I have received a recent delightful request that I make a few selections of my art work for an upcoming exhibit. This had an unexpected consequence, as it actually plunged me into the dark night of the artist’s soul! The request: I was asked to choose from two short lists of artworks that I display in my online gallery.

This gallery is very large, and spans many years of work. I grouped the images into albums with somewhat loose & overlapping categories. And this organization does NOT match up with the groupings of higher resolution images that I store locally. Then there are the original artworks, which are not at all organized.

Do I have a data base of my artworks? Do I carefully track which pieces have sold, or been gifted away? Of course not! Instead I have incomplete “note” files here and there on my computer. And my faulty memory!

So what caused me to enter this place or mood that am calling the dark night of the *artist’s* soul? First the painful task of locating the works of interest, matching up the images & titles to identify and locate the original artworks! Second the sheer number of unwanted and forgotten artworks in my studio! So much work to be sold, gifted, retained or destroyed.

I found them all, but not without being too exhausted to finish the communication for the exhibit. One drawing was in one of four forgotten folios of drawings & prints from the previous decade. Another mixed media work was sold some years ago, a more recent piece has been gifted to a family member. The others are available and hang on the wall in my house. You may see a few of the pieces shown here in a fun exhibit soon, TBD.

Now I need to complete the job. I will document the sizes, any framing or changes to the works, add prices, and share the list of the available works. Tomorrow I must emerge from this dark night of the artist’s soul, and get to work if I want to show a few art works at an upcoming one day event.