O, Bedlam!

After I complete a flurry new one-of-a-kind masks I must photograph them, then edit said photos and then edit angel-mask.com's pages to include the new masks --

-- but technology was not cooperating.  Amidst the usual happy furor of this time of year, at first it seemed the rechargeable batteries for my Olympus C-3000 had lost their ability to hold a charge.  But the batteries were tested, and proved their mettle.  Which meant something was wrong with this rather expensive camera. 

Luckily it was only the Smart Media memory card, and even luckier I have extras.  Phew.  But in the process of figuring all that out, I'd lost a day and a half of productivity -- a perilous thing when creating and promoting time-sensitive artworks like masks, worse still in this rather iffy economy.  And making a living in the arts ain't for sissies, in any economy.

However, through the virtues of Sheer Obstinacy, I persevered and ultimately completed the photo shoot, then edited the shots.  I then got them onto the pages and wrote their little blurbs, and finally got 'em all uploaded.  Yay.

"Imbrium", leather mask © Ryl Mandus

Is it happy hour, yet?  I am so ready for much rejoicing.

-- Ryl

“Inspiration is for amateurs,
 the rest of us just show up and get to work.”

~ Chuck Close

-- but life's hectic [par for the course], and after posting to my usual blog, FB, and Twitter, I tend to procrastinate posting here -- a case of burnout canceling out my attempts to form more positive habits.  That's the only excuse I have for neglecting my LJ thingie.

At any rate, I'm in crunch mode for Halloween and have listed six of the new one-of-a-kind masks on the website.  This one is "Smaragda": 

,... and more are on the way!

Halloween is looming fast -- do you know where your mask is?

-- Ryl

This one was teetering on the precipice of abandonment for a short while. It began as a simple pencil sketch, followed by watercolor washes -- that refused to do what I wanted them to do.

So I let it teeter there for a while longer,....
 

( title:  Shadows of a Doubt )

A day later, and refusing to admit defeat to a piece of paper, I had at it again.  Again, it refused to do what I wanted.

When I entered the studio yesterday morning, it sat there on my drafting table, silently mocking me.  I picked it up and dangled it in a very threatening manner over the waste basket, when the little light bulb in my head began to shine,...

... if this fledgling work refused to become the painting it was supposed to be, then it was fair game for experimentation. 

I switched from watercolors to acrylics.  Prussian Blue was coaxed into bleeding upwards, while Payne's Grey was allowed to bleed down.  I scrubbed severely thinned Payne's Grey into the previously failed background, then began pulling the subject's highlights forward and pushing his shadows backwards with more opaque pigments, then picked his finer details out with four different tones of color pencil.

I had my doubts, yesterday morning, when I first began reworking the painting -- but now I'm wondering if the painting needed to be something other than what I had in mind.

A few months back I was talking shop with another artist, and we got onto the subject of the qualities and elements that make a body of work distinctively recognizable as the creation of a Particular Artist, so that when you see that new work you know without a doubt who did it.

[below: "In the Blue Room", watercolors/acrylics on paper, 11" x 15"]



He'd used the word signature -- and, dopey me, at the time I'd thought he actually meant the manner of signing one's name to a newly finished work.

Yeah.  I shoulda had the wits to press him for clarification right then, considering he refers to the figures in his own works as 'characters' [a concept I totally dig], but I have this naive tendency to take things at face value.  As a consequence, I completely missed any nuances that might've been in his wording.

Hindsight is said to be 20/20 -- but it takes some things longer to come into focus for me.  Wisdom needs to gestate, like a pearl accumulating its layers of nacre.  That, or I just need to pay closer attention.

So here I am, again pondering this thing he'd called signature.  For my own needs that word doesn't quite work.  I don't want to replace it with the word style -- style can be shallow, a passing fancy tied to an era and its social politics, unforgivably dating it.  But 'technique' doesn't fit, either -- that's the mechanical process of physically creating the art.

Okay, back to the idea of 'characters' instead of 'figures', approaching it all as narratology --

Maybe the word I'm looking for is 'voice' -- like when a writer has a distinctive, recognizable way of stringing words together to get ideas across.  That kind of recognition is akin to being able to pick out a voice you know in a crowded and noisy restaurant -- a personal blend of pitch, timbre, cadence and vocabulary, and sometimes unconscious poetry.

Along with having and developing my 'voice' as a visual artist, I need to ask myself :  What do I want to say?

-- are now on the website:

At long last, I've got a new desktop computer and I'm in the process of making a full migration from PC to Mac.  Gotta find new drivers for my scanner, printer, and interfaces for my digital cameras,...

Also gotta get a new FTP going in the next couple of days, but until then, please note that these one-of-a-kind masks from the "Unique Collection" have just been sold:

"Conciliatrix"
"Merlot"
"Ice Cap"
"Mindsweeper"

TTFN,
Ryl

... and this last one begins with "Dear Sir".  I wonder whether they actually went to either of my websites,...

At any rate, they claim to sell PVC corsets [from a bogus url, yet], and they want me to peddle their stuff for them.  The verbiage of the e-mail's body reads like an attempt at Shakespeare by someone whose first language is not English.

"Dear Sir" -- I get that so often.  Why?

Got a big, new monitor where the squares are squares instead of rectangles, and the circles are circles instead of ovals -- yay! 

But this new monitor also shows just how yucky a lot [!] of my image files are -- bummer. 

So now I need to replace all those yucky .jpg's -- it's going to be a long week.

Yesterday I mothballed both of my Blogspots as it was just two blogs too many -- an account each on Wordpress for my visual art and for my masks, and then repeating the same on Blogger.  [weary sigh]  It all got to be a bit much.

Yeah, yeah, you get more control over the layout and color schemes with Blogger.  But it's just so much easier for me to post on Wordpress.

Several friends and business associates, and now family members, are telling me I just gotta [?!] get on Facebook.  I'll confess to some trepidation over that -- I've been harassed by coattail-riding parasites and stalked by a bewildering variety of whackjobs who've refused to accept the fact that not only am I heterosexual, I'm also married. 

So if I get a Facebook account, what kind of headaches am I be letting myself in for?

Opinions, please,....