Non xe più tempo de luganighe

I have Aphantasia, its super hard to put characters in poses from my mind. I cannot draw cartoons or exaggeration well, its very hard because I do not see the drawing until it is on the page. I use so many construction lines and blocks of color and always need a reference to base my character poses on. I cannot imagine things artistically before they're on the page and it is super frustrating.

You can still do it with Aphantasia though, it just takes practice. So many of your sketches without references are going to look awful despite you knowing the proper proportions of the human body, it doesn't mean you don't know what you're doing.

It just means you need to give yourself extra help. You're not lesser or bad for not being able to draw on a whim or not having these intricate details. Trust me, I've struggled with thinking that.

The best thing you can do to work with it is collect so many references, use a pose software (like magic poser), and absolutely screenshot and collect art that has a creative element you struggle with. (For me its color, backgrounds, and splash text.) Also, maybe practice abstract art. You have a brain unhindered by a visual expectation, I recommend it. For me I like to do surrealist/abstract pictures of water and space. It takes technical skill but everyday is a good day to start practicing.

Lovelies, your stories and art are beautiful because they are from you, and FOR you. Stats do not determine the quality of a product. Again, some of the BEST stories on the archive I have ever read were around 100 hits, and 0-10 kudos. Some of the BEST ART I’ve seen has 0 notes.

You know how I can tell? Because the authors and artists poured their heart and soul into their craft. As long as it can inspire ONE person, you should be proud. You just radically changed the life and perspective of ONE person. That’s amazing.

Sure, you might think your art or story is “cringe” or “bad”…OR, it can be someone’s comfort piece that they go back to after a long day. You may see your stats and think, “man, nobody enjoys this,” not knowing that maybe, juuuust maybe, you have that ONE person who you’ve inspired, who loves your work, and lurks your socials awaiting for your next project. Your art, your music, YOUR story has the potential to do that, but you have to love what YOU do.

And yes, your love WILL show. Maybe not with stats, or kudos, or notes, or comments. But you may be someone’s favorite without even knowing. As long as your art is out there, it WILL reach somebody. I will try to be that somebody for a lot of you, but there is indeed A LOT of you.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I encourage you to have a seat and read this little ‘essay’ I wrote back in 2014 if you really want to understand what I’m doing today. I would be really grateful and I’m sure you’ll have a much better understanding of my whole work.

Digital walls, but walls

On the way to space and public art | came across the digital walls. They can be “painted” but they also have the function of limiting, of delimiting, of separating…

A change of paradigm has been happening for some years now with the arrival of the internet, which has completely changed some aspects and concepts that have to do with the world of art and more specifically with urban art or public art. From the beginning, this type of art has been carried out in public places with the aim of being observed by anyone on the street and thus making it free, accessible and free from any premise or institution when it is created. (not considering the “warlike coexistence” with the advertising).

The appearance of the Internet has changed it. A vast majority of the art is seen online on a screen, what questions that the street is the natural canvas of this art discipline. While it is for the one who creates the piece, it is almost never for the one who looks at it. Public spaces are no longer just physical, in the same way that the plastic arts are no longer just plastic.

Due to the access to technology and its cheapness, nowadays it is inconceivable to think of art without considering the whole digital sphere, whether as a tool, a method of creation or of dissemination. But at the same time, all these centuries of art history condition the understanding of art, sometimes acting as a burden in terms of understanding what art is.

The dragging of already preconceived ideas and the weight of the genetic inheritance makes us repeat concepts about what art is and was. In the face of such a rapid change of paradigm, it seems that we find it difficult to understand that this whole new digital world is still the world. Both virtual and augmented reality are also reality, but the fact that it is appreciated through a screen sometimes causes it not to be considered as something artistic or even real. Thinking that way we could say that looking at a piece of art on the Internet does not have its complete experience, since we are not seeing it in the place for which it was devised, and neither are we perceiving it in a direct way, but with a screen as an intermediary. But at the same time, I think about all the content that we consume today with these devices - movies, series, photographs, news, and even art, current and classic - and not because of that we think or say that they are unreal.

At this point, where the analog space merges with the digital space, a new artistic expression is born that is entirely digital, where the final piece is born and ends up in the digital realm. Conceived through digital tools and deposited in the public digital space. These pieces of art suggest skipping the step of "existing” first in the ‘real reality’ to reach directly the virtual reality, which is also reality, and once from there, to have an impact on the analog reality.

It would also be curious to reflect on the parallelism between urban art and digital art, since, being in public places, both are susceptible to being stolen, altered or appropriated by other people for different purposes. And also, on the idea of anonymity, always used by urban artists to be able to work in the street without risk of infringement, and now also used in the digital environment. Either by often using copyrighted content that we find on the web (street 2.0) for an artistic purpose or by the “erosion of sharing” in which at some point someone does not credit the work, but it is still shared. In this case there should be a new word to define those people that everybody knows, but nobody knows who they are. “Famonimous” characters or the concept of “famonimity”; people or artists who are known precisely because they are anonymous.

Since the beginnings of urban art, the idea was to use public space to express oneself freely, but we must bear in mind that public space is nothing more than the remainder of the space divided by the private, the “leftovers” after the developers pass, the worthless places left open to the common people by institutions, etc., etc….. With the change of social, technological and artistic paradigm, urban art has been normalized and is now used as a method of decoration of places in poor condition, as a complement to a public road or simply as a means of open artistic expression as it has always been. Because if the initial objective was to make art accessible, direct and open to everyone, that idea has moved to the internet and, in some ways, the radical idea of urban art would no longer have that sense.

Therefore, if we understand urban or public art as a type of art accessible to everyone, free of charge and without any kind of condition, | believe that digital art fulfils this role today, since it inhabits all public places, whether analog or digital. Urban art needs this digital sphere to be able to expand and be visible. Because nowadays most urban art is seen through screens, not in the place where the piece has been created, which makes all these works more accessible to everyone at any time. And so, the ’paradox of the graffiti artist’ is born, the one who expresses his freedom in the walls that imprison him. These walls generate private spaces and what is outside them is considered public space by the mere fact of being spaces where people pass through. But it does not mean that this public space is open to intervention. Every public space is under the supervision of a privative entity, whether it is a municipality, a company or simply, the property of an individual. Public space does not exist, neither in the ‘real reality’, nor in the virtual one. It is always subject to something superior that manages it.

Within this dilemma, augmented reality becomes another alternative to the path of public art. It gives the possibility of creating art in public spaces, only seen on digital devices, and using the ‘real reality’ as the piece’s canvas. Until recently, photography and/or video were methods of capturing reality. Now, with this change of prism, these disciplines moved from being the purpose itself, to becoming raw material for the creation of other new artistic expressions. In this direction, | want to focus on the gif format. This format is strictly digital, so it gives us the option to edit, to add movement to pieces that, before, condemned to live still. We can spread in on the Internet and make it accessible to everyone at any time. When adding augmented reality, the two concepts intertwine, urban/public art and digital art, what gives rise to new artistic expressions that call into question deep rooted concepts such as museum, art and reality.

There are already many centuries researching, testing and creating the same type of art, whether sculpture, painting…. Except for the birth of new “isms” within these disciplines, it gives the impression that they are exhausted. At this point it would be convenient to think about the idea of unique work, copy, forgery, recreation… Thinking about the evolution of art we must consider that all new progress is born of the technological options that occur in each era. Nowadays, the difference is that progress happens every day, very fast, and it seems that it is difficult (or unwilling) to understand this change because of the speed of it. This cultural and genetic heritage blurs our vision and sometimes prevents us from conceiving new artistic expressions as such, since there are no previous references to support them.

But, at the end of the day, every new artistic expression, in its beginnings, was not art. “Science develops ideas that come from art that is inspired by science.” The world of classical art enjoys an aura of untouchable deity because when we are born it has always been there, but we cannot forget to think for a moment with perspective that all this classical art was created mainly by the entities of power of each era: kings, church, political powers…

This is why today (without underestimating the technique and the work of the artists) these types of classical art enjoy an invulnerability as, in the end, it was created by and for the power itself.

Then, this type of art collides with the urban and/or public art, along with digital art. In the public and digital space those who decide what is "art” are the people.

I am sure that the first Cro-Magnon who used a tuft of horse hairs instead of his own hands to paint was seen as an art/magic/belief apath.

Now we live in a new paradigm shift, but in this case it is not local or national, it is global and immediate.

i see the disdain flash in my mother's eyes when she is compared to my grandmother. i watch as she catches the fury under her eyelids.

what frightens me is that a mother's hate is a mirror to a mother's love. but the stretched ropes and falling eyelashes hold me in place, as they hold her. she is the reflection of my shadow. in another day, in another time, her mother is a reflection of hers.

you could set fires to a forest, but what will you do if the roots remain intact? i know she tries to let it go. i see her try every day. but she is the mother she had, no matter where life takes her. and i fear i will be the mother i have.

Okay, for those of you who may be confused let me explain. So basically, i woke up today in a strangers house with no memories. adding to that, this wasn’t just any house, it was a giants house. Obviously i was freaked out when i woke up underneath a ginormous couch with nothing but my clothing, which looked worse for wear.

I had foolishly assumed that I was alone in the house, and got reckless while trying to wrap my head around the situation. I ended up getting spotted by the giant that resided in the house and they caught me. Fast forward past a bunch of struggling and injuries on my part and here we are. A giant is warming me about the sting of antiseptic as I struggle to keep my breathing sound. His hand, which is about the size of a car, steadily approaching.

He doesn’t wait for me to give consent before dabbing an alcohol covered q-tip on my fresh wound. I let out a yelp and curl in no myself. My breath starts to grow ragged, as the stinging in my leg grows more and more noticeable.

“S-sorry little guy, but we have to make sure it won’t get infected” I feel a warm plush finger start to rub my back, in an attempt to calm my anxiety. Unfortunately for them, I haven’t had the best experience with giant hands since I woke up here this morning. I flinch away and try to curl into myself further.

My body starts to shake as I feel tears prick my eyes. The stinging has subsided minority, but now I’m more focused on the looming giant. I just need space. Why won’t they leave me alone. They keep making things worse. Just go away. Go away. Please please please just go away.

They touch my head again, ruffling my hair roughly. I yelp back and finally snap.

“PLEASE JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!” My voice sounds odd to my ears. Not how I had expected it to sound. It’s watery and cracks on certain vowels. I feel the hand flinch back at my comment. The giant hesitates before speaking.

“Y-you can actually…talk..?” He seems unsure of the proper response. I assume he didn’t think I was sentient, or at least that I didn’t speak his language.

I ignore his question, which seemed more like a shocked observation than anything else. I look up at him and for the first time today, I look him in the eyes. I’m shocked with how sorrowful they look, he seems so sad. Why does he look that way?

We hold each other’s gazes for several silent minutes. His eyes are a sparkling shade of silver, which is combined with the soft hue of teal. They’re comforting and calm, while still looking concerned.

“I-I need to clean up your wound, it might get infected if I don’t” he said carefully. He showed me the differing supplies and ointments he had layed out around the surface of tile that surrounded me. “I’ll try to be gentle with you, but I don’t want you getting even more hurt because of struggling”

Against my better judgement I nodded. He carefully lifted my leg up in between his two fingers. Gently he rubbed some healing oil onto the flesh surrounding the wound, along with ointment on the wound itself. O was pleasantly surprised to see how cautious he was while working.

When he had finished, he bandaged up my leg with gauze and set it down.

“Is that better?” He asked, putting a bit more space between us now that it wasn’t necessary.

“Y-yes, I think so…” I figured with my hands and the hem of my well worn shirt. He seemed to brighten when I spoke, smiling a bit in a friendly gesture.