Audio Journal in November - Blog Post | November 28th, 2020

I was 21 when I had to write one of those one or two sentence bio’s that sum up who you are as an artist for the first time. I had no idea what to put, in fact, I still find them incredibly difficult to write, but that’s not important. What is important is what I ended up putting ‘Letty McHugh is an artist, writer and illustrator, she’s exactly like Leonardo Da Vinci only not as good.’ This bio was on display on the member’s board in the hallway of the artist studio group I used to be part of for years, and went largely without comment until one day…

Oh no. I’ve played a cruel trick on you, I’m not going to tell the rest of this totally riveting story. If you want to hear the rest you are going to have to listen to my thrilling audio journal entry, at the time of writing there are 20 episodes available on my IGTV, but there will eventually be 30, one for each day in November.

As a special treat I’m embedding one here, to entice you over.

Okay, you’re probably thinking, I’m obviously hooked but also I must know more, why did you embark on this adventure into audio as a medium? Well, firstly obviously because it’s exactly what my lifelong muse and inspiration Leo would have done. (That’s a statement I’m confident to make because I know so much about him and all the other renaissance artists).

The truth is I like to set myself a creative challenge at this time of year, normally I write 50,000 words for Nanowrimo, but my chronically ill brain didn’t feel up to that this year, and I thought recording audio notes would be a good way of sharing some ideas without creating a lot of extra work. Once I added videos and captions to make it more Instagram friendly it turned out to be about the same amount of work, but it feels important to note I started out intending to rest, for the remote chance my MS Nurse is reading this and thinks I’m not sticking to my fatigue management plan.

Here at Letty McHugh Productions, we use the latest in cat toy technology to achieve our professional results.

The experiment started out as a way to share some of the research I’ve been doing for my new project Book of Hours, but it’s meandered a bit over the course of the months and has included some thoughts on Jane Austen, me wondering if it’s okay to make jokes in serious projects, a very earnest speech about the importance of human connection in art, and a story about the North of England’s premier shopping destination Boundary Mills.