reLaunching reFocused

...and why it was dormant for so long

Last week saw the first anniversary of my last reFocused post. I had never intended for this to be an annual newsletter, so why didn’t I write for a whole year? Ironically, the key message of that last post may have had something to do with it. The post was about authenticity and how important that is to me:

One of my personal core values is authenticity. There’s quite a few interpretations out there of what it means to be authentic, so to be clear, I define authenticity as the absence of pretense and deceit. I don’t like pretending to be somebody I’m not, or deceiving people into buying stuff they don’t need. I want to be able to honestly own up to what I do and what I create, as something truly my own.

At my core, I am a private person, and combined with my doubts at the time about my right to call myself an artist, this made sharing my thoughts and motivations with the world feel somehow inauthentic. I felt that in writing about my art and process I was pretending to be someone I wasn’t.

I am over that now. With a more established identity as an artist and the realisation that sharing my work and thinking is very much part of that, I am ready to relaunch this reFocused newsletter. And since I only stopped writing but continued to explore ideas and produce art in the meantime, I have quite a backlog of work and thinking to share...

So, watch this space!