Peonies, Monsters and the Mood Swings of June

There are two wolves inside me, and the third one bites them both by the troat. One who paints supercute things, like Peonies.

Ink and watercolours on cardboard. Look at all those nice little petals?

The other wolf howls and scowls and hates, for instance, being allergic, what we do to the Earth and being Overheated.

Digital nightmare. Hard to believe I'm the same person. I am fully aware this is no way to treat an audience. Thou shalt stick to one thing. Damn, man, thou mustn't vary like this! Some days I'm in between, still a surrealist but not that radical. Some days I Just Can't at all, thank you Wolf no. 3. So please let my moody mood swing its swing? Then I'm at least moving.

My World is Dissolving.

My World is Dissolving. An Essay.

I was an analogue person. But I think that I’ve used computers since my teenage days and Photoshop since 1996, that might be a bit rare. They’ve always been along. So I shouldn’t be a hypocrite? Still, my fortunes rose and fell with the analogue world around us that is rapidly disappearing.

Now first. You get some art. Ballpoint pen + som digital enchangments, here you go. '

Example number one. The Fine Arts’ Market.

I had my first exhibition in 2004. I did utterly well, but it wasn’t dumb luck, I had studied this. I sent my local rag a picture so good that they voluntarily printed it along with the details of the event -- back then, there were special pages dedicated to local cultural events of general interest, which you could report yourself, and those suggestions were kindly read and taken care of by humans.
We’ll get back to humans.
And people did read local papers, and they came.
There were also special advertising boards all around the town slated for culture and community life, and man did I wallpaper those things, spending days biking around putting up my posters. I put energy into those. They were artworks in themselves. Last but not least, I sent physical invitations by mail to a huge amount of people, but the rationale was, if One of them bought a large painting, this still paid off.

And all of this did. I sold the first one some fifteen minutes after opening on the first day.

(This was the one that the local paper editors liked, too.)
And I actually next to sold out.
Painting, painting, and then exhibiting yearly (doing all the marketing chores mentioned above) I soon had a list of some 60 regulars. They brought others, and for many years this went promisingly well. The recipients of my fancy letters are all dead now. (I can even point out the churchyard where many of them rest, along with my grandparents.)
The humble advertising places for local culture and activities are still up, standing near parks and public places. The people pass by, looking at their cell phones. It is very crowded inside their little cell phones. If you want to get somewhere inside them you have to pay a huge lot of money. And my other means of reaching out have passed away in similar manners.

Example number two. Finding, Getting Deals with and Trusting People.

One also finds me in illustration, music and giving seasoned advice as a language consultant. In theory, I should survive. But on the Web, you have to be seen and Found and recognized among the Zillions of Others. People have the attention span of… I can’t think of any animal with less attention span.
Even if you Do get the attention of someone, I’ve learned that the character of the human race isn’t the same as before the Internet. The final blow was the Pandemic. The Pandemic taught me this: If you can’t meet and shake hands and look each other into their eyes, well, then you can’t trust this person afterwards. It was difficult enough before, God knows. But now! The greatest victim of the Pandemic is not the humans that died, after all, but the humanity in those who survived. If you don’t know a person thoroughly it is as if you ever existed, and they can treat you and your feeble attempts at negotiation any which way, if they at all think that you exist. Internet business has reached the depths of internet dating.

Example number three. Surviving.

--- Well, for said reasons, I won’t. And this grand state of things has permeated all of society. For every day, new acronyms like NFT or AI are invented, and this world of abstract letters is a good home where robots can thrive. But there is no life for me or soon not anybody who speaks a human language among those abstract letters. But well. I am a thing of the past. My world is disappearing. Soon, and this is not entirely unrelated to said loss of soul and language and higher values, all of this world will burn like a Canadian forest.

This is an Essay, which means that I must try but need not succeed in finding any solution. I lay these observations out bare on the table, as they are. And lay myself down to rest, hoping not to wake up soon. The world spins madly on, for now being. With or without me.

-- Dedicated to Larry of Larry’s Corner, one of few but luminous exceptions.