The Highs and Lows of 2023

When life gives you lemons, hey, you don't get scurvy!

Yeah, I know, year-end posts are supposed to celebrate the highlights, but first I need to talk about the lows. “Challenging” is the mildest word I can come up with for my career in 2023. Challenges abounded. Some of them really hurt.  

The Neural Connections scarf debuted in 2023, based on one of my ink paintings

In general, these were failures of connection: My work did not connect with jurors. I didn’t communicate well with my collaborators. My online community fell apart. Let’s roll the tape!

• A joint exhibition that I expected to be an artistic collaboration ended up being essentially side-by-side solo shows. Then I was in a group show nobody heard about and another in a government building so secure, I have no idea if anyone saw it at all.

• I was not chosen for an award that would have given me a huge, beautiful, free studio for a year.

• I was rejected by two big art festivals that have previously been very successful for me.

• Of the festivals that I did get into, two were canceled due to bad weather and another was cut from two days to one.

• I got terrible advice from a career consultant who had never made or sold art.

• I quit Twitter, for obvious reasons, at the end of 2022, leaving behind 12,000 followers built up over 10 years and a large, supportive SciArt community, not to mention the top source of clicks to my online shop.

I didn’t just stew about this stuff all year. I mean, sure, I stewed about it quite a bit, as is my nature. All that rejection and failure took a major toll on my confidence.  

But I also persevered, reflected, and turned some of 2023’s lemons into lemonade.

So the gallery show didn’t quite turn out as I envisioned, but hey! I had a gallery show, my first in years, and people came to see it. I made fifteen new paintings for it, incorporating a new (to me) field of science (vasculature, of humans and plants) and a new, earthier palette. And I sold some of them.

Three watercolors from my Vessels series, inspired by phloem and xylem

Yes, I took part in fewer festivals than usual this year, but I also returned to the Society for Neuroscience Meeting as an art exhibitor for the first time since the pandemic and sold a lot of brain art. I saw old friends there, made some new ones and encountered many ideas to pursue in my future work.

Neuroscience-inspired ink paintings on yupo, all made in 2023

I took the terrible career advice (Coupons! SEO! Facebook!), contrasted it with some less bad but still unrealistic advice (quit online sales entirely), and arrived at the realization that artists today are basically emulating the ancients. Since we really don’t know what will work, we perform rituals that we hope will persuade the almighty algorithms to bless our endeavors. This idea led me to create another new body of work, the Algorithm series. These pieces resonated with many people and were my best sellers of 2023.

Watercolor paintings from my Algorithm series, 2023

Finally, I did a lot of intentional work to create a community for myself and to support other artists. I joined Netvvrk, a group of mostly mid-career artists helping each other set and meet goals, identify opportunities, and develop our unique voices.

I joined Bluesky and Threads, and I am building new online communities there, with much less of the toxicity that characterized Twitter for the last few years.

I launched this Substack, and people have read, enjoyed, and shared my posts, for which I am grateful.  And I am finding so many wonderful writers and artists to follow here.

Day by day, I am forging new links, making new connections.

And most importantly, I am creating new art.

Bring it on, 2024. Challenge accepted.