Blog 10
The internship experience I must say at times was annoying. I have so many things I want to do all the time that having a second job basically was difficult to keep up. My schedule just got difficult to figure out and I found that the night was my only free time and I really should have spent that time sleeping. Going through all that though was a blessing. Life is easy when all you are expected to do is go to school, it makes you look really good too when you do stuff via your own free will. When you have to work saturdays, do 100 hours somewhere else after school, do homework (Didn’t meet that expectation really) and somehow find time for those extra projects, things get tangled quick. I’ve learned that the first step to separating all the crossed wires is to figure out exactly what wires you have. Disarming a bomb is really hard if all the wires are color coded. So I got organized, relative to where I was before anyway. This is something I’ve been procrastinating on for a good 17+ years, but that’s pretty good considering I don’t start most things until they are due and I don’t think I’m due to meet the Reaper yet. It’s a skill I need, keeping records and writing things down Is mandatory for working freelance. That career path, considering my habits, is an awful Idea. However, I’m not one to listen to the boss man for long and I need money so where else am I to go?
I didn’t expect to change much as a person, I knew that having this extra expectation would be hard but not as hard as it was in reality. My pathological hardheaded laziness was an important factor in this. I’m definitely not over that; maybe soon I will be.
Blog 9
I’ve said this in previous blogs but I feel more and more sure in my choice to separate my professional and fine art work. It seems to me that professional fine artists tend to either compromise a great deal in order to sell their work or compromise very little or none at all and don’t sell. The art market is like any market so generally what gets purchased has merit but there are of course irrationalities. Some artwork is very terrible especially in the sense that it isn’t terribly original but sells like hotcakes. Some artwork is very good and sells like hotcakes as well but that’s very much the exception. It doesn’t help that this market is a little unhealthy. The fact is that the number of suppliers, i.e. the artists, outnumber the consumers to an incredible degree. This results in some sort of inverted monopoly where a few collectors control the majority of the market. This is probably because art is terribly impractical, most people would rather have a 10 dollar cat picture on their wall than a 200 dollar painting. Additionally most artists don’t produce huge volumes and thus price goes through the roof. Art is damned expensive. Rich people don’t necessarily always have the best taste especially considering that to many of these people art is an investment. This is a good and bad thing but its primary negative impact is that to do fine art with no limitations you have to be fairly fortunate. In the end I’d rather not bother worrying about the money period. If I win the lottery of collector’s affection that’s great if I never do I want to be in a solid reliable and fun career. So in short my ideas about the future haven’t really change but I am definitely more confident in my understanding.
Blog 8
I have all the materials necessary for my project but that’s about as far as I’ve gone. I did talk to Allison about it and she didn’t have much to say. Glass half full: I get to do whatever I want, glass half empty: I could be a little silly in my approach or execution. I find the stuff I do completely for my own sake doesn’t tend to be well received. I’m not sure why, maybe it’s because I’m a little out of touch or maybe everyone else is. I could tell myself that all of those people are fools and don’t have any valuable insight because they don’t get it. I know that Isn’t true but I definitely see a connection between positive reception and realism. I definitely don’t do abstract art my personal taste is for realism, but heavily distorted. So it could be I’m not doing my job very well and that other people don’t like the same things I do.
Whenever the subject of my art comes up between me and Allison I’m reluctant to show any of it. I’m really in need of criticism and I tend to not find that from most people nor do I always want it. I am used to being the best artist around as far as technical skill goes, so humbling is something I haven’t experienced. That fact has probably made me a little skittish when I see that experience could be in the near future. It will have to happen eventually, hopefully in college and no later. Either way when there is a creative dialogue between myself and others I tend to not make it about me.
I have no Idea how i will get this project done, It is definitely the largest, by square inch, thing I’ve ever taken on. I guess we’ll find out at the governor’s mansion in the spring
Blog 7
I suppose I should not be surprised but the art business is more focused on money than my cursory understanding entailed. Of course I knew galleries were very focused on their margins but I didn’t realize how much successful artists focused on the same thing. I had always thought that artists that made money did so because people simply happened to like their work. As it was said in a movie I really dislike, “build it and they will come,” was the attitude I assumed most artists had. That would be my own attitude anyway. Turns out that the fine artists that make a living as such are capitalists and part of my dislikes that. I really don’t believe that the whims of collectors and the like should determine the nature of the work. I believe even more that the work one does shouldn’t be about what looks good in a perfect high dollar hotel lobby. On the other hand I do appreciate the idea of being in the position to profit off of what one would be doing anyway.
It seems that there are 3 types of fine artists; the first is the one with a day job working to survive and doing art to stay sane, second is the business artist who makes a living doing art but also playing it by ear, listening to what the market is saying. Finally the rarest of them all is the artist that has gained fame and acclaim seemingly purely on merit, maybe they were once the day job working weekend warrior or the capitalist, but now they do what they want and get a nice check for it. I think if I were to enter the world of fine art seriously, I would prefer the first option or the last. The one that follows the money with their work seems too close to a sell out. That is a cliche term, I know, and I’m aware that this type definately has no master really, they still work independently. I just think that maybe, for me, if I am going to be a commercial artist I’d rather do commercial art not the fine sort; I’ll leave that for the weekends.
Blog 6
I’ve actually be treated very differently than I expected but in a positive way. My experience with work is via dish washing, the ditch digging of the food service industry, and I found it difficult when there were lulls in my workload I was stuck in the mindset that I was wasting my employers money if I wasn’t actively working. Of course this isn’t a job, I’m not wasting money because I’m not getting paid (not including chinese food, thank you Eric Nord). I needed to shift myself into a very old and dusty stance that of a student. This isn’t like how I think and behave in school because in school it’s very much like employment in that you are just trying to get through it. Being a student on the other hand is a method of being in which you actively try to learn something new for the sake of it, not to earn a score or grade, or to get the teacher and parents off your back. If I myself had an intern this is what I’d attempt to teach them. Yes you are working but the purpose is to soak things up information. This, if I’m honest, is not how i was looking at this program going in. I was more thinking about resume padding as well as just avoiding my boredom. For a while I was writing off fine art as an income stream in my future, and now by being more studious I’ve learned the inner workings of the art market and see it as an option.
blog 5
As a whole my internship is rapidly getting better and better. At this same point seven days ago i was a little worried. I was very behind on hours and as I result I felt like it might all fall apart. Several long shifts later my feelings are the reverse. I spent the week helping to install spending more time with my coworkers Allison and Eric as well as meeting new people like the show’s artist Jared David Paul Anderson. On saturday I was at the opening, the first one I’ve ever been to without my parents. The show looked great in its completed state, well lit, everything object and painting in a visually pleasing place. One notable piece was a wide and short rectangular painting. It was composed of a slightly distorted black and gold grid with various x’s and o’s as well as high amounts of texture. To me, the image almost pushed itself away from the viewer like a distant wall or the ground from a bird’s eye view. Now for the part of this week’s blog that no one really wants to discuss, the low light. Social situations aren’t really my forte a lot of the cue’s and unspoken understandings fly right over my head and as a result of this interacting with people especially those I don’t know so well is the source of great anxiety and stress. I want to lay that out because if my sponsor reads this I want them to know that it wasn’t their fault in the slightest that I spent most of the time at the opening sitting on my own. Becoming more outgoing is my own prerogative, no one can fix my problems nor should they. I need to just go for it learn to initiate conversations whether I get burned or not. A trial by fire is required and I need to just build up the courage to jump in.
blog 4
It’s difficult to say what my responsibilities are at Leon. Every time I clock in there’s something different to be done. Before the opening I was going all around town passing out flyers and telling people about the show. Later on the next week I was helping hang for said show. Then I was on the internet combing over the various art consultants across the country. Of course all along I occasionally help clean but often times there’s only so much I can scrub or sweep. So based on that my whole contribution would be assisting whomever I can, making their work go faster and freeing them up to do other tasks. The Leon circle is a fairly small one. At the core is Eric Nord, Eric Dallimore, and Allison. Each of them shares ownership of the gallery, there are various others on the perimeter but for the most part it’s just me and them. So if one of them have to do something time consuming like hand out information then that’s one less person that is able to work on more complicated tasks. The same goes for cleaning, sure it isn’t rocket science but It’s time consuming. Washing glasses by hand for example, to do all of them after the opening it took nearly an hour, but hopefully because of me that burden isn’t on someone else. I suppose that is my daily duty, it isn’t one single thing but a wide variety. There is one single purpose however which is to be useful whenever that is possible.
Blog 3
Internships are an interesting because they are for all intensive purposes jobs but often without what one might think is the rewarding aspect of a job, money. Having done the closest thing to ditch digging in the restaurant industry, dishwashing, for some time I’ve learned that although money is great there is something rewarding about helping out. Being a useful part of an always forward moving machine is its own reward. That is the point at which I recently arrived with my internship at Leon. The day I showed up on was one of the slow ones, not much was going on in spite of that however I managed to get a fair amount of things done that will hopefully make someone’s day easier down the line. Allison, one of the recent additions to the team, was the only person there. To be frank it was awkward at first, I’m not the best with new people or people in general. As the day went on however I slowly became more comfortable with my co worker as well as the environment. As I slowly learned where everything was in the space Allison and I began having short friendly conversations. As i do not have a laptop there was the work I did had to be thought up on the spot by Allison and thankfully she gave me plenty to do. There was a party the night prior and the glasses they used had yet to be washed. My coworkers didn’t have time so the task fell to me. The apparatus for cleaning was an old photo table downstairs, a hose and a bucket. This wasn’t exactly what i was used to when it comes to washing but I made it work. Once I had completed my work I felt satisfied knowing that i had saved someone else some time and made use of myself despite the nature of the day.
Blog 2
The best moment or two in my internship experience either involve the gallery dog or the short concert at Twist and Shout. When i arrived Eric my sponsor was on the phone and it became necessary for me to kill time. The first opportunity to do so presented itself in the form of a dog named Jasmine slowly jogging over to me. I found her quite entertaining as the moment you stopped petting her she would bark at you as if to ask why you stopped and to insist that you continue. I wanted to finish looking at the current installation a grouping of paintings and sculptures meant to draw parallels between vain lords and ladies of old and modern selfie obsessed culture. Either way Jasmine was having none of my art loving and I waited away most of my time with her. The live music was personally fun for me although that may be difficult for me to communicate here. The record store was noteworthy to a greater degree because to my knowledge I haven’t been in one before and if my memory is simply failing me than at the least this was my first time at that particular store. The band although, not my usual, sort of thing was good and I enjoyed being able to zone out for a bit and take in the previous weeks insanity.
Blog 1
I had a very turbulent and very late first week. My first day I was a no show because I tried to cram too many things into one day and long story short a parking meter took all my money. So my second day became my first and that was Thursday September 8th. Eric Dallimore the owner and my sponsor met and talked over what I would do. He told me I would likely work with the other owner Eric Nord and their business partner Allison. I met both of them after running an errand. I delivered a letter and went on to office depot to pickup a replacement USB cable. In the process I explored a neighborhood I hadn’t seen in a long time. Directly behind the gallery stand my childhood healthcare provider, the source of many flu shots and uncomfortable checkups.
We discussed the parameters of the internship, the hours i would need to work to catch up (quite a lot) and what i might do along the way. Compared to my job job the work isn’t too manual but it isn’t all intellectual either. A solid mix of physical and mental labor which I cannot say I’m unhappy with. Up to this point and afterward I did very little code switching of any intentional sort. If anything I merely spoke less than I normally do as I was among new people. As the day went on and we eventually migrated over to Twist and Shout record store to see some live music I loosened up with my language a little. Despite being overdue the day went well and I look forward to the next.