So in like 20-ish paintings you’ve gone from a sorta impressionist thing to (imho successfully) chasing photorealism? It doesn’t really matter what the official classification is, I’m more interested in your own take on your direction, so lay it on me/us, if you will. Whatever it is, I dig the end product.
Thanks. This one actually looks fairly impressionist-ish irl. Kinda the further back you stand, the more it looks like it could be a photo. I am referencing a photo, however. Mike took the pic, and commissioned me to paint it. I charged him 1ETH. I'm considering always charging 1ETH. :) I don't think I have a direction yet, or that I have painted enough to develop one. I'm still learning some serious basics IMO, and I think I'd be fooling myself to consider style/direction much yet. I definitely try to put feeling into it, but that's more about my process than the end product. I just want to have what it takes. I don't yet, and that's where my focus is. It doesn't take much searching to find contemporary painters that kick my ass. To improve, when I go to a museum, I'm paying attention to Bierstadt, Inness, Frederic Church, Thomas Cole, John Henry Twatchman, JMW Turner, Monet, and always Singer Sargent. Ideally, I think what should happen, is that you put brush to canvas (wood for me), and people can't help but give time to what you've done. I feel like every painting is a step towards that, which is one reason I enjoy it so much.
Your note reminds me a little of what Richard Feynman, Noble-winning physicist, said about art:I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It’s difficult to describe because it’s an emotion. It’s analogous to the feeling one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in the universe: there’s a generality aspect that you feel when you think about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all run ‘behind the scenes’ by the same organization, the same physical laws. It’s an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is. It’s a feeling of awe — of scientific awe — which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had that emotion. I could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe.
I went an interviewed for a bench apprentice position at a jewelry store last week. The interview went well and I should he back tomorrow once a starting wage has been decided between the hiring manager and management. It's gonna be a paycut for a while but I am excited to start working in the field and to be learning on the job.
Ups and downs. Mostly ups. Things have never been stranger. As they say, a smooth sea never made a skilled sailors. Something really cool: I'm unofficially spearheading our efforts to export our sustainable transport knowledge across borders. Three weeks ago, we were notified of a tender to do a study into early EV adopters and where / how they will charge... in Cape Verde. We had less than a week to apply, and in that time I wrote 90% of the offer, got a Portuguese transport company along for the ride and fixed most of the required documents. Last Friday I heard we won the tender! So I get to fly out not once, but twice to Cape fuckin' Verde in the next three months along with the owner of our company. And the advice we'll give them by the end, if they like it, will pretty much decide their steps forward. They intend to start building charging infrastructure next year. So it's a good opportunity for us as a company to show what we're worth, and if it's a success story there are many sunny Medditeranean islands where similar EV solutions are possible. The only downside is that as it stands now, I'll go there first week of June, which means I'll be back for two days from visiting Seattle before flying out again. And the weekend after I have a trip planned with my girlfriend to Cologne. So aaahHHHH LOGISTICS, but also fuck yeah LIFE. Today I had a really cool meeting about my academic paper. Which yes, is still a thing, but no, it's not moving fast at all. But I feel like I have found a small group of people who are just as passionate about equitable transportation as I am, and they want my help to figure out how to bring it into practice and make the world better in as much places as possible. They're practical, networked and smart people, and I'm the academic in this equation. With only my master thesis and not-published paper. I have no idea where this will lead but I'm already invigorated. The rest of my work is busy AF. That new colleague that was supposed to start May 1st? He bailed out two hours before signing his contract and meeting us. Which is not only incredibly rude, it's also frustrating as all hell - I have all these cool new avenues to explore and a bunch of projects to offload and I can't offload them until there's someone to offload them to. And there's now a lot on my plate, enough for me to work much more than I want to. Did 5 days of work in 4 last week and it feels too much like a grind. I can't complain too much though, as most of the work is interesting or engaging, but there's just so much of it.
You know that I am a professional writer, who makes his living writing government proposals and helping people tell compelling stories about their projects. I'm an editor, as well. If you need eyes on your paper... to help keep that project moving forward while you are away... I'd be happy to help. My Dutch is non-existent, however....
It's in English, but I'm not sure if I want to subject you to the stilted language of niche academia. It's language that's more concerned with being correct than with being compelling. I do want it to be that way, so maybe I'll take you up on the offer sometime. Always good to have an outsider perspective on things! :)
I have officially survived an entire semester in a second language! Exams finished up last week. In other news, this week I started an internship in one of my host university's research labs, where I'm the only undergrad, the only foreign kid, and the only woman. What fun!! It's been stressful but I'm learning quickly. I've been planning my return to the US, and I'm all registered for fall classes back home!
It's kind of a bittersweet thing, but I am excited! I've learned so much here. I think the best advice I received before moving away, though, was to not compare "here vs home." In that way, I've managed to avoid missing stuff. But it'll be nice to see my dog and move back to a rural place.
I've been refreshing what little I learned about JavaScript by writing utility bookmarklets. It's nothing you wouldn't find on the Internet already (open current page's copy on archive.org, list all outbound/inbound links, rotate/blank/whatever all images etc.), but now there's at least some purpose behind it, which makes all the difference. Much to my surprise, it's actually a lot of fun. The recent weeks were hectic, and the few days I got now are my island of downtime until graduation, which is likely to happen sometime in the middle of June. Can't wait for that, though it's a paradise compared to the idea of going through job search bullshit while applying for doctoral programmes on top of it. At least I decided it's physics instead of maths, and I'm not moving from where I am; six relocations in four years were enough. That uni place that's supposed to coach me for job interviews changed from "talk to us, we're listening and it's completely about finding a solution through dialogue and exercises" to "shut up, will ya? here's a thirty-minute-long diatribe on why we think you're Civil Service material, disregard your objections about complete lack of relevant skills or background this instance!" within three weeks. At least it's a decent excuse to meet people from humanities campus, which is a very different place, but I don't know if I'm going to continue to bother myself with that thing for much longer.
Sucks that that uni place is so unhelpful, especially since you've not even graduated. It's not like you are holding on to a plan even after proof that it isn't working out. (And even then not listening to objections that their plan isn't going to work is not a good way to help.)
Well, to be fair to them, they were helpful. They made my CV more readable, helped me select a picture where I don't look like a complete spazz, gave me tips on (body) language, and made me realise a couple of things that I'm often too dense to notice in time while talking to people. But that's just about the crux of it: I'd be a terrible civil servant in just about every regard imaginable, and it shouldn't take more than an hour to ascertain that. They had twelve.
"bang on shit with a hammer" class continues apace. Turns out if you alternate bludgeoning with blowtorching you can turn a disk of metal into a cup of metal. Of course, out in the real world we do this with a hydraulic press and a die and do it several times a second. In "bang on shit with a hammer" class it's a little slower. I can decrease the radius of my "vessel" by about 3/32" of an inch every half an hour. That's "blast it until the flux melts", "soak the flux off of it because it was only there to keep you from turning it into slag", "bang on it once around", "bang on it twice around", "bang it smooth with a rawhide mallet", "measure your pitiful progress", "coat with flux" and repeat. "Soak the flux off of it" is a 5-minute rest period. I started with a six-inch disc. I now have a cup with a diameter of about 3 1/2 inches. You do the math. I'd like that cup to have an upper diameter of about an inch and a half. Kindly do the math again. Here's where it gets offensive: I decided that since I was going to be spending the better part of a month beating the shit out of something with a hammer, and since my instructor observed that every studio you go to has these shitty-ass copper cups that everyone hates because nobody enjoys raising but everyone has to do it so we all hang onto these ugly beat-to-shit copper cups forever, that I wouldn't make mine out of copper. I got some goddamn fine silver. Hundred twenty bucks worth. Know what? You can move silver faster than copper. And you can enamel on it. And enamel on silver is Faberge, not some shitty beat-to-shit copper cup that you keep your pencils in. What's offensive about that, you ask? Well apparently if you spend $10 on something you're going to hammer on for a month and then keep forever, you're an artist. $120? You're Donald J. Trump. The amount of side-eye I'm getting for working precious metal is fucking mystifying, especially considering we were forced to spend three hours watching an "expert" who makes his "living" doing what? Banging on silver. My materials cost is fully 1200% higher than anyone else's but also less than $40 a week. Yet here I am, traitor to the proletariat. But wait! There's more! See, if you're a true artist you use Thompson enamel because it's grainy, it's shitty, it's opaque and it looks like ass. I did this once. I have enamel samples that are shitty, opaque and look like ass. When I inquired about this I was told "oh, yeah if you're serious about this you use Japanese enamel and you wash it in distilled water and it looks dope." So I said "Okay, I can buy twelve colors of Japanese enamel for a dollar each, I'ma do that and see what it looks like because watchmakers use nothing but Japanese enamel because lead and cadmium and other delicious snacks." But apparently nobody was expecting me to call their bluff so we've gone from "oh yeah you'd love enameling if only you had decent materials" to "oh shit make sure you only do that on Friday and don't tell anyone and keep it under the fume hood Daddy Morbux". Materials cost? $132. Jewelry class. The utter defensiveness of this poverty mentality blows my mind. You can't play bingo for $132 a month and I'm a race traitor or some shit because I want to make pretty things in jewelry class. The self-reinforcement is the thing that really gets me - it's not "fuckin'A, you go gurl" it's "are you sure you want to draw the ire of The Man by stepping above your class? Oh wait - maybe you aren't really one of us! I got a river of grief last year for mauling the shit out of a sacrificial component that you buy six for a dollar. I said "sorry, that seemed unavoidable, here's twenty bucks for the student fund 'cuz I'm going to mosh the shit out of more of them and want to do it with a clear conscience" and that caused awkwardness. I donated about eight pounds of chain (that I bought for $5) and everybody has been using it on everything for like nine months and isn't that great but when I say "you just gotta buy the stuff used" they look at me funny. It's like "chain is hard to make therefore it's valuable" but also "chain is made by a machine therefore I'm guilty if I use it" but also "since I didn't pay for this chain I can use it without losing my virtue" but also "but it's machine-made chain brought to us by the rich dude therefore I should feel guilty". I had to buy $2200 worth of tools for CNC class. So did everyone in the class. I guess people just sucked that one up because they weren't staring down a future of selling trinkets on Etsy for beer money. But maybe if they worked in real materials they wouldn't have to sell trinkets on Etsy for beer money. It's this vicious cycle of bullshit that grinds my gears. Now if you'll excuse me, I might be able to decrease the diameter of my cup by 9/16" if I hurry.
I hear ya. When I finally got around to getting a degree in my late 30's, I went for Fashion Design. Every single other person in class was an 18-25 year old woman who thought they could draw bad pictures and hand them to someone else to actually draft a pattern, cut it out of material, and ... ya know ... SEW it together! So I focused on drafting and construction skills. Fuck drawing. Anyone can do that. Trade skillz are hard and people will pay you for a garment, while nobody will pay for a drawing of a garment. Learned to use industrial sewing machines. Thread a serger properly. Replace needles. Lube and oil and service the equipment. Learned all the tricks to drafting an armscye so a garment fits properly over the shoulder, neck, chest, and arm hole. And how bodies change as they get bigger, and which measurements actually increase as the garment's size increases. (Hint: people don't get equally fat of muscle-bound over their whole body. Fat pools in certain places. Muscles bulk differently in the legs and chest.) So I bought an industrial straight-stitch machine ($350) and an industrial serger ($750) for home, so I was using the same equipment I would be using out in the real world. Everyone else bought a $75 Bernina from JoAnn Fabrics, that is about good enough to sew through tissue paper, if you have a sharp enough needle. I bought a French Curve ruler. And several pairs of Fiskars scissors, each for a different material. All-in, probably $1500 in materials for a class that was what... $12k? People looked at me like I was crazy for actually using the tools I would need to have experience with when I graduated. Note that almost every single one of my classmates drove to school in an Audi, Escalade, BMW, or other vehicle, and had the latest cell phone, $200 shoes, and the finest set of Pentel drawing pens (a gift from Daddy, no doubt). But actually learn the TOOLS OF THE TRADE they claimed to be interested in?!? Oh gosh no! That's so expensive!
To a point I get the awkwardness around materials and money, wealth and the display of it is used as a marker of status. That said, "hey I'm going to keep this thing around forever so I better make it nice" is a really sensible perspective.
EXACTLY that. What I realized here: Is that our natural instincts, as tribe animals, are to self-censor and persecute those within our own class who attempt to mark their status as anything other than where we are now. The fundamental deconstruction of "dress for the job you want, not the job you have" is "if you signal a higher status than what you have, higher-status individuals will respond." The signaling is far more subtle than most people think, however; Primates of Park Avenue spends easily two chapters on the Birkin bag. Here's the issue: goldsmiths, silversmiths, fine craftspersons of all intricacies must necessarily signal to the people who can afford their products. If you're working in copper or nickel, you have a few deficiencies - they color the skin, people are allergic, they have zero scrap value. One of the reasons I love Art Nouveau is that Lalique and crew created bijouterie, adornments made out of crap materials that they sold for the same prices as gold and gemstones because the value was in the effort: ...but unless you're bomb.com your efforts into garbage materials just make things look more garbage-ey. And here's the thing. If you're going to spend 10 hours making something, and you're assuming a 40% markup, and you think you're worth $15 an hour, that means your labor costs alone are $200 or so. So congrats: at minimum wage, you're making $200 "objets d'art" that nobody wants. That Faberge cup? That was turned on a lathe. Probably took half an hour. Then they did some engine turning. Probably took an hour. Then they did some enameling and polishing. Probably took another couple hours. They're selling it for $2300. They can do that because (A) they're a big jewelry house (B) their shit actually looks good. I gave a presentation yesterday on automata. I pointed out in every slide that they're the playthings of kings and rich people. Everyone oohed and aahhed in the right places. It's okay to like jewelry. It's just not okay to make jewelry. In jewelry class. Because if you can't afford it for yourself it's baaaaad. Those rich people can do whatever they want but as soon as you put on airs of being one? You too are baaaaad. Grinds my gears.To a point I get the awkwardness around materials and money, wealth and the display of it is used as a marker of status.
It's election season again! Woo... I am very much not pumped for this, especially since it this time around means knocking on peoples doors to convince them to go vote for us. At least the goal is mobilization, AKA convincing our regular voters that the EU elections are important too - not convincing people that our ideas are the right ones. But personally I find it hard to care as much about the EU-election as it deserves. It is important, but it is very hard to feel that when Sweden have so few seats and the European Parliament is so large.
Browsers- For a few days, Firefox would not allow add ons to run. As a result, I decided to give Brave a shot on my tablet and overall, I was unimpressed. Unlike with Firefox with the uBlock Origin add on, in Brave I wasn't given granular control over what domains traffic was blocked from nor was I able to see what domains were trying to push content in any given site. Additionally, with their Brave Rewards system, "friendly ads" come through and on the reviews on Google's App Store where people have complained about this, the developers claim that feature can be toggled off in settings. The version I had did not have such a toggle. On the other hand, it was relatively fast, which was nice, and the interface looked rather sharp, which was also nice, but now that Mozilla has straightened their act back up, I'm happy to be back onto Firefox. Books- I recently treated myself by picking up a copy of Imagine a Forest by Dinara Mirtalipova. It's a wonderful little book and I absolutely love her artwork for being a great balance of traditional European Folkart with a more modern feel. It was a great impulse purchase and I'm glad to have it. I also recently picked up a book called Zakka Embroidery, after thumbing through a few pages and loving what I saw. I haven't really gone through it yet, so I can't say too much about it, but I think overall it'll be a nice addition to the library. Work- Honestly, work has been going a bit rough lately. I won't go into details, but I'm praying things turn around. If not, it'll probably be time to start job hunting again. Crafts- nexto and a relative of mine both gave me some good ideas and advice on how to potentially save my rabbit project. Unfortunately, the twill I'm using is just stubbornly uncooperative and the more I work with messing with the pieces I made, the less they want to stay together. Which is fine, it's a good learning experience. Instead of letting the rest of the pieces go to waste, I'll practice embroidery a bit on them. I think next time around, I'm gonna a) blow up the templates a bit to give me more edge for sewing and b) experiment with a few starches or spray adhesives or something to try and get the material to stay put longer. Edit: goobster dropped some good advice in that thread that I think might save the project. Combined that with some of the fabric I've been experimenting with because nexto got me to thinking, I think I might be able to make something that works and might even look halfway good. Sincerest thanks again, to both of you guys, you've saved me from some real frustration. Pets- Know what's interesting about dogs? One is often more than enough. In fact, one is often one dog too many. Yet paradoxically, at the same time, one dog just isn't enough and maybe it'd be nice to own two or three dogs. Also, if the wife and I ever become rich eccentrics, we're gonna get a llama as our rich, eccentric pet.
I purchased quite a lot of books and I am starting to learn a few more programming languages. Also, my boyfriend and I have been together for 5 months. I am working on looking for more jobs and I will be talking to someone later this week over dinner about job prospects.
Just came back from Afrikaburn. I think my favorite part of it was training and volunteering with the Rangers. Hopefully I’ll be accepted and will be a Ranger at Black Rock this year too. I learned lots, met some super cool burners and honestly I’m glad I had something useful to do because the event was pretty small. I did about 20h of ranger stuff, and still feel like I’ve seen all the art and camps and done all the activities. Most of them twice. Now we’re on our Roadtrip! Heading into Namibia tomorrow :)
Oof. I hope you find a doc who's a good listener, I hear those are getting fewer and farther between. :/