Who I am. What I’m doing.

Art Every Day Month (AEDM) was started by artist Leah Piken Kolidas seven years ago. The concept is simple: Create or experience art every day for the month of November. Why November? Another month-long creative project, this one for writers, National Novel Writing Month (NANOWRIMO), runs during November and challenges participants to write a complete novel in a month. Leah hoped to achieve something similar for art.

Art is on my mind 24/7. Writing an arts and culture blog, BakoArtistConnect, keeps me busy: hunting down events, researching local artists, photographing the action at various openings, films, festivals, etc. and making new contacts in the local art scene is a constant, daily routine. Thinking about art. Promoting art. Encouraging artists. Dreaming up new ideas to inspire the arts in my little corner of the world. It is time-consuming, energy-draining, poverty-making… and I love it.

Aside from the blog, I am also the mother of an artist, a full-time employee of the County of Kern and a part-time Bakersfield College student. My 16-year-old son is a talented, imaginative whirlwind of creativity himself: he writes, he draws comics, he creates videos and he self-teaches himself drums, guitar, bass and keyboard—all while using a room at his grandparents house as a make-shift studio to record his music and post his creations to the internet. He keeps me entertained (and educated!). As an employee, I put in a 40-hour week at my day job—working for the County Recorder. Not as much fun as you would think, haha, but certainly interesting. My student life consists of night and on-line general education courses as well as a concentration of art and journalism classes on campus. Currently, my multi-media class assignment of creating and maintaining a blog is keeping me quite occupied. (See previous paragraph.)

However, though art is so much a part of my life, I realize that less and less time is devoted to my own creative process. Although I take hundreds of photos a month, they are not of the sort that I might someday frame or sell at a gallery. Although I write frequently, the words are not of the variety that might one day sit, beloved, on a shelf, or that might cause the stirring of passionate emotion from a reader’s soul. Art Every Day Month reminds me of the need to find time to birth my “children”, those pieces that are growing in my
he(art) waiting anxiously to be born—to see the world and let the world see them. Thus begins Words and Pictures by LissaFudge—a place for my creativity to find a home. Also, I will use this space to post musings on the things that inspire me, locales in Bakersfield which are particularly refreshing, and links to others in the art world of interest or who propel me to greater heights as an artist. Feel free to drop by often!