art – Page 24 – The Consulting Artist

AmericArt

A few weeks ago I painted a small acrylic abstract on canvas board titled ‘Lost In Spain’. It became a part of the We Are All Artists free art project and the art work now belongs to a lovely lady named Stacie, who did some excellent detective work to figure out where the painting was made. Here’s a photograph of the art work being finished on our return from Spain, before it was handed over.

The following week I hid a piece of art in my local town after being photographed by the local newspaper who kindly ran a feature on the free art project (the piece in the photo was not the piece I hid that day).

By coincidence, Stacie’s son found the piece of art I hid among the flowers! Having already received a piece of art as part of the project, Stacie and her son decided to pass this one on, which is a lovely community minded thing to do. Stacie’s son travelled to the USA later that day and he took the art with him. It now resides somewhere near Simsbury Connecticut, and that has to be the longest distance this free art project has travelled so far.

Map My Art : Can You Help?

I’ve painted quite often since I last posted here, and I’ll get round to sharing more recent work soon. Whilst painting I’ve been thinking more and more about where my art is, geographically. I’m in the process of trying to map my art. I’ve set up a page on Google Maps where I can record the various locations of my art around the world. It’s a work in progress, here’s where I have got to so far.

If you have some of my art, please get in touch and tell me the country/town/city where the art is, and I’ll update my records. Coincidentally, here’s a doodle of where some hidden treasure is buried. I sketched this years ago and came upon it again while setting up the map project.

Are These The Right Things?

I am a member of a Facebook group called New Business : Next Steps, run by Ann Hawkins and Ed Goodman, authors of an excellent book by the same name. Ann often bookends our working week with some good questions about what we’d like to achieve, and how we’re getting on.

Lately I’ve been feeling lost, and somewhat withdrawn. These are things that happen from time to time, that’s life, etcetera. I’m no complaining, just acknowledging. When I feel like this, I tend to withdraw from responding to Ann’s questions too. Lately I’ve been nurturing a bias for action, so today, I chose to reply to this prompt from Ann:

Check in Friday: What was the most useful thing you did this week that made a difference to your business?

Here’s how I replied.

Wrote 4,000 words towards my book.
Asked people in my network for help with some questions to provoke more content for the book.
Kicked off plans for a Berlin/London art meets work mini tour.
Made a conscious effort to stream my thinking and to do stuff, it’s been far too messy lately.
Wrote a farewell email to a group I’ve been working with.
Attended the quarterly business review of a partnership I joined a few months ago. Doing this helped me see first hand and in more detail, the exciting work we can do together.
Shared a video of my talk about the art and soul of better work from this year’s All About People event.
Made what I think is a lovely piece of art for my weekly local free art drop.

Clearly I cheated, this is not the most useful thing I did this week, it is several useful things. Are they the right things? Who knows, and what they are, is evidence that in among the doubt, I am taking action. Thank you for the prompt, Ann.

In case you are interested, here is the art work I mentioned, and the video of the Art and Soul of Better Work talk.

Have a lovely weekend.