Hello. If you’re here for the first time, thank you for popping by, I appreciate it more than you realise. You may be thinking, ‘He doesn’t post very regularly on his website, does he?’
If you’re revisiting, I also really appreciate your visit, but you’re probably thinking, where has he been? Why neglect your website for so long?
Let me explain,
I am getting old. I am fast approaching 50 and as the years move steadily on, I have let my negativity and mental health dictate my creativity/humour. So, no website visits meant keeping this site up-to-date became less of a priority. It’s a bit sad, but as far as encouragement/inspiration/lunacy were concerned, lack of interest in the site meant lack of interest from me. I just don’t seem to go anywhere.
In my defence, as a family, we’ve had to endure some hard knocks over the past 4 years or so and although I haven’t stopped drawing, or being silly whenever possible, the blackness of depression has been uncontrollable and random, sometimes knocking me back during my best times and making me doubt everything, even give up altogether. I also suffer with anxiety, although there seems to be a lot of that about recently, I mean it, the older I get, the worse I worry but not without cause, I actually do have a lot to worry about.
(I’ll blog in detail one day, but suffice it to say, that with 3 kids, (one of which is an adult), all with health problems of their own, coupled with with my own and my wife’s, it’s not just worrying about nothing*).
(strawberry from The Shopping List – See next blog post for details)
Anyway…..
I’ve done a lot of thinking recently and I’ve decided to stop stopping. It’s a nasty, vicious, pointless cycle;
Make art, post art, try a project to make money, project fails, start new project, get dejected, get ill, stop.
then something like halloween or Xmas pops up and it’s back to the sart of the cycle again.
So from now on, I’m breaking the cycle. I’m working on how to structure my time so I don’t hyper-concentrate at the detriment to other platforms. For example, I’ve ignored this site, because of a lack of traffic, but still post on my Facebook page (pickledpizza.art) and last year, ignored instagram because Tik-Tok was doing well.
I haven’t a clue how other people juggle all the platforms when they only focus on one product, so being a diverse artist with several mediums makes the whole thing even more messy. For years now I’ve hunted the solution to have a portfolio website that’s easy to upload to, but has enough sub-categories to cover photography, portraits, digital, vector, craft, facepaint, crving, pyrography, inkwork, tattoo design, text art, poetry, photo-manipulation etc etc etc.
But what did you mean, this thing happened?
Well, the reason I’m back, hopefully from this point onwards is the culmination of my working out how to be in all places at once and a determination to battle my mental health, coupled with a tiny** burst of recognition on Facebook, thanks to a shopping list.
Shopping List?
Well, every now and again in my life, something random might see a piece of art thrust into the limelight, sometimes deliberately sometimes by accident. On Sun 26th March, I doodled on a shopping list, something I sometimes do to make my wife or kids laugh whilst they shop and my wife left it in the trolley.
Next Time… The Shopping List – The Unfolding Story of a Folded Envelope
In my next blog, I’ll explain this event in more detail but this simple shopping list has made the events leading up to now, to make me channel what I do, which sometimes makes people laugh, to stop chasing my tail aimlessly and keep on keeping on.
*I also worry about others, some of which are far worse off than myself.
**this could be relative. Tiny so far, Tiny in comparison, or Tiny sarcastically. Time will tell!
Dean Perry aka pickledpizza 