Happy New Year everyone!
My two main NY goals last year were to buy a house and get rid of some stupid dumb Covid kilos.
Happy to say, we finally, finally, finally managed to buy a house, and moved in the nick of time, on December 22 2022.
Our last rental was 86m^2 and 1/3 of that was taken up by a staircase because it was a three storey house. It was supposed to be a temporary rental for 6 months or so after a previous purchase had fallen through and we looked for something else. Then Covid happened, and a bunch of job bullshit, then suddenly we’d been living in a tiny house with no storage and almost no room to move for three years. The house was in an identikit estate far enough away from town that we had to drive or take the bus to do anything. The new house is 140m^2 or so over two floors, with a garage that I have plans to convert into a printmaking studio. Even with a whole bunch of stuff still taking up space in boxes, we have so much more room to move than the last house, and are slowly getting out of the habit of crunching up our bodies to fit through spaces. I chose the town we’re in my looking at the Irish Rail map and picking the best place for connectivity, so we’re living in a small town that’s a connection hub for rail to Dublin, Cork, Galway and Limerick. Everything is walkable, including a gym with a pool, and last week they had a birthday sale on memberships, so I’ve started walking to the gym again and doing actual real exercise in a space that’s bigger than the 50x200cm space between the end of our bed and a wardrobe.
At the last place Toshiro had a tiny room that had to become his office, and I had a slightly bigger room that was printmaking studio/music room/video production room/spare bedroom. Now Toshiro has a huge office because he’s permanently remote working, and I have a room that’s around about the same size as my previous one, but it only needs to be an indoor art/video studio AND it has a good quality built in wardrobe that’s perfect for storing all my materials. We have another room that we’re sharing as a music room / spare bedroom (thank you, IKEA Friheten), and I have my outdoor garage to upgrade for more studio space.
First job of 2023 (after we finally finish unpacking) is to repaint my plan drawers, which are the base of my desk, then I’ll repaint the studio room. We plan to do an energy upgrade to the house (new windows, new doors, heat pump, more insulation, hopefully solar) using the government grant program here, but that will take some time because there’s a pretty long waiting list. After I get the desk done, I need to paint and assemble a telecaster for my niece, which will be a late Christmas present.
Another thing that happened last year that I wasn’t expecting was that the Irish government started a trial where they selected 2000 artists at random to receive a basic income for three years, and, dear reader, I was selected. It’s made a huge difference already with taking some of the financial pressure off moving, and it means I don’t have to look for another job here if I don’t want to. There’s no restrictions with the grant; we can spend the money however we like without the pressure of needing to hit targets or make specific work, and it’s such a huge relief. I can use the money to get my studio space set up how I want it. I also have an album I want to finish this year (after putting it on hold last year), and having that money means I can probably justify sending it to a professional for mastering instead of doing it myself.
The reason that I put the album on hold last year is that I had a successful proposal for showing artwork and speaking at a printmaking conference in September, so most of the year before moving was spent making as much work as possible to show and talk about, I filmed all the production and the video footage has been sitting on a hard drive since, ready to be edited into videos for YouTube. Once I’m set up again and have a few videos edited, I want to keep going with the zine / artist book project that I was working on for that project as well. Here’s some of the work I printed for that.
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Those are relief printed from hand cut cardboard letters and I was super happy with how the ghost printing worked out. What you can’t see in the photos is the word “invisible” embossed over the top of the coloured text.
When I was packing up all the artwork from my drawers, I realised I probably need to make a concerted effort to sell a bunch of it this year just to clear out old stuff and have a fresh start, so once the drawers are painted and I’m ready to unpack stuff back into them, I guess I need to make that a goal. Ugh. Not looking forward to doing it, but will love it being done. And it will be good to inject any cash I get into upgrading the garage studio as well. Trying to sell artwork is unfun in the extreme, but it’ll be good to have old work no longer taking up space.
So yeah, 2023:
1. Finish losing Covid kilos
2. Upgrade indoor art studio
3. Set up music room
4. Start planning garage studio
5. Sell some artwork
6. Edit the masses of video footage from my hard drive
7. Paint some guitars
8. Make some new local friends
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