A Place in this World

Hard, isn’t it?

Monday Mood

In a perfect world, I would be making art all the time, and that real world concerns wouldn’t keep me from doing whatever I want to do. But I guess that’s the same as any pursuit. I just feel awful sometimes when I think that my art alone does not put food on the table. Sad but true. Artists, even geniuses whose art talents don’t even compare to mine have to keep working nine-to-five regular jobs and put their art on the side.

For the past year, I’ve been reading a lot about First Nations and Anishnaabe culture. I used to dismiss Aboriginal art, thinking it’s the same themes and images over and over again. It hasn’t evolved and is not interesting. After studying a bit, I’m glad to say that I get it now. I was wrong. I was so wrong. Although the forms and style can be redundant, there is truly something deeper there, and that maintaining the same style and not “evolving” is the point.

Hello Weekly

I will be posting weekly entries from my personal Web site at https://josephmreyes.wordpress.com here. While I enjoy having my own Web site and putting my work and art out there to who knows who, it feels really isolated. I used to blog over at http://tabulas.com/ but have since moved on. I miss the old community of bloggers back then, it’s something I feel is more active than a personal Web site but not as obnoxious as Facebook. Tabulas is running into some problems at the moment and I hope the admin works things out soon. It was a great blogging platform.

This blog will not only have art-related entries, but sometimes writing or whatever else comes to mind.

A good friend introduced me to Prezi (http://prezi.com/). It’s an online presentation tool that people use instead of PowerPoint, or as a tool to make dynamic resumes and portfolios. I played around with it a bit and found that it could be used for story narratives, something which I’m surprised they haven’t focused on. With Facebook integration and people’s narcissism, making story narratives using people’s pictures should be something popular, much like Conan O’Brien’s vacation slideshow skits back when he was in NBC.

Anyway, I’ve been carried away playing with the platform. I’ve been making a series of slideshow narratives featuring Jeremy Irons at http://happyslides.wordpress.com/. This is not the art idea I was talking about last week however. Although it keeps me distracted.