Planning for 2025

We’re two weeks into the new year, but I feel like I’m still in first gear: there has been no “hitting the ground running” — or any other similar corporate-speak — here. In addition to the necessity of restarting after Christmas and New Year, it's also the month of my birthday which seems to interrupt the flow of the month.

I am slowly starting to plan out the year with regards to my artwork, though:

Finish off my Acid Renaissance series and publish it as a book

I’m fairly certain that finishing my Acid Renaissance series this year is viable, and if so then I should also be able to also prepare it for publication as my third book of artwork by the end of the year.

It will probably be an A4 sized paperback, similar to my England’s Dark Dreaming book, but final decisions won’t be made until closer to the end of the year.

Build up a list of local life-models, and do regular life-drawing

Moving to Hastings has meant that I don’t know any of the local life models. Compared to Brighton & Hove it’s smaller and doesn’t have any large university, so the number of prospective models is much lower.

I still hope to work with some of the models that I worked with in Brighton since I can cover reasonable travel expenses, but it gets a little more costly for me to pay the return train fare from Brighton/Worthing/London to Hastings on top of the £20 per hour life-modelling fee I pay (typically for a three hour session), and the person life-modelling also has to sit through a 60–90 minute train journey before and after the life-drawing session.

So, while I’m happy working with non-local models (as always, contact me if you’re interested!) I’d certainly like to build up a list of Hastings people who are happy to come and model for me, as this would enable me to avoid paying travel expenses on top of the model’s fee - let me know if you’re based in Hastings or St Leonards and are interested!

Once I have a larger pool of life models then I want to set up regular life-drawings sessions twice a month to solidify this as part of my artistic practice.

Sell a bit more artwork

Truth be told, my artwork sales have not reached the heights of 2018/2019 for a few years. The reasons for this are mainly because of the cost of living crisis that has left most of my regular customers significantly worse-off financially and only able to afford strict necessities (and sometimes not even them). Just about every other artist I’ve spoken to has said the same.

I hope that there will be some easing of this, but personally I’m not seeing any sign of it, and no sign of any actual changes from the new Labour government that might make any difference, just endless promises of jam tomorrow (now with added unwanted AI). So I don’t know how I’m going to achieve this part of the plan, if at all.

Continue to blog here regularly

Over 2024 I managed to post here on The Artist’s Notebook blog about 3–4 times a month on average, which feels to me like the right rhythm - it’s enough to help me think through new ideas by writing about them, while not making me feel like I should post something when I don’t actually have anything to say. So I’m going to try to continue with that sort of post frequency.

With every new announcement from the social networks I become more convinced in the necessity to own my blog and not be beholden to a social media platform. Watching Twitter start its Nazi death dive last year now seems like just a foreshadowing to a similar descent on Meta’s suite of platforms.

I have a Facebook account, but haven’t posted any updates there for years. I tried out Threads, but of the new social platforms I find it to be the worst, and far less interesting than Bluesky or Mastodon. Instagram, however, has been useful for sales, but if it’s going to be overrun by racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia then it will need to be abandoned.

Whatever happens to the social media platforms, I have a blog and an RSS Feed Reader to keep up to date with what other people are saying (so long as they have their own blog).