All an Artist gets to Keep is his Trail.
The Importance of Self Documentation.
OK, here is a big secret of developing and keeping going with your creative lifestyle. Organized, ongoing documentation. I cannot stress enough how important this is. If an artist wants to have a vital ongoing life as a creative, you need to be able to navigate your future by documenting your past efforts.
Depending on how long you have been making your art or producing some sort of creative output, the very best thing you can do for yourself is to inventory everything you have done. At a certain point a lack of organized documentation became a problem for me when I realized I didn’t know what I had done, didn’t remember where I put it or accidentally threw it away or left it behind somewhere or had forgotten all about it.
As things accumulate, and they will, it becomes harder and harder to keep control over your ongoing body of work. If you eventually start exhibiting your work, placing it in galleries and selling works, you will need to keep good inventory control. Before you get into the market do yourself a favor and get into the habit of documenting and inventorying your work now.
For many of my early years I was too disorganized, too busy and too disinterested to keep track of everything I was doing and meanwhile things were accumulating and laying around in unorganized piles here, there and everywhere. It became overwhelming. My solution: just ignore it.
However, at a certain point, I started to slowly get into the gallery market and have exhibitions and my lack of personal organization started to cause problems and I could not ignore this shortcoming any longer. Another element was realizing that people would actually buy my artistic production so all of the sudden it had value. Hum…
Once I started to think about my artwork being worth something on the market then it started to become apparent to me that I had assets that needed to be cared for and protected from harm or loss and that I needed to know where they were and how to find them. I needed to start respecting what I was doing.
The first person who has to believe in what you are doing is you yourself. You are the only person who has firsthand knowledge of what you are thinking, what you have done and as they say, ‘knows where all of the bodies are buried’. Without you, there is no witness and your artistic activity is buried in your undocumented past.
Believe it or not, everything you do artistically is important, it is a part of your trail. Your trail will be swept by the winds of time into oblivion unless you establish and maintain organized trail markers so that you can retrace where you have been, when you were there and how you have gotten to today.
In the end, the most important thing that an artist gets to keep is his/her trail and all of your documentation is your bread crumbs as in the Hansel and Gretel story. The problem for Hansel and Gretel was that they were leaving breadcrumbs which the birds ate and so they couldn’t find their way back home even though they had marked the trail.
From an artistic point of view this would be equivalent to thinking your artworks will be your markers but if not documented properly they will be eaten by the birds just like the breadcrumbs.
For me personally, it took me a very long time to devise a system for myself that I could rely on to keep track of things and after many years I am still working out how to do this the best way possible. For any artist there can be a variety of approaches, but I will tell you what my current thinking is on this problem.
I would suggest the following.
Start and keep a daily journal or record.
This might take a little while to solidly establish. Though I have attempted it in the past on multiple occasions, I have only been keeping a daily journal since summer of 2022 but I have established it as a daily habit at this point. I don’t care what I write in it, it doesn’t matter. To establish it as a habit I decided that I would record the date every morning and what time I woke up. Then I record what time I went to bed. So that is the beginning and the end of the day. This only takes about 1 minute a day to accomplish this required habit building exercise. So, no big deal. It is just establishing and locking in the daily recordkeeping. Then when and if I have time, I try to mention what I did for the day such as, made some art, visited so and so, ate this or that, etc. Hopefully enough to recall the day at a later date. If you can then write down some thoughts, plans, new ideas, self-reflection, etc. all the better. There are many days I don’t get past recording the date and when I woke up and when I went to bed. But close enough. A lot of times I don’t feel like writing anything else.
But the journal, which is an always open word document on my desktop computer, is a priority in terms of being a daily habit and becomes my basket for catching all text-based work I do such as poetry, memories, theories, thoughts for the day, essays, interviews, quotes by other people that I want to remember, etc. Maybe throw in some art, photos or other images.
The Best Logic in Chronologic. Date everything.
When it comes to using computers, the best way to date things is year.month.day then your file names when on the computer will line up exactly in order. The main thing is knowing when something happened so that you can line up events in chronological order.
Contemporaneous record keeping will be so amazingly helpful in the years to come. So, write the date on everything you produce. When you record it, also write the inventory number on it.
The next thing is to photographically document your artworks. Taking quality photographs is best but, from a documentary point of view, even a phone photo is sufficient for recording your work. Then put an inventory number on the work itself and incorporate that inventory number in the file names of every photographic instance of that work.
In my own case, because I started many years ago with inventorying certain types of works that would be sent out to the market, I have kept those particular systems ongoing especially for collages and paintings. But a lot of other works not intended for the market were slipping through without inventory numbers so some years later I decided on a 3rd category that included all works on paper. With these works they are inventoried as mentioned about merely as year.month.day.number-in-sequence such as work.on.paper.2023.11.23.075 – to account for up to 999 works in a year use three digits. 001, 002, 003, to 998, 999 etc. unless you constantly exceed on average three works a day, 3 digits will work fine but otherwise start with 4 digits: .0001, .0002, .0003 etc. if you think you might break the number 1,000.
If you are working in journals then you can number those as, let’s say journal.2023.A.027, journal.2023.B.012 etc.
What do you do when you are already years into your work, and you have not been keeping inventory? You start with today. Pick a numbering system and start practicing documenting and inventorying everything starting today and spend the next 6 months to 12 months disciplining yourself to keep track of everything. Once you have this disciple well in hand you will begin to see the importance and usefulness of it. Once you have worked out the kinks and you are confident about keeping track of your creative work then you can set up annual folders on your computer of previous years and slowly go backwards to document and inventory your previous works that you still have in your possession. Eventually you will have your entire body of work laid out in a chronological trail.
What I have been doing since 2010 is publishing an annual catalog of my production. After I document and inventory all of my works (which I usually do every 2-4 weeks) I then add the images and details as a page in another word document that is primarily all images of my artworks. After the first of the following year I start a new catalog and then publish the previous year’s catalog once I am sure it is complete.
All of this is a lot of time and effort. There is no question about that. But, once done, it is finished and you never have to look backwards except to look at your catalog and you have your trail perfectly documented in chronological order. So far, I have not combined my daily journal with my inventory catalog, but you could certainly do that too: one centralized record for everything.
At a certain point you could think of all of this documentation as your main work of art. It is a great thing to help you see your work as a continuous, daily ongoing lifelong project.
One thing to consider, a robust detailed record is the most useful. It is not about what is important or unimportant, it is not about the question; ‘is it any good or not?’. If you did it, that is all that counts and everything you don’t throw in the trashcan should be recorded.
As you go along you will figure out how to keep it simple and manageable and daily.
For more detail read MAPPING THE TRAIL
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