My current business goal is to drastically reduce admin time so I may similarly increase time making art, reading, researching, rambling on the beach, idling in forests, visiting state and county fairs, and generally absorbing the gossamer of life and its many splendors.
Website 1.1
I've spent the last few months tinkering with the website's front end and back. This has largely consisted of ripping out the semi-custom wires and playing nicely with the purchased framework. It is... frustrating... to be limited, but it is allowing me to focus on things I specifically care about (painting) rather than the things I do not (being particularly clever in website construction).
Paint
I started the summer wanting to reduce the physical media in which I work in (acrylic paint, gouache, and watercolor)... I successfully removed acrylic paint from the mix. Specific to how I want to work, there is a lot of overlap between gouache and acrylic, and I'm finding the former easier to work with.
Watercolor is so fast and expressive that it will likely remain a studio staple for sketches, experiments, and blog headers. There is not significant pressure to types of media outside of spending time to improve skills and specialize.
Future blogs and essays
Given the rise of AI and the continued oddities of paid influencer culture on social media (it will forever be weird that we all culturally moved away from the tighter title, "spokesmodel"), I am dusting off old plans to review books, movies, and other older media.
I want to focus on things either a bit older and forgotten or fresh, new, and with small audiences.
Small internet
In writing for this site's revamp, I kept referring to "the small internet," by which I mean independent (hi) websites, studios, artists, musicians, writers, puppet makers... people making things with far more heart than marketing budget.
I miss the early 1990s to early 2000s internet era. This will be my small way of keeping the spirit alive and well.
I can feel this terminology percolating back into my soul and I love it.
Netherworld Stories and a yet-released Endless Exploration series
A large parcel of stories are ready for posting, missing only artwork. This will serve fantastically on this year-without-commerce -- practice and space to experiment and explore art without committing to products.
I haven't yet cracked the Endless Exploration series format quite yet, but I feel I am very close. Similar to stories, these will explore the Netherworld, but without a focus on characters or plots.
I am inspired by text-based MMORPG rooms and ambient messaging. Pure background detail and atmospheric texture, nothing happening in the gameplay, and seemingly endless in depth and variety.
Now that the framework for the rest of Netherworld Post has been established, I can get to the work of getting to work.
