This morning, my reading eye fell upon this recent blog post from Gwenn Seemel on a topic near and dear to my heart: “What artists should blog about”
Gwenn does a great job giving ideas on what you the blogger might pursue if you’re stumped one day while looking at the “blank screen”. In a way, I am taking her #4 advice:
4) Along the same lines, steal ideas from other artists’ blogs.
The easiest answer to the question of what artists should blog about is found daily on your peers’ platforms.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Having been blogging for many years, I’ve had my ups and downs. The worst down was in a period when my whole life wasn’t saying too much either. I felt bad about my quietness at the time but I was confident it would pass and it eventually did. Last year I set a goal to over-achieve in the blog post total and among other things, it really made me ponder blogging in general and my blog in specific.
Like many things, I find that one’s blog writing has to be written for your own sake, with a small glance to the audience. I don’t rant here about personal or work things or air dirty laundry. That’s outside my purpose of having a blog. Sometimes all you find here is something interesting I saw or a link that gave me something to think about. Sometimes it’s my own photography or own work or talking about the process I’m in while working. Whatever it is, it’s an ongoing conversation. I realize as I write this that it’s all the sorts of things you might discover in a flow of conversation over time:
“whatcha doing Mary Beth?”
“Not much, but I was just looking out the window and noticing how the tree tops seem to move in a kind of oval way against the sky when it’s really windy. And it’s mud season and I almost lost a Birkie in my front yard.”
“Interesting.”
OK, I hope someone somewhere thinks it’s interesting but even if there’s no comment back like that, the bottom line is that it has to be interesting enough to me to put it down in words for the day. I don’t post all of the links and videos I find interesting here, in part because I don’t want those to take over my own content. Plus, these days, there are other outlets aka Social Media that let me share those gems with my nearest and dearest.
Long way around to be saying that I hope other people with blogs will read Gwenn’s advice and ponder what they hope their blogs to be and then do that, whatever “that” is. If you’re only posting a picture of your latest work, just add it to your gallery and create the appropriate web page for it. If you’re not going to actually talk about it (or something), don’t be telling me you’ve a new blog entry about it. I’d like to know more about you and your work but that’s up to you to write and tell me.
