Tag: personal

My May 24 with Norman White

For the past decade or so, I have been an avid camper. Ever since that first trip out to Georgian Bay with my high school’s art’s department, I’ve been hooked. Nature is awesome when people haven’t moved in a wrecked it.

I try to avoid the big holiday weekends, choosing instead to head out either the week before or the week after the holiday weekend. This way, the traffic is a whole lot better, parking is plentiful, gear rental is assured, and popular camp sites are deserted. The spots I typically head to are quite remote, but I still run into the occasional camper if I am out during a holiday weekend. And it just doesn’t feel like camping when other people are near by. I need that ‘middle of nowhere’ feeling.

On this trip, I broke my usual rule when my friend Mindy invited me to something very special: camping at Norman White’s place.

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First Urban Landscape of 2011

It’s strange how as a painter, I go through creative peaks and valleys.

There are times where everything I touch just turns out wonderfully; almost effortlessly. And there are other times where it’s a real struggle to resolve a piece, and even when I do, I’m not fully happy with the result.

During the first quarter of 2011, I was stuck in a fairly deep rut, but I reciently started moving away from that place. I set up my camera for some timelapse photography, and I think I mannaged to capture the point where I started moving towards my next peak!

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Free Prize Inside

Last week, Brad and I had a few sales of our photo book, Illuminated Landscapes. Through a complicated series of relatives and acquaintances, the purchaser was able to have the books delivered to me, so Brad and I could sign them.

It’s always flattering to be asked to sign something. (well, I assume it’s always flattering, I don’t really know for certain; this is one of the first things I’ve been asked to sign…)

In the last several months, through a series of flukes and random good luck, I’ve had the opportunity to observe several well-known people in action. One thing that struck me was how cool they were. They weren’t arrogant celebrity divas, they were regular people who, upon meeting me, went out of their way to make a tiny gesture to make me feel cool.

This gave me a brilliant marketing idea: don’t be a dick.

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Words of Encouragement

Tonight, I had the opportunity to chat with an old friend I haven’t seen in years.

During our brief time together, they offered me some very kind and much needed words of encouragement.

“You’re still doing it, you’re still making art full time. You’re making it happen. I’m so proud of you. I’m so envious of what you’re doing.”

Here is someone who from my perspective has their life in order. This person has a career they enjoy, a permanent home in a nice part of the city, a spouse, and a child.

And this person is envious of what I have: A tiny basement apartment with no windows, a rapidly depleting bank account (well, I’m still doing about 55.3 trillion dollars better than the American economy, so I guess I don’t have it that bad) a pile of new paintings that is accumulating more slowly than I would like, and a broken cellphone.

Wow. All these little things kinda made me lose sight of one big thing: unlike 90% of my former classmates, I’m still doing it. I’m still making art. That dream I had back when I was five is now a reality. I had forgotten about that.

A few nice words can really make someone’s day. Thank you.

OK, back to the studio…

Big Projects and Looming Deadlines.

Hello.

I’ve been a very bad blogger lately. Sorry about that.

I’ve been presented with a very big opportunity. A truly tremendous opportunity. An opportunity I really don’t want to screw up.

I’ve also been stuck in a bit of a creative rut.

I wish I had something interesting or inspiring to report, but the honest truth is that I’ve simply been working a lot, and producing nothing worth showing.

Going Through Some Old Photos

I’ve been working on the CV section of the website lately.
When I started building my site 3 years ago, I had no idea what I was doing, and the result became a maintenance nightmare. Lately, I’ve been going through, and cleaning things up, and reorganising the pages.

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A Whole Lotta Blog Love

Half of being an artist is what takes place outside the studio. No one is going to randomly knock on my apartment door, just to see if an interesting artist happens to be living there. Marketing and promotion matter!

The most labour-intensive project I have been involved with to date is my collaborative project with Brad Blucher, Take a Picture

A few days ago, I was talking to my friend Jonathan (a maker of fantastic things) and he suggested that I try submitting Take a Picture to the Make Blog and Hack a Day.

Long story short, this was wonderful advice, and it started a snowball rolling, and I can’t wait to see where it goes.

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Writing a New Artist Statement

Oh, artist statements.

I’ve written about my dislike of writing artist statements before. Writing about another’s work is easy, yet writing a one-page blurb about my own work is incredibly difficult.

As the creator of the work, it is easy to become infatuated by the small details, and miss the bigger picture. When looking at my work, the things I notice and really work on are very minute details. The larger ideas are things I’ve been working with for so long, I don’t even notice them any more. The old expression, “can’t see the forest for the trees” comes to mind.

There is a saying among artists that describes this feeling, “I’m too close to the work.”
When talking to fellow artists, we know exactly what this phrase means. I recently had the awkward experience of explaining that phrase to a non-artist. “It’s hard to see my work from a detached perspective because I spend so much time with it up close, I can’t think of it objectively”.

That’s when I had an idea, “If it’s easier to write about someone else’s work, why don’t I get someone else to write about my work?”.
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A Tired Kyle is a Useless Kyle

I am not a morning person. It takes me a while to get myself warmed up and ready to go. My usual routine is to wake up, turn on lappy, make coffee, open some web pages (twitter and reddit have really reduced the number of sites I go through on my web surfing routine, all my boingboing, slashdot and techdirt headlines are aggregated and combined on one page)

It’s only after an hour or two that I’m ready to actually do anything. And being a full time artist, once I’ve reached this point, I can usually ignore the clock and just keep on working until my hand-eye coordination degrades to the point where I know I need more sleep.

I had a break from this routine over the weekend, and this break provided me with a good reminder of just how useless I can be in those first few moments after waking up.
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Artist’s Statement Hell

I’ve got a big show that I will be applying for in the near future.
I’ve known about this show for over a month, but I still haven’t sent in my application.
Why haven’t I sent in my application?

Well, the last few years, they’ve wanted some jpegs, and a copy of my CV, a list of my show history.
This time around, they aren’t interested in my history.

Oh no.

This time around, they want an artist’s statement.

Oh, artist’s statements, how I wish you did not exist. I have yet to come across a single artists who is thrilled at the prospect of writing an artist’s statement. Some artists hire others to write their statements for them, some hack something together last minute, and some over-think and over-work their statements to the point where they have a tangled incoherent mess of invented undictionaried words.
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