This image is titled: And God created canned sardines.
What’s an Artist to do?
So, let’s say you’re over 40 and not a tech millionaire. You’ve been stringing together cool beads, weaving nice yarns into arty and fashionable garments and also applying contrasting colors to stretched canvasses on wooden frames, like, for years, and you still need a part time job at a food court to pay your utility bill. Does this sound familiar? Well, if it does, consider yourself lucky. Yes, you are a lucky human. I’ll bet you have some friends, and you listen to music now and then and are surrounded by conveniences that would have made kings drool 400 years ago, but today, it all has been reduced to common place. You are fine, my friend. You just need to re-boot your PERSPECTIVE!!
Now, I’m not talking about converging lines to a hypothetical vanishing point on a horizon to give the illusion of three-dimensional space on a flat background, though that also is known as ‘perspective.’ What I mean is the concept inside your skull, in the most important soft bio-electrical interface you have, your brain. The moguls of industry and the pyramid scheme have been brainwashing folks for so long that too many have forgotten how to use their brains and seen the true nature of reality all around them. We are extraordinarily well-equipped to live well.
Do I really need to tell you how much better off you are than a peasant in the 13the century? Google it, if you must.
So, here we are. So what if my house is mostly ‘art studio’? An artist holds within her grasp the last refuge of humanity, and that is the mirror to hold in front of the dazed self-deluded faces of the young who need to carry this civilization forward. Yeah, stick that mirror right square into the space between their eyes and their I- phones.
A friend of mine, a brilliant artist and business woman, thinks she has to ‘learn code’ in order to bankrupt herself in the real estate of the metaverse and I’m begging her to reconsider. I suggested she (and you) watch just these two brief episodes of Love Death+Robots on Netflix: Three Robots, and then Three Robots: exit strategies.
Talk about some nice code there. BTW I do not recommend any other episodes.
Artists need to show society what it looks like because society has a tendency to drift along the river’s flow like a leaf, or a dead fish. Artist have an absolute responsibility to slap society’s face and wake it up. Those two episodes of Love Death + Robots I mentioned above (to recap: Three Robots; Three Robots- exit strategies) is an attempt of some wonderful animators to do just that. Trust me on this.
I can hear the complaints now: “But I just want to paint the moon on a misty night reflected in a little stream” - Sure. Have you seen one of those lately? You know why not? Has some developer mowed down trees to put up overpriced condos and we have the gasoline internal combustion engine polluting the sky so much you can barely see the moon, much less a handful of stars. Is it any wonder that the WEBB deep space telescope images are knocking the socks off people with awesome beauty? No. Most people have never seen more than a handful of stars. When there was a power outage in LA some years ago, the 911 lines were clogged with people reporting strange and scary stuff in the sky…….. it was the Milky Way, friends. They had never seen the Milky Way.
Artists! Know you are vital to humanity’s survival!! Make your art. Wake them up. They need real and weird stuff on their walls made by the hands and brains of real human artists bursting with love and idealism or else.
You go gurl.
p.s.
yes, gurl means male artists as well as however the heck you self identify!!
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