August 26, 2008 - My attitude was sucking pretty bad for a few months this year, roughly March through I dunno, the end of July? It is so unlike me. I really looked forward to the down-time in Oak Creek as it usually recharges my batteries and lightens my mood. Although I had a good time in Oak Creek this summer, except for breaking my tailbone (which is really painful), I didn't get that renewal of spirit I was expecting. I don't think the broken tailbone had anything to do with it though.
I admit life is challenging at the moment. DH has been laid off again and so we are in survival mode again. Survival mode is a crashing bore. Where to find my long-lost spirit in the midst of such turmoil? So I am bitching to one of my other artist friends all of who are a bit concerned that I have been in my own private Idaho for so long, when one of them asks if I know what to do that makes me happy.
Hmm. Good one. What does make me happy? As I reflect I realize that I have not been doing what makes me happy in a while. Like I said, survival mode - you spend all your time doing what you have to do, a lot of which is not what makes one happy. Let's face it there is not a lot of fulfillment in doing the J-O-B when you are not gaining on the long-term goal, but are instead treading the financial waters and trying to keep the sharks at bay. I don't live for shaking the money tree, shopping for the best deal on toilet paper, and cooking meals day-in and day-out because we beyond tight on cash. I don't enjoy popping into my favorite establishment and having to bow out just when things are starting to pop, just because we are on a budget. When times are good the whole world is your friend, but when times are tight, you dine alone.
So I resolved right then an there to start making the time for what makes me happy. Once I started doing these things, that which makes me happy, I lightened up instantly. One of those things for me it is dancing, bouncing around like a fool. I think part of it is the endorphins that you get from any exercise and part of it is the complete uninhibited nature of it all. It is an utterly useless unproductive activity, but it doesn't cost anything either. Bingo, my creative muse returned. Conversely I am also demanding a bit more out of DH too, which a kind of reaching out instead of drawing inward.
Now I think I will share.
So what makes you happy? You have known it since you were a child, which is a good place to start browsing if you don't have a clue. I've got a good deal on some real-estate in private Idaho but take it only if you are planting a secret garden or building a field of dreams.
June 3, 2008 - spent so much time in the CSS salt mines people were starting to talk. But the website went up this morning. Not with out a hitch, as my DSL line went down in the middle of the upload, but it did get posted finally. Still have some tweaks, like actually getting some prints set up at FinerWorks but at least now I can live again. I have been living on my computer, spending nearly every waking minute of the last three weeks on this conversion-excepting of course when I needed to do some work for my day job, restock the household so the husband and critters wouldn't gnaw my leg off, etc. I am really looking forward to creating again. Also my annual break from the world is coming up; in less than a month I will be up among the red rocks completely technology free. Even the phone service sucks up there. I am so looking forward to being disconnected so I can reconnect with the universe.
May 19, 2008 - CSS change over is going slowly forward. But my mind is rebelling at the entirely repetitive boring nature of the process. I am about 1/3 done I think. Day 11 and counting. :-P So I am doing a blog entry instead of working.
Just left my first negative feedback on eBay. I feel sad. Its upsetting when people do not conduct themselves honorably. I purchased an item that didn't work upon receipt. I offered to send it back and asked for a refund. The seller sent me a second one instead, which also did not work. So I sent them both back and asked for a refund. The seller said he was going to give me a refund, but as of day 60, the last day I can leave feedback, still no refund, despite his continuing assurances that I will get my money back. So he got the negative feedback. "DVD didn't work, 2nd didn't work either, sent both back, day 60 no refund yet." eBay doesn't give you a lot of room; I had one character left after that short description. I have a dispute open now too-so that will be another 10 days out of my life. What an emotional time sucker.
When I finish this project it is my intent to start selling art on eBay. However I can't help but feel the universe is sending me a message about this prospect. I have been having pretty good luck with eBay until recently. The other bad transaction I had recently was with me as a seller. I only accept PayPal and I only ship to confirmed addresses and I state both of these items in bold red type in my auction, just to make sure you don't miss it. See how just jumps out at you? So this guy buys and says "Oops, the address is wrong, just ship it here." I refund his money and ask him to correct his address and re-verify at PayPal and repay me, I'll wait. He threw a hissy fit and refused to pay. I had to open a dispute console to get my eBay fees refunded. His name did not match the one on the PayPal account he was using as his name on the PayPal account was Jennifer. Was I being a pain? probably, but that transaction had more than a few red flags on it.
I have a PayPal account , my address is confirmed and I am verified so I can tell you its no big deal to arrange. Although I know the system isn't 100% foolproof, but I love that it affords me as a buyer a certain amount of protection from fraudulent charges. But it only works if sellers use the system. Ever had fraudulent charges show up? Yes you will eventually get your money back if it is a credit card charge - bank account charges are trickier - but you will spend several months periodically monitoring your bills to see that the charges have been reversed and that no new charges are appearing. Then there is reporting it to the police and getting credit reports etc. It is a hassle. Yes I have done this thing, more than once-in this day and age protecting your good name requires vigilance. I admit it is a sorry state of affairs, but it is one that I have no control over.
I feel I am becoming an expert by the definition of Niels Bohr: I have made all the mistakes that can be made in a narrow field.
You might ask why go through all the hassle of dispute consoles etc for a few dollars. I am reminded of another quote by Edmund Burke who said, "The only thing necessary for the triumph [of evil] is for good men to do nothing." I will not stand idly by and neither should you. I believe that if one does not respond to petty theft, one emboldens the perpetrator to go on to do more and more. I hate that the credit card companies do not even make the barest effort to go after the crooks who use other people's credit fraudulently and I feel they have contributed to the problem by doing exactly nothing. I will not be part of the problem.
May 14, 2008 - Mini rant time-don't go any further if you aren't in the mood for surly:
Hey folks, my current day job is an accountant. Specifically a tax accountant specializing in micro and small business. I really like to help out the little guy. So what has got my drawers in a knot? To me, it feels like some folks expect the-artist-that-is-me to complete disengage from any sensible business practice. Art is a business like any other. I expect to eventually make a living at it. If my art is good enough to be collectable when I am dead, it should be good enough to support me while I am alive (I paraphrase the Mean Girl for that quote...it sums up my feelings perfectly). Still, some folks out there in the big blue box are not member not members of the kinder gentler tribe. Many years ago, I had the misfortune run to afoul of some people who like to take advantage.
My first art theft occurred in grade school. I entered a city-wide competition, got all kinds of ribbons, and my art disappeared. I think my mother was more upset about it than me (hey I was like 10?). Anyway, how lame is that? Somebody ripped off a 6th grader. If you did that you know who you are. My mother is still mad at you, because she really wanted that cat sand painting. Moms, aren't they greatest art collectors of all?
Other subsequent experiences have pretty much convinced me that in this day and age you really should get things in writing just to keep everyone honest. Fast forward to today. I have been contacted occasionally by some claiming to want to use one of my images in a limited form. I always respond to these requests. To date only one person has actually gone to the effort to sign a licensing agreement. What's up with that? What is wrong with me taking the minimal step to protect my copyright? Why do some people think I am being testy when I don't say, "Yeah, sure, go ahead and make corporate clip art out of it, I don't care..."? So at 3 AM I am browsing my email and one of these requests come in-they write, "Folks, could I get permission to use your Herding Cats image in an internal department document that is not for sale and has no external/client use? what would this take?"
I reply, "I require more information about how you intend to use my image. I haven't gone through the trouble of copyrighting it & registering it only to have it wind up on some company server being used as anonymous clip art. I have occasionally licensed my images for a reasonable price if the person I grant the license to, is willing to sign a document attesting to the onetime non commercial use of my image, along with a guarantee they will destroy the means of reproducing it. But before I grant any such license I need to know a lot more about how you intend to use it and what happens to it after you are done." I admit, my language is not the most flowery at 3 AM.
This person wrote back that due to time and tone he was going another direction. In other words, because I was going to insist on a licensing agreement, he was no longer interested in using my art and maybe he didn't want to pay anything either. I figure this guy just wanted a free easy ride and I am pretty certain he had no nefarious intent, but the thing is art is a business therefore I will continue to insist on licensing agreements. For the record, the one person who did take me up on it, it took about 2 hours with a flurry of emails and one fax, which isn't that big a burden in my opinion. I actually have draft licensing agreements ready to go, but they do require the kind of information I requested: Who are you? What do you want to do with my image-as in how many copies and what is your specific purpose, etc? What will you do with it when you are done?
I know that it is impossible to protect my images, especially those out there on the web, and it is a risk I do not take lightly. That is one reason all is why all my web images have a copyright watermark. It makes it only somewhat difficult for the amateur image bandit to just lift it, and puts the more dedicated thief on notice that if I ever catch them I will cheerfully sue their socks off. In a similar vein, when one someone has my high qualify image for a one time limited use, I can't be sure they are not breaking their license, but again, they signed a document stating they will destroy the original when the use is done. If I catch them, they will have no one to blame but themselves when I take them to court. For the record, I federally copyright everything, and I have registered nearly all the art I can still lay hands on via the Fine Art Registry as well.
I know some of you out there are still saying, Jake, why do you gotta be such a hard a--. I fall back on one big take away I got from that 10-week business class the City of Phoenix so graciously put me through, by NxLevel, which was, 20% of your customers take 80% of your time, you really don't want those customers. The customer isn't always right.
End rant. Back to the cascading style sheet salt mines.
May 10, 2008 - finished the whole moving the meta tags thing about 11 PM last night. Today I have spent a good chunk of the day designing the first style sheet for the revised website. The dynamic web template I have arrived at here is the first template. It is a time saver, but I do have to take a step I was unaware of and cut all the content out of the body before I can apply the template. Then I just paste it into the "content here" editable region. Before I make the cut I am removing all formatting to make sure the old "styles" do not conflict with the new CSS. I hope you like the look. I am thinking about making a scrolling flash widget for the home page, but that is a project for after this project is done.
May 9, 2008 - in the midst of converting this website to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Can you say boring? I am seriously about to lose my mind and I have only just started. I am probably going to do some serious weeding while I am at it. Why am I doing this chore? Because the Microsquish Themes I originally built this thing with are going the way of the dodo and Microsoft has stopped supporting the software I used to create this mess. My webhost has made noises that it too will stop supporting themes soon therefore I am making the change before my website stops functioning. I was hoping there would be some way to transition over smoothly, but it really isn't possible. The hack to convert themes to CSS fills the source code up with all kinds of junk that I am not even using making it hard to find things to make minimal changes. So what is a girl to do? I used my other venture, ArtandBusinessConsulting.com as a guinea pig in preparation for this huge change to figure out what will and will not work. ArtandBusinessConsulting.com is only 25 pages and it took me about 4 days to convert it-but I was still on the learning curve. This site is at least 10 times that size, but hopefully it will go faster. I learned a few things on ABC's website change over - like if you apply a dynamic web template (DWT) to a page, it will wipe out most of your page head, leaving only the title and DWT code in place. I recovered the keywords for the ABC web pages, by copying them from the source code on the web. That was fun (not really), I had to browse to my website online, find the page, open the source code, copy the meta tags, close the source page, paste into the webpage code I am creating, save, repeat as necessary. I have spent an enormous amount of time creating keywords for most of AKAJake's pages; the keywords are a meta tag residing in the page head. Creating keywords for every page is a real a chore on a scale this size (I know, I did it before), so I am in the process of cutting and pasting all my meta tags into the body of each webpage that I won't be reinventing the keywords wheel. Once I have created and attached the DWT to the page I will have to cut and paste the meta tags back into the head, where they came from. So far I can do about 30 cut, paste & save, before I have to go do something, anything else. Its worse than putting in shopping carts, which I still haven't finished after several years of effort-although I was almost done with that. Hey at least I am in the R's now. At 3 PM I was just starting the pages beginning with numbers, (the are before the A's) so it has been about 5 hours - not steady mind you I can't do it that long. Today is the day I officially started the AKAJake.com website hack. Lets see how long this takes. Back to losing my mind. open page, find meta tags, cut, find body tag, paste, save, close, repeat...
March 21, 2008 - I decided to compile some of the images from Art Detour 20 on my own site, see AD20 Aftermath and AD20 Public Art. I hope this update goes. I spent a lot of time uploading new art images in anticipation of StartLogic moving my hosting to a new server. When they moved my other web, it could still be browsed, but I was unable to update it for weeks. I am hoping I don't have the same problem this time around.
March 12, 2008 - Art Detour 20, MOB5 aftermath. First for however long she leaves them there, Sylvia took a mess of pictures of the goings on... http://www.flickr.com/photos/sylviashawn/collections/72157604095779795/, there is also a You Tube video as well http://www.youtube.com/user/sylviashawn. Anyway, so I had to shut down accounting ops for a week to get into my right mind. Still I did have to take in one customer during the mad week of preparation which included photographing and framing 22 pieces of art. I have discovered that you can make even a small piece of art look big with a good mat and frame job. My choice of materials was a hit with the other artists: lightweight, inexpensive and they look good. Prior to the show, we MOB-sters got back together at the Kollectiv all dressed in black, with odd hats and sunglasses and did our best Sopranos impersonations. The point being that since we weren't showing at MonOrchid, we really needed a different interpretation of our namesake-we became the Mob. Many pictures were taken and at some point I got the idea to do a Reservoir Dogs pictorial on us. The portraits I came up with were a hit-so much so that I had requests from the artists for the images post show. In theory Sylvia is going to post the group on flickr too, but they aren't there yet. As for the show, different people responded to different pieces of my art. Some were drawn to the non representational bits. Some to the bright colors. Some to the figures. Some to the pop / commercial pieces. All in all I don't think there was a dud in the bunch. Kristine Remmers of the Kollectiv was an excellent host for the MOB. In fact she says as long as she has room we are welcome to reappear on First Fridays if we want. We did like being able to spread out and claim a space in our own name and style. On the other hand 6 of us were parked in the south side hallway and it was hard to drive traffic there sometimes. As for the traffic, Friday was busy, Saturday was really slow, Sunday morning saw a small spike followed by hours of nothing. In terms of sales I think it was my worst AD yet. There could be several reasons, not the least of which has to do with the promoters of the event-they really were not as organized as they could have been. The brochures weren't even ready until 5 days before the event. There was no time to get them handed out. If I can say something nice about Art Detour is that participation did force me to get out of my left mind, which is in major tax mode this time of year, and get into the creative zone. I like my new figurative work. Something about the pale alabaster figures is really jazzing me. I did get to see some people I hadn't seen in a while, which was pretty cool. Jimmy of "Dogs" came by-he had been to Alaska and Thailand in the interim. Many ghosts who haunted the Paper Heart came by too - they were still in mourning at its passing. The weather was nice so I did a live painting demo on Saturday. I have a really good start on a Phoenix. Well that is the AR20 after burn. I have 27 more pieces to upload to this site and also to the Fine Art Registry.
February 11, 2008 - Believe it or not I have continued to battle computer problems since the last entry-what an emotional time sucker. At the moment I have just about finished migrating all my data to a brand new computer. The other one is on its fourth motherboard (Yes HP replaced it that many times) and it is dying again. HP finally agreed to just give me a new computer, but it has been a long painful process. Enough about the tiresome stuff.
Although my right and left brain continue to battle as I work as a tax accountant & paint, at the moment my right brain is getting some air time. I have begun doing a lot of figurative work. At least among my art buddies it seems well received-in fact someone already has dibs on one of the pieces even before I am getting to show it. I will be premiering the new series with the working title "Alabaster" during Art Detour 20. I am very excited about my new work. There is something about painting the human form, which seems to bring me back in touch with humanity in general. Given the whole extended computer problem issue it is about time I got out of all that left brained thinking and feel like a person again.
In other news I have recently been heard to say, "I like to let my art speak for itself, because I apparently do not do such a good job of it..."
Also I was quite happy to find that I have won some internet awards for my art and this website. YES! Does my heart good. Can you feel me basking in the glow?