The Future is that Thing in Front of Me, Yes?
Happy New Year • 明けましておめでとうございます！！
It’s 2020! For those of us for whom the year 2000 seemed like something out of a sci-fi movie, this is a very strange time to find oneself.
In some ways, I do feel like I fell in a cryogenic vat shortly after college, just recently pried open my eyes and, y’know, maybe things aren’t quite as different as I thought they would be.
Pop culture certainly seems to be digging deep into the pool of nostalgia. There’s still a Star Wars movie in the theaters that’s pissing off a lot of fans (sure, Vader being Luke’s father is common knowledge now, but there were deniers right up until after ROTJ came out, and does nobody remember the endless whinging about Ewoks? ). Rock’n’ Roll is dead again (long live rock). Politics are a bald-faced copy of my youth; it’s like we could never find good replacement villains after the Berlin Wall came down, so we’ve gone right back to the classics.
Then again, in other ways, it really is a whole brave new world of tomorrow. Sure, we haven’t got the flying cars and jetpacks that 12-year old me was hoping for, but phones are pretty neat.
My first thought for the first article of the new year, right after I thought “Wow, it’s a little late for the first article of the new year!”, was to write a year in review.
That would be a very short blog post.
While my life has been full to bursting with events, accidents, and revelations, precious few of them involved the more-or-less dormant art side of my life. Then, this past year, my daughter turned three. That’s nuts, right? Consequently, she enrolled in nursery school. The upshot of which is that I suddenly find myself with some number of daylight hours to work on art again.
And so I find myself, once again, a working artist. Albeit one who slots his work into a schedule determined by a one-meter tall beacon of unfathomable energy.
So we look to the future.
Shake this nasty cough and cold. This bug that’s been gnawing away at every member of my family since last year. That’s number one. Ugh.
My basic goals for the next 11 ½ months are to make at least a dozen pieces of art (not counting S-series, or tiny experiments) and to add to this blog 36 times. That should be doable, right?
There’s also the dreaded but necessary administration work, joining competitions and events, organizing this progressively more cluttered studio space, and more.
And then, there’s the website.
I was flipping through old blog posts and, roughly two years ago, I graded my progress on the redesigned website. There has been some progress since then, but as aways, there’s more work to do.
Galleries: I still have a bunch of art in need of posting. And in some cases, scanning or photography.
Blog • A Pulse Uncommon: There’re old images, links, and art yet to be replaced. I’ve reached the point where a lot of the old artwork isn’t suitable for the new website, and I’m hunting through old sketchbooks and WIPs to rescan and photograph.
NEWS page: The NEWS page has been the front page for awhile now. How do you like it?
Media: a media page collecting books, newspapers, magazines, etc. that have featured my work is something I’d really like to get up
ART•SHOP: It’s a work-in-progress. I’ve got many of the small works posted and available for sale. The rest is a matter of sitting down and getting the photography taken care of.
and one of my big goals is to put together a Commissions page to guide collectors through the process of approaching me with ideas for art they’d love.
