What Good Are You Then

During breaks at work I've been doing research and development on the next phase of my website. I want something effortless to update but things are getting really complicated with wordpress and php and shit like that. Navigation is a really big issue for me as well.

After this IDN thing I need to get my shit together and nail this one.

Flicking through my old copies of The Face the other day I noticed how much it reminded me of blogs - or how blogs remind me of The Face. Roger has a good blog called Degourget that is pretty rad, I appreciate the nice blurbs.

I want to splice this blog up with some fashion posts, image feeds, and artist features. I wonder how that would end up? A big mess maybe? PROBABLY.

I now give you five blogs that I read religiously:

Yimmysyayo
Sleep Deprivation And Stories Of My Bullshit Youth
Golden Age Comic Book Stories
Selectism
Oh No They Didn't

The World Doesn't Owe You Anything

My dream clients would be Daft Punk, Justice, D-Squared, Suicide, Death From Above 1979(RIP), Masterkraft, or any other cool duo partial to leather jackets.

This is for IDN's Neo New York thing coming up. It is gonna be super crazy!

So why has it taken so long for Christophe Decarnin to become this successful?

"‘I think success in life is half your personality and half your talent,’’ Emmanuelle Alt said. ‘‘He has the talent, but the personality. . . .’’ She smiled. ‘‘You know, if you always stay in the shadows and don’t have the connections, it’s more difficult. Some people have a lot less talent, but they push themselves and go out and meet people.’’ Decarnin said he never goes to clubs. He once went to St.-Tropez but it was years ago, he said.

via Fashionologie

For a while now I've been struggling trying to find a good way to record ideas. Notebooks make me claustrophic and things just get lost in the pages and pages of text that I fill up. Loose pages end up in giant stacks on my desk. I can't really find a good way to collect ideas without them getting lost of forgotten. I wish my memory was sharper, or that I had walls big enough to stick everything on.

I used to set my wallpaper as a screensaver that would cycle through images I've collected online to jog my memory but it kept crashing. Post its don't work either.

So the chemist down the road won't give me sleeping pills.

With all these deadlines recently I've been sleeping later and later, yesterday crawling into bed at 7am after a night of listening to electro and turning my inks into vectors for a crazy project coming up.

My little roleplay as a full-time freelancer(oxymoron?) has come to an end and I have learnt from it many things. I would mostly be sitting on my ass staring at a screen and eating junk food for 18 hours a day, veins pulsating with caffeine while photoshop blending layers haunt me in my dreams. I would be going to bed when the birds chirp outside and wake up to the blinding noon sun. I don't know, I used to find all that shit romantic when I was young but now it is a bit of a punish.

My list of things to do is dwindling down which is a good thing, which only leaves major things like a major website overhaul and my tax return left. After that I am pretty much free to spend the summer at work serendipitously scratching away at drypoints and looking after stressed out students. This is probably the fastest year ever, I can barely keep track of what has happened, I missed the days when things used to linger on forever. Time seems to be speeding up as I get older.

My two weeks off work are going a lot faster than I expected. The weekend will be Extra Cheeese 2 and then Parklife so the next thing I know it will be Tuesday, just in time to complete a major project, and then I will have to return to work to the chaos of setting up the end of year exhibition.

I was planning on doing some Master copies at the AGNSW across the road but I don't really see that happening.

In 2007 I did an entire series based on a counterfeit Micky Mouse and Skeleton Men from Boston. The images were half drawings half text, they were meant to be studies for bigger projects. I might turn them into drypoint etchings and print them on some ancient yellowed copier paper I found in the store-room. They'll be really small compared to my screenprints - and a lot cheaper to get framed.

My art education was in a large part influenced by Julian Schnabel's movie Basquiat. The movie-version Basquiat lived in a box and then later his girlfriend's place, didn't seem to have any kind of stable job yet could afford to be on drugs all the time, and just seemed to 'wing it' the whole way through in cool and serendipitous ways, eventually meeting Andy Warhol and becoming a general New York darling.

My Professional Practice class at uni taught us that the key to breaking into the art world was to hang out at galleries a lot and become a familiar face at openings and make friends in that scene, hoping that eventually after a couple of warm red wines the owner says to you "Hey...you paint?? You want a show??" I've always been kind of disappointed by that side of things. I still don't really know how it all works.

The class probably should have been teaching us about how to write invoices, design and commission agreements, licensing, copyright, and how to understand the GST - but alas - the business side of things didn't seem to be as important as breaking into the scene.

I wonder if future artist biopic films will be made up scenes of the artist just sitting at their desk furiously checking their emails and going on facebook and watching youtube. Where is the romance? The serendipity?

Maybe I should become a painter instead.