Cleaning and Organizing my Creative Space for a New Year!

I spent rather a lot of time today clearing up my creative space.

It's one of those things I probably ought to do more frequently than I do, since it often has been true that by the time I finally get around to looking at stuff one thing has piled up on top of another... probably for a couple of years.

That's usually when what I call "the black hole clock" starts ticking... and keeps ticking, as I waste a bunch of time looking for things, rather than working with them.

I'm pretty sure I actually hadn't tidied the space and looked at all the various things accumulated there for probably close to three years in this particular instance, or since whenever it was that I got a new work lamp and changed things around a bit. I think that was 3 years. The start of Covid lockdowns, as I recall...

In some strange and slightly surreal way going through everything is a bit like an archaeological dig through old ideas and creative attempts during those three years.

In some ways it's slightly alarming to see just how many things I start and don't actually end up finishing because they just sit there, forever at the "idea stage," but they never get executed.

Which reminds me of something I recently read which is that most people are far better at planning than they are at executing their ideas. I think this is something that probably afflicts creative people more than others.

Anyway, I was prompted to do a major cleanup by the fact that I started unpacking everything from this year's shows. As we were finishing that up, we decided that we needed to start some new processes for 2024 in order to be a little bit more streamlined in the way we do things, and thus not have to spend as much time organizing our travel bins between shows.

I also had a nagging memory that somewhere under all the piles of started — but unfinished — ideas and designs were also lists of things from previous shows that I had put there because they would be new experiments I wanted to try. And, indeed, I found those lists and realized that there are a lot of things I've thought about but haven't never gotten started!

Sometimes inspiration even comes from our pasts!

As I think ahead to the next year, I also realized that among the many things I was hoping to get started on was a more regular blogging routine, and perhaps getting a little more serious about putting more of my inventory out on @hivelist.

As the old saying goes "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions!"

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that my creative workspace is now a lot tidier than it was before, and I can even find a bunch of the colors I knew I had... but seemed to have gone AWOL for at least a year or so!

I have never been an obsessive stickler for tidiness in my work, but there gets to be a point at which you waste more time looking for stuff than you do actually creating and that is definitely a clear sign that you should be doing something with your mess!

In a way, I am secretly pleased that I got this done already before Christmas, rather than during the early weeks of January when I should be making ready for Valentine's Day Events.

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2023.12.21 AS-TXT-187/155