How to catalogue your life's work (and why to start today)
Start a catalogue raisonné now — a running, dated record of every piece you make. Don't wait for a curator or the end of your career. It isn't a monument to importance; it's a laboratory notebook you read back to learn.
What a catalogue raisonné really is
Conventionally it's a late-career or posthumous artifact — a scholarly record of a body of work, compiled by someone else, aimed at authentication and provenance. It faces outward, toward the market and the academy. Useful, but that framing is why most artists never start one while they can.
Reframe it and it becomes something you'd want on day one: a notebook. Each work is an experiment; the catalogue is the notation; you are the one who reads it back and gets better. It faces inward.
Won't cataloguing my own work look immodest?
Only if it's a claim to importance. Read as method, it's the opposite — it's the discipline the method requires. A scientist who didn't keep the notebook wouldn't be humble; he simply wouldn't be doing science. Same here.
How to start (today)
- 01Number the work. Give every finished piece a stable identifier, oldest first.
- 02Capture it. One clean image (or file) per piece — evidence, not decoration.
- 03Date and describe. When, medium, dimensions, and a line on what you were trying. That last part is where the learning lives.
- 04Keep it in one place. Scattered records aren't a record. One home, always.
- 05Read it back. Every so often, look across the whole thing. That's the point — the rest is just keeping the notebook.
The tool
Maintaining 1,950 pages by hand is a feat of discipline; most people won't. Dadbot Studio keeps the record for you — every work logged, dated, and attributed — so the catalogue builds itself as you make things, and reading it back is effortless. Start today, and in a decade you'll have the one thing that actually teaches an artist: the whole record, in one place.