The Glamour Fan Blew Me Away . . .

After working out today I decided to get my usual at Starbucks, a double shot of expresso. Usually I prefer to get a Tall double- soy latté but on days that you work-out you must refrain from any fat, and soy milk has a little fat. Fat supposedly slows down protein absorption, but so does blogging apparently since I am now ignoring my protein shake to write this blog lol. "Gulp" problem solved. Ok back to meaningful reality. I mixed a pinch of cinnamon and a little sugar in my double shot and proceeded to exit the café. I approached the door with an intense warm rush from the expresso & cinnamon, it's a tasty mix, and the moment I open the door a HUGE gust of wind came plundering over me, it lifted my hood over my face and it politely alleviated me of my favorite hat and carried it away to the street. All of the outside chairs and tables were thrown about. I continued to wrestle with the wind all while clutching my hot expresso and kneeling down to recover my hat. It was the most exhilarating experience I've had in a long time! I cracked a grin as I biked away. I attempted to take a sip of my expresso and I got a repeat dosage of exhilarating wind, it jerked my bike and caused me to spill expresso all over my hand. I licked it off and continued to bike home. Behind me I heard an angry Starbucks barista yelling at the group of teens hanging around outside the pile of thrashed about tables & chairs . . . how funny, this time they were innocent.

Do you ever feel like nature is reaching out to you to tell you something? Sometimes I feel that way, as crazy as it sounds. Or, maybe I'm just using the wind as a metaphor for what I've been feeling all along. I've decided that the wind today was my "Glamour Fan", kind of like the ones you see on photo shoots lol. I love when little things have such a profound effect, it's pretty rare. The way the wind opened the door, took control over me, and tugged me out, WOW it sends chills through my spine thinking of it! I feel it was a wake up call. I feel like I've been given this incredible bolt of energy and challenged to do something great today with it. I'm up for the challenge!

Today is my day, I'm off from work . . . I've worked out and I can really see results, and now I have to finish my new paintings that I am very excited about.

Ciao X

Let's trade recipes!

I'd say it's time to explore new recipes, but I am not interested in how to make your Grandmothers' famous oatmeal surprise cookies . . . wait that does sound yummy, let's just save that for a little later (I love cookies *yum). I am talking about success recipes.

I had a very inspiring substitute professor this week, his name was Christopher. He graced our class with his inspiring commentary, he had a clever way of adding to the topic of discussion without changing the subject too much. All throughout class he went on and on about various techniques for drawing particular objects, we were focusing on drawing hair this week; "You must think of it as smoke" he would say. Towards the end of class he summed all of his creative suggestions up very eloquently by referring to them as "recipes" for success. He mentioned that recipes help ensure that "you always deliver, even on a bad day". Well frankly put, I have bad days quite often . . . that is to be expected when working full time and going to school. I find myself passionately involved in both my job and school, so there is always conflict in my schedule and my creative production has declined. I think about how much more comfortable I am while cooking when I am prepared with a recipe. Of course I am most comfortable when I just grab my ingredients and jump right in, but that only means that the recipe is memorized, no?

So where do you find these recipes for success?

Your Grandmothers' cookie recipe may have been a home made concoction of your Grandmother, but it surely took some trial & error to get it right. How long does it take to bake a batch of cookies? A little less than an hour from start to finish. Let's put things in perspective. In life you have a very limited number of batches to bake before you are out of time, let's consider a career path as a batch of cookies. It can take decades to establish a career. I'm beginning to think that rather than gambling my life away by trial & error batches, it's time to find a contemporary success recipe and add to it my own personal touch; I am looking for a mentor.

A mentor for me would be someone who has fully utilized all of their talents to their best use. I need guidance. But of course I can't seem to describe exactly what kind of "recipe" I am looking for, I will know it when I taste it.

Novelty

I am an Artist severely distracted by this dreamed up place I've yet to reach in the real world. It's a place that many can ONLY dream of, and sure . . . fame, wealth, power & (added) beauty are apart of this dream place but so are more abstract things like creative freedom in all art forms and media, creative authority over the world, reigning taste, infinite creative novelty . . . something that can make or break your career's longevity. Novelty's shadow is cast upon everything I create these days . . . Like today for instance, I've skipped school twice now because I just realized that the 2X4 feet canvas that I am working on has sunken to mediocrity in the midst of the many corrections and revisions I have made to the original idea. I even wonder if the original idea was ever that great?

So what does 0ne do "Win he mind iz too cr8-z 40r he lev-L ov cre8div fr-E-dom?"

Currently I lack the proper tools, resources, techniques, to execute the complex ideas I have, therefore their very existence is arguable. There isn't a particular way artists think or behave. We are all very unique, and this is why art is such a commodity. We rival with one another not to out paint or draw one another but to express are ideas as effectively as we can with as little discrepancy from the original thought to the executed piece. I can't tell you how many times I have experienced great art in my own mind, that's where art really lives and breathes . . . The physical manifestation of art is merely the bridge between the artists mind and the viewer's mind. Art is first an experience in your mind, then it becomes executed in the physical world we all live in, and finally it returns to it's original state as a cognitive experience in the viewer's mind. As artists, we try to re-live the experience by making it tangible and bringing it to life. And that would be the measure of an artist, his creative power . . . the ability to accurately re-create at least a fraction of the magic that occurs in his mind.

I have reached a point of stunning clarity for why I seem to be so intrinsically motivated to be a part of the fashion industry. Today, fashion serves as the most celebrated & ubiquitous art form. When I watch the latest video podcasts on all the latest shows from the most revered designers I am amazed at how much time & money is put into these productions. They each serve to out-do one another, it's the beautiful circle of life that exists in fashion. Trends are obviously the result of fashion's equivalent of natural selection. Reinterpretation and retro designs come from the ever growing compost pile of failed & exhausted trends. When you look around you, everyone you see is clothed . . . everyone may not have been to an art gallery though, see my point? So then fashion leads the rest of the art forms in terms of cultural penetration, no?

I appreciate and look forward to the praise that is given to talented fashion designers. They are modern royalty. People read so much into their clothing and it becomes a lifestyle for some. That's huge. It's amazing how the even the most remote and exclusive upper echelons of the fashion industry are also very mainstream on account of the constant relaying and reinterpreting of high fashion to more accessible venues like Zara and ultimately even more commercial as Target. Art is alive, it breeds and populates. Fashion has weaved and tangled itself in our social structure as an art from and we are dependant upon fashion just as we our language. Your outfit or lack there of serves as a statement inevitavbly and always, and is just as important as the labels on boxes, cartons, and bottles in grocery stores and pharmacies. Our projected self image, self worth, and, for most people, our attempt at shaping other's peripheral perceptions of our ephemeral profile manifests in our dress. If you're wearing a suite your wearing more then thread and button, you are really just following society's way of organizing itself . . . of course you may say " well I love love suits " but in actuality, you love what a suit represents in society and you believe that you fit the description. You may have freedom in the details of the suit you buy, style & color, but you yourself never elected the suit as your default means of exhibiting professionalism, society did that for you, fashion did that for you . . . you are just playing along. So then I wonder . . . are we wearing the garments, or are the garments wearing us?

My Struggle with Consistency

It's both beautiful and extremely frustrating when things suddenly become so clear to me in my head at randomly scattered points throughout the week, occurring mostly at night. I estimate that only 10-20% of the time I am as as focused as I am right now, ironically during the time in which I am completely immobile and in bed. All of a sudden I am remembering all the things I forgot to do this week, and all the things I still have to worry about completing. I have to follow up with Edyta from Barney's. I have to finish my FASFA. I just realized my two sister's birthdays are coming up this month. I must make sure to bring my planner to bed from now on.

All of a sudden I get very emotional and I miss my family and I thank god for them and pray that they remain safe and reach all of their dreams eventually. I also begin fantasizing about my career and all the things I want to do with my art and all the different places I'll get to experience. I then take my thoughts even deeper and begin to think about myself as a coordinate on this vast and complex grid of countless variables . . . we are all rare points of intersections of all these different variables like genes, region, era (the time we were conceived and brought into existence), life events, etc. I feel lucky to have been conceived and born with the genes that I possess, that I am American, that I was born during a time where I could be free as a homosexual and as an ethnic minority. Everyone including myself is basically a product of the combination of those variables plus many more, right? So if I was exactly the same but was born 200 years ago, I'd be a different person . . . or if everything was exactly the same but life events were very unfortunate for me and I lost my parents at an early age, I'd also be different. So as of now I am thankful for the X,Y,Z coordinate that I occupy on this vast grid of life that we all exist on.

Life can all of a sudden appear very cold when you analyze things too much. That's why I ackowledge things that I cannot explain like the idea of a soul. I'd say it's comforting knowing that somethings in life will never be provided a textbook definition, sometimes things are better off unknown. I may be a product of the intersection between those many variables I was speaking of above, but I have a feeling that my soul is a non-variable and would have been the same regardless of what era or what country I would have been born in, or - in uniform to my statement above - what X,Y,Z coordinate I would have been expressed as. I feel very happy with the current harmony between my soul and my X,Y, Z expression . . . I feel completely unlimited in my potential. I've probably lost you readers out there as I have lost myself a little lol. I think I'm on to something here though.

My goal is to be this focused 50-75% of the time and to always know and feel that I am a very lucky guy in all ways I could hope for. Most of us are, we just don't know it. Okay, I'm going to jump out of bed to creep downstairs now to get my planner. I've got some tasks to scribble down. Shh!

Bonne Nuit,

X Joshua

Tabbing Sketches

I just finished thumbing through all of my old sketchbooks. There are a lot of potentially amazing concepts for future pieces of work hidden in them. I've tabbed them all so that I can easily flip through them for concepts for future work. It's great to have a clear mental summary of all of the quality sketches I've done in the last two years. I must get better with carrying a sketchbook, I now see the value in recording each and every thought on paper, sometimes the value of the sketches are not fully realized upon creation.

To increase productivity, and guide my artwork in a more marketable direction, I am going to divide these tabbed sketches into various categories. Each category will share common means of idea generation & creative processes, and will ultimately be intended to occupy similar venues.

Categories

Class#1: Trial pieces, including sketches and any other unfinished work that represents an idea for art rather than actually existing as art itself. These items usually are creative very passively and generally lead to the development of other work (I.E. Wine bottles, Sketch Book)
Class#2: Commercial Bill Payers- Aesthetically pleasing and able so appeal to local Galleries which cater to clientele that has a very simple taste for good art. I will market & sell the original pieces, therefore these pieces should be created with profit in mind . . . and should be made using as little time as possible, and using the least in materials with no sacrifice to quality. Because these pieces will be sold to other people, it is important to get them photographed and retain copies of all work in digital form. Maximum time spent on a class #1 piece is 3 hours, including idea conception.
Class# 3: Brand builders - Refined work that will ideally be marketable on a global level and made into prints. These pieces tell the story of the artist, they contain my essence . . . the touch that makes me unique as an artist. This artwork should be just a little bit more obscure than work of the previous category. Will have to be worthy of investing funds to make into prints. These pieces will be more expensive, and on average more time will have gone into to making them. In general, these pieces will exist in three forms, in its original form created by me, in limited edition print form, as well as high quality digital files. These pieces are the ones that will be accumulating in my flat, because they are more valuable. If the painting is just simple and pretty than it should be sold to highest bidder or asking price, and digitally recorded in the form of a high quality image file. There is no maximum amount of time to work on these, but they must be of substance and quality.

My goal is to get my hands wet and begin pumping out class#2 pieces to sell. After I start making a little income, I can begin investing more time, energy, and money to creating class#3 pieces.

wish me luck . . .

Rough Draft: Life