Brain, interrupted

It looks like you’re trying to escape social media, would you like some help with that?

 

(Just realized I can easily insert GIFs here so I had to let Clippy out for some air. I miss him so much, he made work fun.)

ANYWAY.

I’ve spent the last few weeks building my new website, Wise Lasagna. Until now, I’ve relied on Instagram to function as my portfolio which was silly, because I didn’t own the platform or control the presentation. I always had an excuse for not making the time to build a proper portfolio – takes too long, couldn’t get the plugin to work on my website, don’t have anything to put in it yet, yada yada yada.

I think maaaaaaaybe the bigger issue was that I was scared to look closely at my work and decide what was good enough and what wasn’t. How could I decide what was good? A portfolio would be evidence that I was very much not an artist, just pretending to be one, and everyone would see it, and then I’d be canceled and irrelevant for the rest of my life.

The amazing thing about this is that I’ve got years of showing my work and seeing it in publications as evidence to the contrary. I have an artist CV, for crying out loud!

After stepping away from social media, I realized that a lot of these feelings stemmed from wandering around through the funhouse mirrors of social media. Everyone’s work looks better, they’re doing new and better things, they’re being more successful even though they’re less talented, they’re hustling harder, or doing almost nothing and lucking into big opportunities. All things that were very much not happening for me. It makes you question your sanity sometimes, on top of causing you to constantly question your creative practice while you struggle to vomit out a steady stream of content just to be seen.

It’s only been a couple of weeks since I stepped off the hamster wheel and I already feel a sense of coming back to myself. I think that’s why I was finally able to spend a few days sitting with my work long enough to pull together a portfolio.

I spent years working on large canvases until I set them aside to work on more bite-sized pieces that could easily be fed to the content machine. When I think back to when I was working on these canvases, most of them were made during periods in which I was on a social media break, or at least using it infrequently, so I could hear myself think.

Let’s talk about these giant arts and please feel free to let me know if you’re seeing something different.

This was my first canvas. I was (and am) obsessed with phthalo green and drips and dots and just playing with the process. I don’t like much about this canvas, though, except the top left corner where the magenta is peeking through.

 

 

The one that came after I like more:

 

 

I’m still obsessed with drips and dots. The contrast is better in this one, but it’s still a little too symmetrical. I love what’s happening with the neon orange at the top center and bottom left.

Still drippy, less dotty:

 

 

The only thing I like about this one are the white ghosty highlights, especially the ones coming in from the right – they feel like dappled sunrays. The painting too dark and too heavy as a whole, though.

This next painting got stranded in Merida, Mexico by the gallerist who abandoned it (and two collections of collage work) when she abruptly shut down her gallery and left the country. If you see it, say hi for me!

 

 

I adore this painting. It shows so much more restraint than the ones that came before. I dug into the ghostly highlights and they really worked here. The contrast is good. The only thing I don’t love are the Payne’s grey sections on the bottom left and right – they’re a little too balanced.

This is the last canvas I worked on. It’s my favorite so it hangs above my fireplace.

 

 

All of these canvases have a layer of collage under the paint. In this one I let some of it peek through. If you zoom in you can find rows of tiny people, a train, and some text here and there.

I realized while going through these paintings that including work in your portfolio isn’t as much about deciding whether the work is good as it is about choosing work that’s the best representation of that particular layer in your creative practice. You can’t see this unless you zoom waaaaaay out with a detached eye – one that’s not been glazed over by comparison to other artists.

I’m sure this is obvious to artists who went to art school (you lucky ducks!). But for those of us who are self-taught and developed our art practice while at the same time growing our social media presence, it might not be.

When I was looking at the layers of my work to build my portfolio, I see a similar pattern in my art journals and collage. They started out very visually noisy and over time simplified into collages using only two images. When I took a break from social media, my collages started to get more complex again.

 

 

Baby Shark image

None of this was intentional.

I was making work that was digestible for the forum in which I was sharing it. And, because videos became one of the primary drivers for social media growth, simple collages were easier to demonstrate than my days-long process of flipping through dusty old magazines until I connected with the right images. People don’t have the patience to witness that process, and having to interrupt myself to remember to record it made the process tedious, and eventually I just stopped making art for a while.

As I move back into a regular art-making practice, not having to create content for social media feels liberating. I’m not sure whether I’m feeling art journaling or collage just yet, so I’m writing a lot, working in my bujo making watercolor train doodles, and writing comics on my iPad.

I have some ideas on how I’m going to share my work so that my art career doesn’t die along with my social media presence. Most of it will require me to /gasp/ leave my house 😱 Basically, I want to provide the kinds of experiences I’d enjoy myself.

I’ve thought about making slowcore long-format process videos for YouTube. Sixty second glitchy sped up process videos with twenty different camera angles which change every three seconds before my brain can grasp onto what’s being demonstrated aren’t it, but I can watch watercolor pigment shift around in slow motion until it dries all day long.

I like finding surprise art in the wild, and from past experiences other people enjoy that too, so that’s something I’m digging into again.

 

 

And of course, I’ll be continuing to seek out new opportunities for shows and publication.

I’m so happy to see lots of people engaging in this conversation about leaving social media. Whether it will reach critical mass sufficient to foster the development of a new type of creative community building is yet to be seen, but progress is progress and less people continuing to be harmed by social media is better.

If you have a personal blog and would like to be a part of my webring on Wise Lasagna, let’s chat!

Lastly, today I received my first paid subscription and I’m so honored – thank you! This newsletter is only a couple of months old and it feels really nice and validating to have support so early in our adventures together.

Have you given up on social media? If you haven’t, what’s keeping you there?

PS – I leave one intentional mistake in each newsletter. If you’re the first person to spot it and tell me about it, I’ll mail you a piece of art!