Wow!

Complete Failure. I didn’t start thinking of a project for last week until Friday night, didn’t start working on it until Saturday, and didn’t finish it until moment ago, on Monday night!

I am not going to try and say anything to redeem myself this time, I just didn’t put the time and/or effort into Fifty-Two Weeks this year.¹

Rather than not completing a project and lose any momentum that I may have built up, I decided to select one of the easier projects from my list.

So for last week I decided to take a few hours to write a letter so someone that I really respect and admire. I plan on mailing the letter to them via good ole’ snail mail.

So here it goes.

Amy.

I don’t really know where I should start with this letter. I guess I could start with a “Hello!” or “How Have You Been?” but beyond that there is so much more I want to say.

I hope that life is treating you well and that you are following your dreams and passions. I have no doubt that you are following every one of them and that they are taking you towards great destinations, for as long as I have known, you were always the type to go after what you wanted and if it didn’t exist you would make it so it did exist in the end.

This is the reason I am writing you today.

Recently (over the past 1-2 years) I have been on a personal quest (if you want to call it that) to reclaim my creativity, to find where I lost it along the way and to get back into a creative state that was once very familiar to myself.

Personally I feel that I have made more progress in the past 6 months as a person and as an artist than I have in all previous years. I’ve been trying more and more to step outside my comfort zone and try new things that push my limits and challenge my abilities as an all around person. Doing so has helped me in so many ways that if I were to start listing them I would get lost and off the point of this letter.

I wanted to write to you, Amy, to let you know that you have had a great impact and influence on my work, my creativity and me in general. You might think that sounds a little odd considering we haven’t spoken in sometime, since we worked together, but it is true.

I still remember the conversations we use to have while working together, when we would talk about the projects you were working on and the projects that I should have been working on. As I said on those nights when we would talk at work rather than actually work, I had stopped drawing, painting and doing anything creative in general, but after more and more of our conversations I started to realized that not doing anything creative was doing far more harm than good. I remember very clearly that one of those nights, on returning home from work, I sat down and painted and then shipped part of it off to you. Although it was something very simplistic, it for me pointed in the right direction.

Every time I start a new project or finish one that I never though I would, I always have a thought of you in the back of my mind. The way that you talked about work artwork and how you felt when you were completing it always amazed me, and because of this I always wanted to complete more art myself.

I remember going to the BealART show a couple of years just to see your work. I was blown away when I found out that you just weren’t limiting yourself to one medium but branched out into a variety of them. I think this is important as it helps an individual to gain a better (and different) perspective on their own artwork as well as that of others’.

Overall the point of this letter is to let you know that you inspired me a few years ago to find the artist within me, who at the time I lost, and you inspired me to expose myself to a wide variety of things that are outside of my comfort zone. I very much admired the way you went about completing your pieces of art and the passion you had for them and I always hoped that I may have the same passion one day.

More than anything I wanted to say Thank You for inspiring me.

I hope all of the best for you, now and in your future endeavors.

Cheers,

Kevin

1. Note: In the coming weeks I will need to complete projects that are not as involved or time demanding. When I started Fifty-Two Weeks it didn’t occur to me that I could be teaching for a month long block in March/April, as such I am going to have little extra time over the coming weeks, so rather than fail again I want to make sure that at least for the coming week’s my goals are achievable for the amount of time I have. Starting in May I hope to complete some more involved and community focused projects. [↩]