What's r u looking Ahead to a New Year, New Ideas, New Goals

Looking Ahead to a New Year, New Ideas, New Goals

With Christmas having come and gone and looking ahead to the coming New Year, I spent a good amount of time yesterday, digging through discs of reference material. I had sort of decided that this 'in between' week between Christmas and the New Year celebration would be a good time to relax, take a break, catch up on housework, clean my work room, restack the frame inventory, and so on and so forth.
Well, I got bored after restacking frames and decided to spend some time looking ahead at what work I need to think about for the first six months of next year. Fiddling through disc after disc of material, I managed to pull out and save a lot of images that sparked my thoughts as I looked over them. You never know what is going to become inspirational for a work till you have spent some time mulling over ideas.
I've talked before about how inspiration seems to hit me, coming at me from all angles and locations. Sometimes an idea starts with a vision in my head, sometimes it starts from being sparked by looking through a series of photos or sketch ideas, sometimes it comes from . . . I just don't know where!
As I begin to make a list of upcoming deadlines for specific 2011 exhibitions, jury competitions and ideas for new gallery works, I am open to any and all things that pop into my head. These initial notions will get refined in the next few weeks as I make more definite plans and work out kinks in sketch form, digging through reference material looking for images that suit or going out into the field to seek out images and locations that only exist in my head at the moment.
I will spend a bit more time this morning, looking at those images that I saved out yesterday to see if the initial spark is still there and if so, how I might consider them for specific compositional ideas. Once that has happened, I will look to see how I can plug in those settled upon ideas into my list of events/exhibitions/competitions for the first half of next year. This way, I will have a pretty good idea of what I need to do as far as laying out my work schedule for the next few months.
And thus, the process begins! The process of deciding what to do, when to do it and how to do it. This all may sound a bit too structured and lacking in spontaneity for an artist and creative soul, but it works for me! Being the rather undisciplined person that I have always been, I tend to need direction, goals to aim for and a written down sequence to follow to get me to those goals.
So as the New Year and its coincident new goals unfold before me, I will spend these next few days refining and coalescing ideas, formulating compositions and putting together a work schedule that, I hope, I can stick to!