Celebration

By the time this hits the Internet Christmas day will have passed and New Year’s Day is just around the corner. Christmas is the time of giving and forgiving, New Year’s is for starting anew. Many people make resolutions which get broken the day after or the week after or the month after. There are a few brave souls out there with wills of steel that are able to keep resolutions for the full year. I myself can generally go a month if I am determined and make a reasonable resolution.

But for artists what kind of resolutions do we make? Make more art. Create a masterpiece. Read that book on Rembrandt. Work in Watercolor instead of Acrylic. Try new Mediums. And such "trivial" (trivial to people outside the field of art) resolutions seem easy to keep. However they perhaps get broken as well as we fall back into familiar habits of work and thought.

Instead of creating these verbal, mental, or possibly written resolutions for ourselves, why not make them visual. What is a visual resolution? A visual resolution is something more abstract, and yet more definite. It is a reminder of something we promised ourselves. Much like the yarn tied to our finger to help us remember to get milk while we are in town, a visual resolution reminds us to smile at everyone we meet before we walk out the door. It reminds us to take our medication faithfully, brush our teeth regularly, or even wipe our shoes on the mat before we go further into the house.

A visual resolution of this seemingly insignificant magnitude need not be a masterpiece, just a 5 to 10 minute exploration put in a frame and hung in the appropriate place. The word "Smile" done as a charcoal rubbing off of placards or gravestones. A humorous collection of clipart indicating a person brushing their teeth and grinning at the mirror. A visual resolution is both a helpful healthy reminder to do what we set out to do as well as a pleasing little piece of art.

Perhaps however the obvious doesn’t suit you or it doesn’t suit your resolution. Perhaps you wish your reminder to be more personal and less obvious, like loosing weight. Perhaps it is something you wish to do for yourself and don’t want other people to quite pick up on your personal resolution. Then a visual resolution becomes a small piece of abstract artwork that is meaningful to you and placed in a small frame where you see it regularly, like on your night stand or as a bookmark.

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