Share Like an Artist

Last night, I finished reading a delightful, little book just before I fell asleep – Show your Work! The book is about making art and sharing it. Austin wrote the book in ten, simple steps.

This morning, I wanted to flip through the pages one more time to find my favorite few quotes to share with you.

• “My blog has been my sketchbook, my studio, my gallery, my storefront, and my salon. Absolutely everything good that has happened in my career can be traced back to my blog. My books, my art shows, my speaking gigs, some of my best friendships – they all exist because I have my own little pice of turf on the Internet.”
• “Artists love to trot out the tired line, “My work speaks for itself,” but the truth is, our work doesn’t speak for itself. Human beings want to know where things came from, how they were made, and who made them. The stories you tell about the work you do have a huge effect on how people feel and what they understand about your work effects how they value it.”
• “Yet a life of creativity is all about change — moving forward, taking chances and exploring new frontiers.”
• “Be ambitions. Keep yourself busy. Think bigger. Expand your audience.

The key point of the book for me was this:

• “Traditionally, the artist has been trained to regard her creative process as something that should be kept to herself…an artist is supposed to toil in secrecy, keeping her ideas and her work under lock and key, waiting until she has a magnificent product to show for herself before she tries to connect with a private audience…This all made sense in the a pre-digital age, when the only way an artist could connect with an audience was through a gallery show or write-up in some fancy art magazine. But today, by taking advantage of the Internet and social media, an artist can share whatever she wants, whenever she wants, at almost no cost…By sharing her day-to-day process – the thing she really cares about – she can form a unique bond with her audience.”

These thoughts come from the beginning of the book where Austin makes a strong case for the importance of “sharing like an artist” in the modern, digital age.

Here’s a link to Austin’s blog and an affiliate link to purchase the book on Amazon.com:

My Day as a Writer

In light of all that inspiration on sharing work. Here’s what I’m working on today. I’ve got 44 photos left in a folder titled “Anywhere” and I’m trying to find appropriate, meaningful homes for them within the text of the book I’m publishing this fall – Wild Man: A Mostly-True Memoir of an Old Time Cattleman.

Don’t you think it is important that I find a spot for this hilarious grandfather-grandchild moment?

If you are interested in keeping up with updates on the book, please sign up for my email list here.

After that, I’ll be polishing and publishing a post for the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society featuring over a dozen different foreign covers of the Little House books series. I write and manage the online communications for the Memorial Society including, blogging, Facebook, Pinterest and a monthly e-club newsletter.

And, after that, I’ll take the chipped finger nail polish off my nails. It is driving me crazy!

Happy Thursday,

Sierra