Diary of an artist writer online

Its weeks since I last updated my blog so what’s happened?

Well, I guess it’s been a period of introspection and the realisation that my blog is not focused enough.

Ever since I joined Blipfoto.com – where you put up a daily photo from your life- it has made me realise how unfocused my blog is.

To start with it’s far too general. Secondly I do not put up the personal stuff – left over from my days in journalism – and it’s the personal stuff that often makes a blog “sticky” or the fact one is giving specialised information, which would not be available elsewhere.

I have finished another e-book. Now I got to upload it to Amazon via Kindle – that is another steep learning curve requiring knowledge of HTML so I have started the search for someone to help me.

Meanwhile have another solo exhibition at Scion House, Stirling University Innovation Park but not until February 2013!

Forth Valley Open Studios is now a registered not-for-profit company (Community Interest Company) and we hope this will enable us to attract grants and sponsorship though given today’s economic climate we are not that hopeful.

One spin-off of FVOS is that it has resulted in a flurry of artistic activities in central Scotland and the local council is conducting an in-depth survey of the creative industries in the area. We have already had meetings with the researcher and she tells us one of the reasons people thought nothing was happening in the area is that most of the artists are home-based and do not show up on the official business registers.

She has discovered, what we had already learnt through FVOS, that there is a very lively artist scene here.

It just operates below the traditional business radar.

And we all recognize a need for a central artistic hub to bring together, share and co-ordinate all these activities.

Tomorrow night we have the first pop up networking event in Stirling organised by Joe Hall, a young woman new to the area.

She tells me it is already over-subscribed.

We are delighted.

For those of us who live in central Scotland this area is like a cultural desert for the contemporary art scene, in its widest scene, with little in the way of printmaking, digital, music, performance or film.

OK there are little pockets of activity – MacRobert Arts centre and Changing Room- but no central hub for contemporary artists.

Everything happens in either Glasgow or Edinburgh.

Through Forth Valley Open Studios we created the first ever database of all artists working in the area- and there are over a 100 of us- but most work in the traditional arts and crafts sector.

Hopefully these series of pop-up art events will help create a vibrant artistic community in the central belt of Scotland so that artists no longer feel they have to migrate to Glasgow, Edinburgh, or worse, London on emerging from art college.