I've spent today and yesterday rearranging the galleries on my website; it's the start of a year, so a good time to do this. Historically, my website had a page-per-year for each creative endeavour: a page for paintings for the year, a page for poems for the year. People complained that they couldn't find certain paintings, so I've gradually grouped them into 'periods', though this started originally by genre or something similar. Poems always remained per-year, but the number of shortcuts and the size of the menus grew and grew...
But I realised that I had more zeal to create when I had a nice blank year to fill, and it felt nice, as well as neat, to look back at each year and see (hopefully) progress, or at least memories. Gradually my website if more of a tool for me, a personal museum, rather than an advertising space - though one could argue than a museum is a sort of advertising space for art... but still. The website is more a catalogue than a game. Even in a museum, it's hard to find the work you want.
So, I've spend the days rearranging the paintings by year again. This normally takes an age. I have, to date, 1339 visual artworks filed, so looking at each one to work out the date has the potential to take months. I now have two master files for these; one diary index (as detailed in my book, How To Organise Your Computer Files - you've read it, of course?) and one simpler list of one artwork per line. The latter is much easier for finding the year, so I've spent today typing a year for each artwork.
I've used the year of completion (obviously) not the year I started a painting, but a couple still have ambiguities... the Starcrossed Escape was repainted a little in 2021, but painted originally in 2012. I can't list both, so chose 2021, and the same for Love Is Dead. I've also included many more works that are catalogued; including studies and early painting which were, for me, not up to scratch and which I threw away. Perhaps it seems odd that I'd catalogue and photograph a work, then throw it away, but space is limited, and it would be even more foolish to throw a work away without recoridng it! Then it would be totally useless - the aim is, after all, to learn from mistakes, not toss things away like a wailing baby.
There are one or two paintings which are sexually explicit, however abstracted. I'll keep painting them if my unconscious requests it, I won't censor my ideas, but I've excluded those from public eyes to keep everything reasonably family friendly, partly because search engines will increasingly flag and block such things, even the finest of art.
So now, the painting galleries are grouped by year once more, and the poems/songs too are divided in decades, so I should now have room for the next 100 years of art. I may do the same for music and will work on this tomorrow.
2020 remains a year without paintings. If I'd had this format on the website then I'd probably have painted something to stop the page from being blank - thus the power of this format is revealed.
