Sometimes it all comes together...

Like many artists my life is all about juggling in order to find time in the studio. Often it can be very difficult and seem like a constant uphill battle...but then something happens which makes it all (almost) seem worthwhile. My own time is divided between my day job (helping run a pub) which brings an income of sorts, my career which is my art work and also 'studio-sweepings' which covers playing around with processes, trying out things, occasional workshops/ craft fairs etc. and generally all the stuff which has no direct relationship to my art work but can often feed into it in unexpected ways . In my own work I have recently been thinking of extremes of scale. Working on very large raster digital drawings has started a whole thought process about vector images where the output can range from tiny to huge with no loss of detail which led me to consider very small images such as postage stamps (- and this consideration is probably directly linked to the fact that I am also thinking about envelopes/ stamps in relation to the current Mail Art Open  I am organising at the pub). I decided that I should make a submission for the show and ordered a mixed bag of stamps so that I could decorate my envelope and use the remainder for cards/ badges - but also thinking the visual stimuli of a pile of postage stamps would be useful in relation to my own work - it's one of those thought processes which I'm sure will lead somewhere even if I don't yet know where or when. They arrived this morning and on top was the above stamp - a Kathe Kollwitz drawing. I have always loved Kathe Kollwitz's drawings and prints and so it was such a buzz. A bit of on-line research gave me an image of the set it was a part of but I haven't yet found any other information. This stamp will NOT be used for the Mail Art submission or turned into a badge or card- I'm going to frame it and hang it somewhere where I can see it every day so that the next time I'm feeling really fed up about the intrusions which stop me from being in my studio (likely to be later today!) I can look at it and think that sometimes it can be a positive thing!