Artistic Ego Damage

Just a fun anecdote; I've been sitting on this piece for 17 months. Why? Well, that's the million dollar question, right? I ask myself the same question often. Why didn't I just publish it as soon as I was done wanting to work on it? I think it started with the beta fish's face. I didn't want to approach making it feel acceptable, because it felt like anything I would do would be unacceptable, so I stopped working on it entirely. Mind you, I worked off and on with this one for about three weeks. Then I reached the face -- one of the last pieces of the process -- and I just froze. I stopped working on it and thinking about it altogether. Since then, my last artistic piece was published ten months ago; the longest I've gone without posting something personal-art-related in 7 years. While correlation does not necessarily mean causation in all scenarios, this one I feel is very much on-point. I felt meticulously defeated by its lack of completion and therefore a core part of my artistic ego was effectively damaged.

Ten months later, I'm fucking sick of that feeling. Fuck that. You want perfection (me speaking to myself)? Go visit an off-shore, direct-to-consumer amazon product factory.

You are a human being (now not only to myself, but everyone). Your meer existence, and all its outreaching tendrils are messy. That's what we showed up to see. That's what we paid to see in this overly artificial landscape. We don't want to see your overly perfected art while we are trying to escape our colloquial realities. We want to see mistakes. We want to be reassured that everything is going to be alright, even if you're not living up to everyone else's expectations.

And with that, I finally decided to post this to segue into a hopefully entirely different six months of content. If you are in fact still reading you must have some level of interest in what the fuck I'm saying so, I will be attempting to participate in @struthless69 's #alphabetsuperset challenge. 26 weeks of finished pieces on entirely different topics each week, but constrained around one theme and some pre-determined stylistic choices. I am going with the theme of consciousness expressed in the form of graphic/typography posters.

Why consciousness? Well, that's almost entirely what I like to write about in one way or another. And most of my complex feelings I yearn to express are tied up within that space. So the next six months will be dedicated to attempting to explore that.

Why graphic posters? Simply because I've focused pretty heavily on illustration the past few years and want to put my day job skills to work a bit more in the home creative realm. I've got my four fonts picked out, and 5 colors. We'll see how much I come to hate those choices shortly lol.

Intermixed will likely be some blender tutorial finished products and motion graphics tutorials, as well as perhaps some fun little videos as I also just finished building the dream computer and want to push this forge to its limits as soon as possible.

It's interesting that I choose to start this with posting this long-held art piece for a couple reasons. One, the large reason that Struthless started this challenge was because he found himself not posting nearly all of his work. Two, this piece does seem to embody consciousness in its own way. The more I stare at this illustration the more I resonate with the fish being exposed to a force so much greater than itself, yet equally as organic. The fish can't help but be entranced by this grand force placed in front of it, it's face being melted off by the sheer magnitude (the shortcut for not doing the face lol).

And yeah, that's how I look at being alive, consciousness, and the world around us in many ways. That's what I hope to dig into over the next six months. We'll see how it goes. You'll get a new serving of philosophical ponderings every Saturday evening, should I stick it out, until April 6th of 2024. Chat soon. ❤️