The task I find the most daunting among those required of me as an artist is the revision of my website. This might well seem an odd admission to make in a blog such as this, but it is true. Of course I can cope with routine minor up-dates, and actually quite enjoy sessions such as this, when I am trying to share something with visitors to the site about what is going on in my life as an artist. This is quite a different matter from the task of making a fairly major revision. Looking through the site today it came to me, however, that I really ought to get a grip, and use the Christmas period to give the site a face-lift.
This does seem to be an opportune period in which to do that kind of job, because I imagine that most people will have better things to do over the Christmas period than think about me. So there might well be several days when I go into “radio silence” in order to concentrate on the gritty business of web-site revision.
The experience that brought me to the realisation that I need to do this work was a brief canter through my galleries this morning, wondering where I might put references to my newest material. It came to me that my interests have shifted quite a bit over the years, and themes I believed were central to my work now no longer strike me as relevant to what I want to communicate about my art. I have to admit also that some of the things in the galleries don’t represent my best work, and also there are still items on display there with I have sold. New themes I am now finding stimulating, but the structure of the galleries doesn’t permit me to give the space I would like to this work.
All of this means, of course, that some hard thinking is required. Possibly more important is the requirement that I will have to overcome my permanent, residual techno-phobia, which is always an inhibiting factor when I have to face up to this kind of task.
It is unlikely that I will be off-air completely, but postings will probably be more intermittent. I hope that by the New Year, however, I will be able to feel that the site does represent well the kind of things that interest and motivate me. There will be a place for history, and a record of my development over the years, of course, but my intention is that readers will be able to gain a more accurate and up-to-date impression of the things that are currently going on in my work as an artist.
I suppose that an important function of this message is to make sure that, having made a public declaration of my intent, I will feel obliged to actually get on and do something about it. I am, you might say, in the process of summoning up the strength and determination to do the deed.