Feeling uninspired? Have you lost your work momentum? No fears…it happens to everyone! Here are my best strategies for jumping back into the flow and reconnecting with work after an absence.

Leave Off In A Good Spot

My favorite strategy for painless re-entry after an absence is to deliberately leave myself an easy place to start up again. If you can stop work in the middle of a task, it’s much easier to pick right up and find your groove when you return. Having a piece of artwork that I’ve already begun means I can grab my tools and just jump in exactly where I left off during my next work session.

Ease In

I have a lot of complicated, involved pieces of art I need to start for my solo show, but to jump into them immediately would be a recipe for disaster for me. Talk about overwhelming! If I haven’t managed to leave off in a good spot, per the tip above, I find it best to ease in with simple projects that can quickly get done. For me, those might be a series of blog posts, quick sketchbook drawings or even a small chore like adding framing hardware to the backs of completed works.

Have A Plan

I often have a gigantic jumble of thoughts banging around my head, and if I don’t get them down into some sort of to-do list or plan, I’ll go crazy. When I’m away from my studio, I find it helpful to keep a running list of upcoming projects broken down into small steps. If I feel overwhelmed when I return to work, I need only consult my to-do list to find a tiny task I can jump on and start.

Keep A List Of Small, Quick Projects

Sometimes, I cannot make it to my work studio – sick daughter, flat tire and other life mishaps can get in the way. Keeping a list of small, easily-accomplished projects that can be done quickly during this time (such as filing paperwork, revising shop listings, or updating my mailing list) can help keep my work momentum going. I have to admit, I need to take my own advice on this one – I had a million of these tasks running around my head during my daughter’s school vacation this summer, and I wasn’t quite organized enough to jump on any of them. Next time, however, I’ll be ready. I am now keeping a list of “small tasks” with work projects that I can do in two hours or less for next time I find myself in a similar situation.

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Curious to see what 1,000 degrees of heat can do to a piece of wood? Check out my artwork gallery!

And if you’d like more excellent strategies to encourage your everyday creativity and productivity or just want a sneak peek into my art making process, sign up for my newsletter. Made with love and always 100% spam-free!

(A sneak peek into my tiny studio right now! The work for my show is piling up….)

The post Get Your Work Mojo Back! How To Return to a Project After an Absence appeared first on Amy Ventura.

I managed to take a short break from studio work today (something I rarely do) and I went for a walk to collect texture photographs for some upcoming pieces I’ll be starting soon. The slideshow below has some of the images I found.

I love that even in the urban neighborhood where my studio is located, there is nature if I look for it. These kinds of textures and patterns stick in my head and roll around until I find myself pulling them into a piece of artwork down the road, often subconsciously.

If you look at the details close enough for a long time, they start to look kind of trippy! I’d love to know which strange natural objects Roland Topor stared at too closely when he designed La Planète Sauvage? Or maybe he just focused too long on something completely banal, like a house fern….

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I have this tendency when I’m walking down a crowded street in Chicago, overloaded by the cacophony of angry car horns and screeching el train brakes, to mentally escape. While I wish I were more “be in the moment and meditate to the noise,” the reality is that I more often tend toward “zone out and retreat to somewhere else in my mind.” Usually, somewhere filled with a weird, fantastical nature scene that is just far enough away from reality to cushion my brain from the craziness around me.

I love dreamscape imagery for that reason. And I especially love images of landscapes that almost look real, but aren’t. Images that reference nature, but morph it into a strange and dreamy version of itself.

Have you seen the 1973 French cartoon, La Planète Sauvage (Fantastic Planet)? It has long been my favorite for doing just that—twisting the patterns and colors of nature we know into a strange and mysterious backdrop to create an alien planet.

I watched that movie several times before I started working on my show for Firecat, thinking about how I’d like to create just such a dreamy atmosphere for the world I’m building in my artwork. A sense that what the viewer is seeing is something she’s almost seen before. Almost.

I’ve been working on the piece above all week for my show; it’s one of the larger works I’ve done, at 18″ sq. I love that it looks like seed pods…almost. Leaves…almost. Rocks and pebbles and cracks in stone…almost. Something I’ve seen before on a walk in the woods or along the ocean.

Almost.

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Do you have a creative block? Are you stuck on a project and can’t seem to move forward? Give my flowchart a try to see if you can move yourself along.

The post Creative Block? Unstick Yourself With Six Easy Questions appeared first on Amy Ventura.

Burning wood for one of the new pieces I’m making for my Firecat show:

The post 1,000 Degrees of Hell Fire! appeared first on Amy Ventura.

When I was a kid, I was absolutely certain that I could solve mysteries. Too many hours spent reading Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown convinced me that there were always tidy answers to every enigma, and that if I put in enough time, willpower and shoestring-detective gumption, I’d be able to unearth them.

In no particular order, I became obsessed with (and sure I could solve):

• the lost colony of Roanoke
• the disappearance of Helen Candy Brach, heiress to the Brach Candy fortune
• finding Amelia Earhart
• the kidnapped Lindbergh baby
• the secret codes in a board game advertisement just before the attack on Pearl Harbor (scroll down to “The Creepy Coincidence of the Deadly Double”)

And pretty much anything on the pages of those Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown books. (Remember this “spooky” video? It played for years!)

I’m older now, but no less obsessed when I encounter a spooky unknown. Of particular fascination to me are the everyday artifacts and clues left behind by the disappeared.  Sometimes, they’re the detritus of a life interrupted—combs left on dressers after a morning grooming, a pile of bills meant to be paid that evening. But sometimes, these objects are more ominious—a scrawled note describing a premonition or a hastily-scribbled attempt to leave a clue before heading into an unknown fate.

My show at Firecat Projects in Chicago this December will be comprised of dreams, hallucinations, premonitions and rituals, a mystery of people long disappeared and the things they left behind. The images above and below are preview sketches of the “premonition” pieces I’m burning now…dreamy harbingers of dark times to come. Stay tuned for more posts, previews and updates as I create this body of work.

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