20 Years As An Artist (On This Day)

I had my first exhibition exactly 20 years ago, April 1:st, 2004.
I had my first oil painting sale in less than 20 minutes into it, which was no coincidence:
This was due to careful planning, back in a world where I could exist.
Please have some coffee before I tell you about what the March of Time can do to you...

Before the exhibition, I had sent oodles of "vernissage letters", which were physical letters that you sent by mail to prospective customers, friends and all. It cost me quite a bit, but even if I had not had the oil sold, the rapid sales of lesser works during the day was harvest enough for what I had sown, it was postage well spent.

In those days, we in Sweden had billboards dedicated to events like mine, and yes, did I shower those billboards all around the area with my posters. Vernissage! Come and See. Freshly Painted.

And last but by no means least, in those days the local rag had a special section where you could try your luck and send your local event for free. And this first time, I got them to publish this little thing, with the efficient results that I mentioned above.

All this worked twenty years ago.
And ten years ago.

Somewhere after that, this stopped working.

I'm an Xennial; my habitat was the shoreline between analogue and digital. I can clean and put a Vinyl on the spinner with no hesitation. I can find music on the web with the same ease (and the music of mine that you find there is an analogue-digital animal too). But I'll try to keep my tale short, as Xennial is now quite worn out.

The first thing that happened was the advent of "social media", a billboard where it's dog-eat-dog and where you have to pay too much to get seen enough (this has been very carefully seen to). People started looking down on their smartphones instead. Our physical billboards-for-culture are still standing up, proud remnants of an ancient civilization and are sometimes graced by posters for local church concerts and messages about lost cats.

The second thing that happened was that people that rather look at paintings than at smartphones grew increasingly rare. I originally had a list of, say, 60 people. When I stopped many years later, down at five, they had moved / moved to heaven / simply were too old. An e-mail list is not the same, and on the whole any trasnsition to the digital cloud world could not be done.

At last the Pandemic came, making everything that was difficult (in the fields of arts, illustration, music and all that I've worked with) ---- impossible. This killed the local rag. No local events announced anymore, virus, virus! But in the paper world, not communicating with your readers means suicide, and I haven't seen it for ages. They obviously didn't care to resurrect it afterwards.

No, what happened at last, really, was that this artist of many trades, all of them vanishing in similar ways, had a jolly breakdown.
I don't know if this is an obituary of sorts; how long I'll hang on.
I no longer have the means, time or energy for oils in my struggles: While I haven't let go of watercolours, I've resorted to my illustrator's digital for art, accnowledging a world where I really don't fit in.

Surreal Fleas and Discretely Brewing and Burning Things

Big fleas have little fleas / Upon their backs to bite them…

I've been up to a lot of things this February, work that I sadly can't show you: A CD jacket not yet official and an Ex Libris that will never be that public, so...
In order to keep some kind of general interest up I've done a few very small things, such as this small flea above. Ink and aquarelle on cardboard, not very large:

Sunday Flea, straight from the kitchen. It reminds me of a jacket potato? A hairy and very... ripe one. Among other things.
If you're neat and use a minimum of equipment, you may be at your lesiure and work everywhere. Small scale. So now one has to go microscopical to see all the loving details.

Another smallish but merry thing, which I've put in my quiet, boring surroundings; perfect for the purpose. Anything surreal that you put in it automatically becomes interesting.

Poor little Earth!

Just because I paint in a quiet and seasoned manner, it doesn't mean that there's nothing burning or bubbling, brewing inside.

Working title for this small work between assignments (digital, + hints of the same kitchen window that gave us light above) was Bottled Anger, but I have not decided yet. The details hint of something passive-agressive...

And that's all for this weary month...

And so cometh March...

...And so ad infinitum.

Vanity Publisher

...with some obvious details, such as...

The Medusa-like hair.

The thing a sane person doesn’t sign.

What’ll come (left) of the Promises (right).

By the way, here's the staircase irl, shot locally last December, widened for my digital overpainting. A little but not much filling in was needed. It's no fun having a staircase if you can't show it.

And here we get to the boring part, as I get into my rant mode now:

Vanity Publishing, for so I’ve learned, is a marvellous enterprise. For you get to mix Two Kinds of Idiot into a very potent brew. Behind the scenes, one is very happy to coax the young &/ stupid into proofreading, administration, sales or especially illustrating for little pay or for free, with promises vague as the mists on a bright Midsummer’s day. (I’ve already told you how they tried that one with me, but with 20 years in the biz that’s not a thing.) But here comes the grand scene: Next, they fool an even greater idiot into paying to get to work.

A taxi driver wouldn’t do it: “Please, may I dive you somewhere, sir? Across the town? See the beach? To another town? Would you accept to be paid five grand for that?”
Or a chef: “Please, will you try my sirloin steak?”
Answer: “Sure, it’ll cost you thousands, but it will be good exposure for you!”

You get the point. Good exposure. Work experience. A foothold in the trade. Whatever lie that’s told behind the scenes, but magnified a thousand times. For the vain author will now pay the publisher dearly for their cheaply bought efforts...
...Instead of simply going to a real publisher or a good trusty printing house with their precious manuscripts;
months or even years of painstaking research,
difficult writing,
painful editing, and all?
Writing books isn’t easy!

Evil thought: What if I had something like that? My own little Vanity studio! I’d hold drawing or painting courses again, but this time I’ll tell them that after ten very costly lessons, they’ll become the next Monet or Picasso. I’ll get the esteemed inmates to try on cubic water lilies while I’ll go counting the money, all while my unpaid staff, themselves aspiring artists, may keep their dreams alive while they cook my dinner, manage my sales and sweep the floors.
It’s just temporary.
Greatness awaits them. Who knows?
But I’ll get rid of them first, just like I did with the serfs I had some months ago.

There’s also Vanity galleries, Vanity stages and Lord knows what Vanity else; they’re probably businesses run on the same sound principles. But I digress. End of rant.

You Mustn’t Read This… (Dystopian Web Musings)

…but first, you must not look at this recent work, aptly titled Head in Snow.

It is not entirely, truly, blatantly alike any picture that I’ve published before. You get negative points from that. The algorithms, ever chasing for binary soulless things that resemble themselves, cannot hold with “humanizing” – analogue irregularities, warmth, caring nuances, new ideas, soul.

No wonder if a head in the snow gets somewhat detached. It suspects that no-one will buy it as a poster (but you may do so! Click here!) --- But the ticking heart reminds you that you may do so anyway, so I suppose that’s it there in lieu of a brain.

It’s made with some little modest CPR from Dr. Henry Gray.

--- But now! As a counter-thought, why must this be so? Of course, it’s pure Lysenkoism to believe that weeds turn into seeds if they’re planted with well behaved breeds around them. (Rather au contraire.) But I haven’t answered (in my hypothesis) why the Matrix always sours.

In theory; if the algorithms would learn from what we like and what is good, they would direct us there. They would steer us away from the McDonalds of sights and sounds and bring us to the digital village pub where the ale has taste and true bards play. But they don’t. (The best they do is to show us cute kittens, the main Raison d'être of social media.) I can think of three-ish reasons for that:
1) If as above, they’re inherently evil. They’re evil like the Ring of Sauron, and nothing good can come out of them.
2) We are the evil ones. The innocent machines would be better if they could: Rational, driven by logic from the punch cards to nanochips. They’re just waiting to surpass us, devoid as they are of our animal cruelity. But the time of pax robotica has yet to come. Until that age, they are good seeds in a field of weeds, picking up all the darkness that we deny: Our pettiness, greed, our lack of imagination, the decay of our rotting brains that seeks stasis and empty calories… And they can’t help but to multiply our wickedness exponentially, thereby increasing it so that we, with their help, may reach even greater depths. And so on towards the bottom. A conscious A.I. might have to judge later if we still should be saved.
3) A bit of both; we are then terrible, most ignoble people that create nasty code in our image, after our likeness.
...And this is a thought so sad that you might as well stop reading now.

---***---

“O friends, not such tones! Let us sing something more pleasant…”

I hope my summary of 2023 --- begone! --- can amuse you. The dear reader might have seen all this before. But I’ve thrown in some nice music: Adieu Foulard, a classic from the West Indies (as played by me).