Two Through Six

The second day of my "vacation" was occupied with the following: Michael and a trip to Kmart for camera batteries where a crazy-eye helped us with our selection; a successful experiment in bicycle mechanics; an upload of webpage technology; and a trip to biglots which netted me Born to Kill for only three bucks. We also saw that billboard that some kid used to ask his girlfriend to prom. She was already his girlfriend. He could have just said, "Hey, what are you doing next week?" Instead, he wasted a bunch of money on a billboard for the world to see. Later I went with my brother to The Third Annual Homegrown Film Festival which was a strange mix of relatively professional and downright terrible productions. There was another crazy-eye there, a different kind. I think I'm going to organize a film festival. I'll show Wheelchair Werewolf.

One Thousand Hits/Zero Reasons to Give a Crap

This blog hit 1000 page views today. As the number increased, I thought 1000 would be some kind of milestone. Now that it has happened, I feel like 1000 visitors in 8 months is pretty lame.

Since today is Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day, I spent some of it working on fitting a 4x5 Graflex press camera with a pinhole lens, and a 120mm film back, trying to figure out an exposure guide, and taking some pinhole shots. They won't be developed for a while. I also stopped by the tiniest, low-rent carnival and took a few daytime shots. Then I worked on chopping some necks for some cigar box guitars. After that I sat around reading comics and feeling sorry for myself.

Doomed

Feel Better About the Human Race

Multiple Magenta

I'm just going to start spending my free time making these again.

Webmaster/Lonely Loser

My website is up and running at its new home, goodfeets.com. There are some things to work out; like devising a way to effortlessly replace one set of thumbnails with another for future expansion; speeding up the load time; replacing the image-based text on the bio and resume pages with actual, copy-and-paste-able, faster loading text; and probably including a news page for current and upcoming shows I might be involved with. But it works for now and it feels pretty intuitive to navigate despite the fact that its layout is far from traditional.

Now that that's pretty much finished, I'm thinking about preparing for my graduate show which will hopefully, if everything works out, be in December of this year. I'm really just coming up with the idea, and so far it seems like it might be too big for me to complete. I might need an assistant or two to get it finished. That seems pretty unlikely though.

Fail

Even though I'm considering this a failure because of its non-uniform tile size, drastic warping, and general washed out color after glazing, I guess I figured out how to do something I haven't done before. If I live long enough, I'll be going back to the drawing board, mixing a new kind of ceramic ink, and starting this project over again in a few weeks.

Buy American

Jeff Stevenson sent me some pictures this morning showing the way in which he's presented some small pieces of artwork he bought from me a few months ago. Good job Jeff. They look nice framed like that.

Those pieces were a part of Buy American, a mixed media project of 80 small drawings, paintings and prints, all put into retail packaging and offered for sale at the low price of $8.99. This project has been hanging for the last few months, and I'm hoping that the packages have been selling. If you want to check out the project, every package has been scanned and uploaded to a set on flickr.

Goodweb

I'm going to spend the weekend working on getting my website finished. I was so tired last night, but I stayed up all night working on it. Dumb. Hopefully it will be up and available for the world to marvel at within the next couple of weeks. Today, however, I'm going with Jessica to get our stuff from Union Street since that show is over.

Currently Untitled But I'm Working on a Good One

Here's a preview of a part of the piece that I'm trying to get finished for tomorrow's opening. Really, everything that needs to be done, is done. But there are a few details that I wanted to add. If I get through with my chores fast enough, I might have time to get those extra details finished, but if not, I'm fine with what I have right now. I could use an awesome title though. To be smart, and to increase my chances of winning, I should have another piece in the show, so I'm going to look through some of my junk and see if I have anything else to hang. I'm pretty sure I'm going to win anyway, despite a few awesome pieces by Jessica, Michael, Mike Smith, Rob Contania, and a dude I've seen around a lot but to whom I was never formally introduced. Today we talked for a while and I found out his name is Tor.

Updated to report on titling: The Intercession of the Saints (or Their Equivalent)

Wednesday

The school's annual student show opens next week. The work I've been doing lately has been going so slow that I'm not sure what I recent work I have that I want to exhibit. I'm hoping to get my JFK assassination project in a presentable state by Wednesday and get that in. I don't know what else. Anyway the show is going from April 8 - May 14. There's an opening reception Wednesday the 8th and everyone is welcome to come. There should be some free grub. GSU Visual Arts Gallery 1 University Parkway, University Park, IL.

Southern Graphics

I don't want to seem like a crybaby or a misanthrope, so I'll just say that the Southern Graphics Conference was kind of a drag. My instincts are telling me to point fingers and rant about how things could have been better organized, but instead I'll just blame it on the fact that I wasn't feeling really healthy during the few days I was there. I did have a great lunch at The India Grill on Wabash so it wasn't all bad.