I started drawing late in life.  It wasn’t a gentle easing into creation that spanned my youth, it was swift and absolute and unexpected.  September of 2012 was the first wee hint.

November is when I mark the anniversary, it’s the date of the first picture in my first sketch book – the “First Floral” (blog post on that beauty is coming).  Last November was the 10 year anniversary.  In the first decade I created 686 (documented) pieces of art: 526 pen and ink drawings, 59 oil paintings, and a myriad of other medium including 2 wood block prints.  (Rob, I think you’ve got one of those in your house? … maybe?)

I can tell you which piece I completed just before my marriage was over and which piece I completed just after the Boston Marathon bombing … I know these things because I have been cataloging them.  I know these things because I have finally gathered all of the images together in one place.  I have identified medium and dates, I have backed them up, and I can finally see them all together.  I have lived this cataloging for the last eight months.  This is my story.

For those of you interested in reading about how I did such a thing, please do join us!  I’ll try to keep it as exciting as possible but I really will be talking about imports, data complexity and monthly costs.  There’s only so much I can do.

The first step, for me, was to just gather all the pictures somewhere.  I had images on my google drive, including really high quality print files, of lots of my work … but the bulk of my work was scattered thither and yon.  I spent the first half of 2023 gathering and dating and titling and trying to get them all into some semblance of order.  I initially put them all in a spreadsheet, which worked for capturing dates and medium and such but didn’t give me any way to really VIEW the work as a whole.  Lots of limitations without an interface to work with the data and the images at the same time.  I knew I could build something homegrown and I  knew I didn’t want to.

The search then began.

So, I like planning things … A LOT.  I’m finally learning that it’s possible for me to overplan and actually beat the shit out of a project so thoroughly that no one even wants to do it anymore – and that’s not fun!  Art is fun.  Archiving art should also be a kind of fun.  I use the BestSelf Project Action Pad to manage my work.  The pages aren’t tidy and perfect (as you will see) but the lack of tidiness is how I keep from pounding things to mush.  I can’t take this too seriously or we all suffer.

From what I can see here I looked at about seven different services to store my archive.  I’m not going to go into the details of each one but pricing was a real factor for me.  I’m pretty darned frugal and something about a monthly fee really REALLY causes me pain down deep – and several of these are marketed toward galleries and collectors … the people with the money.  I am not these people.

After a preliminary review I selected CatalogIt to test first.  Holy smokes y’all, I really REALLY enjoy the flexibility of CatalogIt with regards to the data elements they include.  My initial vision of the archive was a way to collect not just what I’ve created but also to make connections to what I was reading at the time, what movies were in my home, what live events were pushing me forward – that was “Vision #2” and in line with the larger retrospective project so this all made sense.

The Import process was pretty touchy but I did get my 50 free entries imported and spent a good amount of time geeking out over the options.  The User Interface isn’t so great BUT there’s also an app so you could easily manage wip photos right from your phone and that’s super exciting.

Reporting isn’t great either but has potential.  Visualization of your work is not simple, meaning, I couldn’t find good easy ways to view my pieces as a collection.  I could get a list together in the collection, but I couldn’t get a  gallery/thumbnail view of them as a whole – finding visual trends wasn’t really possible with the UI in its current state.

This brought me to a crisis of purpose.  What am I really looking for with this, the ability to catalog every possible detail of my life and art or the ability to see the visual trends of my VISUAL art?  I’m sayin’ … it seems obvious what the priority is here.  Also, the cataloging of ALL possibilities feels like the beating of the shit out of a project … let’s just not do quite so much Heather …. k?

So I pivoted … to Artwork Archive.  This feels a bit like the polar opposite of CatalogIt and I love it too.  It is a MUCH simpler tool.  There are less options and less data elements to work with but that can be a kind of blessing for folks like me who are just a little out of pocket with the details.  I am able to capture all of the elements that I think are valuable to me right now, I can visually review my work easily, it’s $25 a month and they were very hands on and helpful when I imported my work.  ALSO, I can export all of my data and images at any time so if I do decide I need to move to a different service later I’ll already have things well organized for the transition.  No app, but maybe 2024?

Anyway, I’m now happy as a pig in shit and I can easily place my work into a collection based on various criteria and then view all of the work in that collection as thumbnails.  So I can see trends, color palettes, texture decisions, and maybe (just maybe) see where I might like to explore next.  FUN.

Artwork Archive also offers lots of portfolio options and the ability to create shareable links to specific collections allowing me to show my work digitally … and that’s a really cool thing.  I have thoughts about how I might want to take advantage of that.

There were a handful of decision points I had to make with regards to how the data was stored, I’ll talk about a few here just to give you an idea of what I mean:

• Naming Conventions for each piece: I decided to name my pieces with the date (e.g. 201210_SweetMargie) I don’t generally know the exact day of the month a piece was finalized, I date lots of my work with the year and the month so that’s what I focus on for tracking.  This allows me to sort by name and I will always have things in chronological order, which is significantly handier than sorting by the actual name of a piece.
• Medium:  I like to have more than one medium tracked as I think “mixed media” just always leaves someone out.  BUT, Artwork Archive wants medium to be the ‘phrase you list on a gallery card’, not a single thing.  So, rather than a list of medium (oil, canvas) which is what I would really like, I settled for Oil on Canvas or Acrylic on Paper, etc.  I do also have Sharpie/Acrylic Paint/India Ink Lampshade, which makes me laugh.  I don’t love this compromise but I do feel like it is ultimately okay.  And maybe calling something mixed media is okay but dammit, I think everything should get listed – I like to know these things.

And it is done.

I have spent ages building and reviewing collections and even using the collection functionality to preview a potential Throwback Coloring Book!!  Old work that I’ve not yet included in a book!

HOW COOL IS THAT!! 

I do feel a sense of satisfaction in having assembled all of these together and a strange awe at having actually made all of these things.  Sometimes I forget.  It’s lovely to be reminded.

And now I am ready to take the next steps and begin the retrospective assembly/writing with gusto!  I have (at least) two more blog posts planned in the next couple of weeks so stay tuned!   

My love to you all!  I hope this summer is treating you with kindness and goodness.  I hope you are thriving.

Always, 

H