Artist-Blog versus Artwork: One Night Only!

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Every artist should have a website, or at least a blog. This is a point I’ve been making to a friend of mine who’s trying to make her creative way in New York City. She’s doing this and that, meeting with little successes here and there, but it isn’t quite adding up to something whole yet. If she had a website, I argue, it could help people see her body of work. Plus, it would help her be accountable to herself and other artists. The web helps artists keep going in more ways than mere self-promotion.

That said, a tension will develop between your site and your work, especially if you blog. Copyblogger says that he developed the blog not to become a pro-blogger, but because he saw it as a way to become better known in the circles where he does his real work. I think that’s right. If you’re a good sculptor, you should start a blog so that people are interested in sculpture will find out more about your work, your thoughts and your creative process. The hope being that some of those folks are interested enough to buy and they will.

The trouble is, you still have to keep up the blog.

As I’ve been working on a drawing project, I’ve been spending much less time in front of the computer. This has become a sort of guilt inside me, that I’m not generating some semi-interesting new essay every day for folks to read or find or think about. I’ve started to feel a responsibility to the netizens. Once upon a time, I would go to bed proud and content if I’d gone to the gym and spent two hours at the drawing board after a workday. Now, I feel like something is undone if I don’t write something here. Like I didn’t brush my teeth. Or I didn’t make my bed.

Okay, I never make my bed.

So I thought about this tension, and came up with some mental strategies the artist-who-blogs can use to make sure the blog serves you and you aren’t serving the blog:

• Blog about your artwork. This is the most important rule I’ve got for you. If your best work is your sculpture/writing/video/comix, then that’s what you will write the most interesting posts about. Plus, if you’re writing about your real work then you are thinking about your real work and you’ll get back to it.
• Blog first - but keep it short. You don’t really have to blog every day, but if you’re going to carve out some time to blog, then you should carve it out before starting your real creative work. Let blogging clear out the cobwebs in your head before you start working, but if you don’t finish the post in the time allocated, hit save as draft. Your public can wait a day.
• Your process is interesting, so blog about it. Don’t interpret your work at the end. That’s not a story. The story is how that crazy stuff you do comes together! We all think our creative process is boring. We don’t see why anyone would want to hear about the fact that we take an old racquetball into the backyard and bounce it against a wall in time to the lyrics we’re composing. It is interesting, though. An artist’s bizarre little creative quirks are, perhaps, the most interesting thing he or she has to write about. So write about it.
• Blog about your progress. I need to do this more. Try to read and be read by some other similar artists, so you know that other folks that will understand are reading about it when you write about how far you’re getting. Maybe it’s just me, but I find accountability motivational. I want people to know if I’m trucking along or if I’m on dead center, and knowing that someone is seeing those reports makes it more motivational.

If you’re an artist-who-blogs, it would be great to hear you say whether or not you feel this tension, like I do.

Is blogging giving you a more short-term view of creativity? Is there a tension between long projects and punchy posts? How much time does blogging take up for you? Do you have balancing strategies of your own? Do you think mine are wrong-headed?