would have the opportunity to create a live painting at one of the museum’s Art after Dark events.

This past year brought many wonderful opportunities from redesigning my studio that has allowed me to finally create larger scale soft pastel paintings to opening my online Etsy store that has given me the opportunity to connect directly with art collectors near and far.

In this upcoming year, as silly as it sounds, I simply desire to lock myself in my studio and create. While this image is probably what most people would envision an artist doing, it’s been a challenge for me since I’ve become active in the local art community.

As an artist that has a demanding full time job outside of the arts community, my free time is very limited. So in this next year, one of my major goals is to plan out my month in advance to set aside for creating, networking, marketing, and setting up photo shoots with local models to develop a collection of source images for paintings.

So this upcoming weekend, I’ll be locked up in my studio with pastel dust flying everywhere, but I will be out and about next Friday checking out retro|perspectives, the last Art after Dark event, at the Tampa Museum of Art before it’s scheduled closing and demolition. There will be over 50 emerging and established artists participating so you definitely won’t want to miss it if you’re in the Tampa Bay area.