Anti-social

I haven't posted lately, it's true. It's been an anti-social couple of months, and getting more so. I'm enjoying the introspection.

I had the idea of blogging about "becoming an artist", since that seems to be my aim, of late. And then I asked myself, "Why do you want to be an artist?"

Since then, I haven't come up with a good answer. Oh... I've had some ideas, but none of them are terribly motivating. Things boil down to a few salient points:

• I like programming. Even if given the chance, I would not stop.
• I don't like artists, on the whole... a few good souls, sure, but that's true everywhere. By and large, artists tend to be... broken people.
• I am so not into self-marketing.
• The money's worse than programming (with exceptions).

That said, none of these trains of thought have deterred me from doing what I'm doing. Namely, I'm drawing. A lot. I also spend a lot of time thinking about drawing, analyzing what I see. Last, and perhaps most copiously, I seek out art, judge it, and learn from the pieces I like most.

Tying that in to programming, I actually wrote a ruby script that scrapes Deviant Art and grabs "favourites" from all of the artists on one page of your own favourites page. (Think of them as meta-faves). It uses ActiveRecord to store some db information, Hpricot and open-uri for the scraping, and it's probably 120 lines. Fun to write.

I'm actually of the mind that my favourites on DA are remarkable works of art. The process has also taught me exactly where I want to focus my efforts. This is key. It breaks down into stages, as I see it:

1. Draw, until I...
   
2. Get some kind of tablet.
3. Do "digital painting" until I...
   
4. Get a strong foundation in form.
5. Start rendering (3D).
6. Move slowly into physical sculpture.

There are a few key points, here.

First, I love digital paintings. I love the colors, I love the textures: like paint, but less chaotic. It's what I want to do... for as long as it will sustain me. Brushes intimidate me. I don't like getting messy. Digital painting is my thing.

"But."

Sculpture is what I consider the height of "personal" art. (The subtext there is that I think there are cooler versions of collaborative art, but that's for another discussion.) If had to choose one thing, that's what I would focus on. But there are a few things keeping me from jumping right in. Most importantly, I don't think I have a strong enough concept of space and form. It's also a "slow" form of art, not as immediately gratifying as drawing or painting. It's also much harder to sell, takes up more space, and is otherwise less practical. ...But someday, I'll be able to work around all those things. Certainly computer modeling gets around most of those, and perhaps I'll dabble in it in the near future. But at the moment, I'm not confident enough: I haven't modeled in.. .oh my... has it really been over a decade?!? Pardon me while I go puke for a while.