Sunday, Apr. 03, 2016 - 12:36 p.m.

I am confused about the direction of my art again. Last time I was this confused, I came up with the seed of the paper jewelry. So I'm going to write about it here as I do when I have these problems. Now you can skip it if you prefer. You have been warned.

1. Jewelry has so much competition at art shows (and in general), I didn't really want to do that medium any more. But I am good at it and my best-developed aesthetic is in that medium.

2. And the one process I can truly claim as my own, my resin techniques. They are hard to scale up to larger objects.

3. I would like to find the perfect combination of the following: calligraphy, linocut, my resin techniques, my dyed paper techniques, handmade paper. And get into shows with that and use the calligraphy as an in to offer the rocks for sale. Because I think they will do well in the right context and be a real workhorse product for me.

4. Or find something else that the rocks would be a good fit with. I like the rocks but they aren't enough on their own to be my entire body of work.

5. I thought about making abstract paper mache shapes and doing calligraphy on them. But that seems weird. And not in a good way.

6. I am also stuck between fun and bright and whimsical and more abstract and earthy. Probably fun will sell better, but earthy matches the abstract work better.

7. If something is fun, bright, AND paper mache, people will think of their 10 year old's art class and I won't be able to sell anything.

8. The labor intense nature of the resin work was part of why I stopped doing the jewelry in the first place. Perhaps it should be off the table. But it is a strong point of mine. Maybe my strongest point. It keeps that "I saw that on Pinterest" folks at bay and is something that I could teach, if I wanted to teach. 9. And then I think, mosaics! My paper mosaics are pretty cool too. Mosaic calligraphy? That would be awesome. And exhaustingly time consuming. 10. And do you remember those book necklaces? Those had potential. 11. No one said it would be easy, even with talent and creativity. It's hard to be this awesome.

�