 Well hello and welcome to this week's video why I'm pivoting my own art. Yes, in this video it's going to be a little bit more about my personal art journey and less about art business. It definitely is related though, so I'm hoping a few of you fellow artists are going to resonate and even be inspired by the story that I'm going to tell you today. I'm going to take you behind the scenes of my art business right back from the very beginning and explain why I've decided to do this 360 pivot and what impact that's going to have on my art and my business in 2023. Alright, are you ready? We're going back in time. Oh my goodness me, I've had to dredge back in the archives to find some photos and bits and bobs that I can show you to illustrate this video so it's kind of exciting. It's been exciting to make and I really hope you enjoy the end process as much as I've enjoyed filming it. So right back at the very beginning when I was a little, I've always been an artist. I was lucky enough to kind of grow up in my mother's studio. My mother was a water color painter and she had her studio that my dad very kindly built on the side of the house. So everything she did on a large easel I attempted to replicate as a sort of five or six year old in my own space sort of sitting next to her little that I realized that was a pretty good apprenticeship, right? I was pretty lucky. So as you can probably hear, I'm British, I live in Australia now, we'll come to that bit in a bit, but I was always surrounded by the sea so I was very lucky that as a small child we grew up near a beach. I was always being taken to the beach. On holidays I was taken to the east coast and so at very early on I was surrounded by wooden fishing boats, wonky houses as I kind of termed them when I became old enough to paint them in my own style, fishing harbors, desolated beaches, pebbles, all things to do with the sea and I went on as an adult to live right by the sea and we used to sit on the beach like almost every day. So I was very, very inspired by the strange shapes and textures of everything you might think of when you think of classic kind of Cornish coastal towns with little harbours and inlets and boats and beach huts and all of those good things. So I spent a lot of time in Cornwall, in Devon, in Dorset along the Sussex coast where I lived and in Kent and then right up to Suffolk. So the kind of the bottom part of the country, so for all of those Brits watching you'll know those areas very, very well but that's where I really have my earliest influences as an artist. So naturally I built a career of semi-abstract, acrylic on canvas, sea, boat and harbour themed paintings and they sold. They sold really well. In fact sometimes I felt like I couldn't paint enough of them. I had certain colourways that I used. They were recognisable but not literal. I had vibrant colours and I developed my own artist thing if you like, a certain way, a certain look and it definitely had changed over the years but the change wasn't huge, right? The change was just one that naturally you go through as artists. There was different colourways, sometimes more texture, less texture but at the end of the day my style was quite obvious and it stood out. So here on screen now are some of my best sellers. As you can see, lots of blues, blues and oranges, strong, vibrant colours, some quite strong shapes, some quite simple shapes, lots of boats, lots of harbours, lots of beach huts and huts. Everything that really typifies that British coastline so where there was infrastructure, so houses, huts and harbour walls, that's where I was. So really didn't really think about the coastline in terms of cliffs and hills and anything that's more nature. It was very much to do with buildings and boats and structures and you'll see that at one point I went on and changed my colourways into more muted browns and pinks as well. So I went on to build my successful business through showing and selling my art in various ways through galleries, solo shows, art fairs, open studios and then eventually via my agent. And I did all of this while bringing up my two daughters on my own. So because of this slightly crazy lifestyle I was leading, I ended up completely burning out. And my journey then took me on a slightly different route. I ended up going what I now would term perhaps sideways, but it felt much going forward at the time and it felt a relief to have a change. I wasn't on the treadmill of having to sort of churn out paintings for deadlines. I went into business coaching and business and entrepreneurship and I'm incredibly grateful that I had that chapter of my life and it's still alive and well now. Everything I'm teaching, I helped people in the startup phase. I did all sorts of things around that business coaching and female entrepreneurship. Then came the crazy time where I left the UK and I spent a couple of years travelling, exploring, working off my laptop and really kind of having a bit of a personal development journey. You know my daughters had grown up, they'd left home, they no longer sort of needed their mum in the same way. So I went off and had my own journey. And I remember thinking to myself, hmm, if I ever took up painting again, I know exactly how I'd start the business, it would be a much more efficient way of doing things. So I really had that learning and that seed had already been sown as I was travelling around and I stayed for a while in Thailand. And I remember thinking, if I ever did that, I kind of know how I would start it. And there was always that kind of little bit of sadness at the back there that I wasn't actually being creative. Now, fast forward to 2016. And long story short, I've ended up in Perth, Australia. You want to know that bit, you've got to ask me to make a whole other video. And there was my new opportunity to start my art all over again. So some of you would say I was in the luckiest position ever, right, fresh canvas, literally, I could start again, whatever I wanted. So what did I do? I managed one of my trips back to the UK to bring back some brushes I had some paints and pastels. I remember coming through and putting them in hand luggage, my precious soft pastels saying, don't break these don't do it. And then opening and going, what is this? And I'm going for art for art. Anyway, eventually, we got here. And I had everything. And so then comes the question of what to paint right after 10 plus years, when you had a career that was defined by painting something over here, you're now the other side of the world. And you would think that I looked outside me and when I know I'll do that. But of course, I didn't I stayed in the track, I stayed with what was familiar, what had lit me up all my life, what I knew what felt safe, what felt kind of doable. And I started to play around with the boats and harbours and all of the things I'd painted before. But I'm pretty sure by now you can spot the big problem, right? The big problem is, I don't have those things at my fingertips. I can't just drive down the road and grab an angle on a boat or get some some sense of light or a color or atmosphere. I'm now reliant on photographs and photographs were really long time ago. But not only that, I'm living in a country with a totally different climate, different colors, different light, all of it. And so what happened is that through some time of trial and error, I ended up painting really bright colored vibrant images of Cornwall and Devon and the UK. So I felt divided, right? Here I was as a Brit, loving those still things, still loving them going back for holiday, getting reconnected, re in love with the old wooden fishing boats coming back saying that this is it. This is it. I've got it. I've got up to date photos. I'm feeling it. I feel alive. And I come back in a studio in Perth, Australia. And somehow it wasn't the same. It didn't feel quite right. And over time, it became harder and harder and harder up to this last year post COVID where I went back for my first trip in nearly three years. And I thought again, it was to reignite and re exciting. I went around some of my favorite places and I sat on the beaches and absorb the color. And I thought my God, this is it. I've got the color palette. I've got it all worked out. I know exactly what I'm going to do when I go back. And now I had a really clear choice. Choice A, build an online business, paint the stuff you love from the UK, you know, sell prints and products and market it to the British audience. All right, that works. That totally works. There's nothing wrong with that whilst living in Australia. And I thought that's totally okay. I can absolutely do that. Or I do what I've chosen to do, which is to do that total 360 pivot that I'm coming to in a minute. I read an exercise that I teach my art business Academy members. And that is how to find your thing. Somehow we can't ever find a better word than thing. I don't want to say style because I feel that's too fixed. But whatever you want to call it, find your style, find your thing. I went took myself really back through that exercise as if I was doing it for the very first time, I put down everything I knew, I completely shut it out. And I realized to my delight, I suppose you could say that actually ever since I got here, I've been photographing the trees, the rocks obsessively, one might say, you should see how many photos of rocks in the bush that I have, rocks by the water, right? And every time I tried to take a photo of some of the old, old wooden sort of hats and structures here, I'd come back to the studio and they just didn't come alive. It just didn't work out. So when I really realized that actually I really loved what was around the trees, the bush, exactly where I lived, everything that I saw on a day to day basis, I walked through it, I photographed it. And all I needed to do was give myself permission to paint it. So now the joy is back in my work. And my reference point is just outside the window. If I need to remind myself about something that I'm doing, I just have to walk out into nature. It's right around me. So there is my choice B. My choice B is that I choose to virtually start again. And that's pretty much from a business perspective, what I'm having to do, right? I'm completely changing what I'm painting. I'm living the other side of the world and owning it and loving it. I can feel a few people going round of applause. And, you know, I know how to build a business any which way. I've taught you this, I'm teaching you this. I could absolutely have gone with choice A. I could absolutely have developed a whole British collection and put them onto prints and products and chip them over there or sold them over there, marketed and sold them over there. Absolutely no reason. But at the end of the day, you have to do the thing that really, really, really lights you up. And so I took that step back. I did lots of walks in that nature, really reveling the fact that I could take pictures of things. I knew that I could go back to the studio and draw and paint them. And now I'm working on a new collection. I'm not quite ready to show it to the world yet, but it will be coming very, very soon, I promise you. So I have a whole new business model. And effectively, like I said, I'm starting again because it's a different audience. It's a different product, essentially. And so what I'm going to do in 2023 is I'm going to share that journey. So if you're interested in following the journey, I'm going to pretend like I'm a new business in order to document exactly what I'm doing. And I'll do that on an ongoing basis, as well as delivering my regular art business content, of course. So there'll be a separate little playlist where you can follow my journey doing that. Now, in the next video, I'm going to share exactly what, from a business perspective, how I'm going to redesign and restart the business and what I'm going to be doing is completely different. I'm actually very, very excited. So I 360 my art. And now I'm going to 360 exactly how I planned a market and sell it. And I think a few of you are going to be quite interested in what I'm doing because it's definitely something that I have taught in the videos, but it's not what I teach predominantly. And it's not what a lot of you are probably doing right now either. So it's going to be an exciting year 2023. If you love and want to watch my journey and follow what I'm doing, then make sure that you are subscribed and grab yourself a place on my email list because for sure I'll be sharing more stuff on that as well as I go forwards. So I'm just going to leave you with a few more pictures from my previous art journey from the UK, just to look at really quickly my studio that I had built in the garden in a very small garden and a very small block that I was living on. I had a purpose built studio says a few shots of that for you to look at and a few other pictures from some shows and things that I've managed to salvage off my computer. Most pictures, I have no idea where they are. So enjoy that and I say don't forget to subscribe and I will see you on the next video. Bye bye.