OS Agnostic

I have started (yet another) blog at free-artwork.com.

About once a week (sometimes more, sometimes less) I will give away a painting or drawing. Yup, totally free. I’m giving away small stuff, so postage is cheap and not that much $$$ went into making them. I have given away 6 paintings so far.

As for the why I am doing this: well, there’s two reasons. One, I just enjoy the process of it. Posting the image, getting a ‘winner,’ and mailing out the artwork is fun.

The other reason though, has to do with the funny inner workings of my brain. When I make artwork, if I have no idea where it will go, I end up kind of lost in the process. I have no desire to create a stockpile of art- in fact, I already have that, and it’s annoying. Art is made to be seen, and the art sitting in my attic- well, it’s not being seen. (It’s also too big to give away - shipping would be over $100.)

At the same time, I like making art. It’s fun, relaxing, and engages a part of my brain that doesn’t get a workout doing anything else. I enjoy the materials, I enjoy working and reworking something.

You may ask- why not just sell the art? well, that’s where it gets a bit dicey. Selling art is actually harder than you’d think. Even at a cheap price, people are fairly reluctant to buy art. If it is priced too low, people will think it is worthless, and if the price is too high, people can’t afford it. I’m not really interested in selling prints, either- if you want a print, just go to the Flickr set and print it out yourself. (By the way, you’ve seen those fancy “Giclée” art prints, right? That means inkjet print. Hopefully archival quality, but not always.)

The truth is, selling small artworks has a razor thin profit margin. And selling things, for me, takes a lot of the magic out of creating, I start thinking about paint costs and paper costs and the ratio of these costs to what I’m selling it for and whether this artwork is sellable, etc. The profit margin goes up as volume or price increases, but I have little time to devote to making prints or more artwork.

So, the solution I came up with was to give stuff away. This way, I don’t have to worry about the pressures of selling, but I still get to send the artwork away to someone who will (hopefully) appreciate it. It improves my mental state while painting. It also gives me a nice ego boost when people say nice things about my artwork.

Of course, I started doing all this when “free” is all the rage- see this Wired article for details. This isn’t a coincidence- a few years ago, I would have never dreamed of giving away artwork. It was simply unthinkable, an undervaluation of yourself as an artist AND other artists everywhere. However - for me, now, free is much better than cheap because I can imagine the value of the artwork to be anything I want. I get around the messiness of pricing artwork while still putting it in the hands of someone that will appreciate it. The idea of free is all around, I am just taking the idea and using it to my advantage.

I can’t, of course, make a living by giving away artwork. No, I have a day job for that, and this puts me firmly back into the “hobbyist” side of the art making world. Art as hobby is a sort of dirty word in art school. “The Hobbysist” is one who does paint by numbers, Bob Ross paintings, or knock offs of other paintings (none of which, I might add, I have a problem with-as long as one doesn’t sell the knockoffs.) But the hobbyist can also be someone who makes original works, but just doesn’t want to get into the art market- because they can make more money doing something else, or because they don’t want to be self employed, or some other reason entirely.

And that brings me to the final point of this post- I realize now that I don’t really want art to become my job. At least not right now. Again, this is probably because of the weird inner-workings of my brain- but once art making becomes my job, the way I feed myself, it loses a little bit of magic. I find it hard to separate the art making process from the act of selling it to make money. I once thought I could make art and sell art and keep the two seperate from each other. I now know can’t. At least, not right now.

Last night I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron. I didn’t really want to yet, but somehow Gnome got borked and I figured an upgrade (from the cli) might solve the problem. Well, it did- Gnome came back- but I had so many other problems that I’ll be reinstalling 7.10 tonight.

There were a lot of little usability issues- menus in different places, etc., that were minor annoyances. But the reason I will be rolling back comes down to 2 issues:

Firefox 3 Beta

Don’t get me wrong, Firefox 3 looks nice and has great new functionality. But it doesn’t work with my extensions, and I REALLY need it to at least work with Zotero. I’ll wait to use Firefox 3 until it is officially released (in June, I think). I know I can patch extensions to run and all that, but I just don’t want to.

Synergy

As demoed in this crappy video, I use Synergy to move my mouse between my workstations. This has completely changed the way I work and I can’t live without it now. It’s great when one computer is being laggy or not behaving right, I just jump over to the other computer for a bit. Anyway, Synergy client isn’t working in Hardy Heron for me. I googled it, found this thread, which suggests running Synergy as root (sudo synergyc host) but that didn’t work for me either.

Rolling back

So I’m going to reinstall 7.10 tonight- not a big deal, my /home folder is on another partition so it shouldn’t be a problem, and I’ve already backed up the home folder just in case.

I realize that some of the problems might be solved if I did a clean install- obviously something went wrong with the system sometime Monday night. I have been running Hardy on my laptop for over a month without issue. The only thing I can think is that installing Inkscape somehow caused it, as that was the only change I remember making. That was weird, too, though- Monday, I went to use Inkscape and it was gone. Not in menus, not anywhere. That’s why I reinstalled.

Although I was annoyed with this turn of events, I was not nearly as frustrated I have been in the past when the gui breaks or other random things happen. I am comfortable enough in the command line now to at least back up my files, and I have home on its own partition. And since there are no annoying license issues with Ubuntu (unlike windows, which I always lose the key for) reinstalling is easy.

The above video is a video of a water balloon popping taken with a camera that will take 2000 frames per second.It reminds me of a painting by David Hockney:

David Hockney - A Bigger Splash 1967
acrylic on canvas, 243.8 x 243.8 cm, tate gallery, london

We take for granted the shape of the splash. When I first saw the painting, I thought “big deal.” But the splash is not what we see- it’s a painting of what we see when we look at a photograph of a splash. A frozen moment in time. Photography has now been around long enough that there isn’t a person alive that hasn’t grown up in a world where a machine can capture an image in an instant. The first Kodak camera was manufactured in 1888.

Muybridge pioneered high speed photography around 1880:

I can’t imagine not knowing what something looks like in stop motion. When I see a splash, I carry with me what water looks like frozen, thanks to the research of Harold Eugene Edgerton, who inspired the below photo.

For a long time, I was obsessed with the freezing of time. Hockney partially inspired it, but I also was influenced a lot by the work of Bill Viola, who uses special cameras (like the above, but ‘only’ 300 frames per second) and other methods to explore the stopping or slowing of time. One such artwork was called “The Greeting,” and was a recreation of a renaissance painting slowed down thanks to the use of technology to slow the motion down.

Another work that was very influential was The Reflecting Pool

This inspired a few paintings, none of which were very good.

I’m still interested in these new ways of seeing- ways that change what we see, how we think about things, and what we know about the world. I can’t go back to not knowing what a frozen drop of water or, now, a water balloon popping look like. I can’t imagine a world without stop motion photography, a world that I couldn’t freeze the action of anything I want simply by taking out my camera. It is technology that enables work like this - not just because computers are used in the creation of the artwork, but because before photography, we wouldn’t be so trained to see frozen time.

PS- you can see an interview with Bill Viola here.