Back to the drawing board…
Literally.
So it’s been almost a year since I last updated here, which will look like like the first post because there’s years’ worth of content that I didn’t feel like digging through and locating and reposting images etc to make it all work again so they’re all drafts. (Site got hacked and buggered up.)
A lot has changed since then, but I guess for most people stumbling on this it really doesn’t matter as y’all are probably either new to my work or you’ve known me for ages and know my score.
Short version: once upon a time, I actually was more of a visual artist and writer. Then I crashed and burned in my foundation year at art school, dropped out, went and wasted a lot of time at university, quit that, and spent a few years off on an experimental music tangent (which all of 20 people might have actually listened to… project was maQLu, speaking of websites that don’t work and most likely also got hacked and I haven’t been bothered to fix that shit yet, either.) Anyway, that sucked too, and I then took a tangent through comedy and political podcasts for a wee bit (I’d link except none of the 3 of us still do that show and I think my cohosts let the podbean archive die, so you’ll just have to take my word that we were hilarious edgy bois plus one edgy gurl). Then I finally wised up and got the Hell out of the God-forsaken shithole known as Vancouver (ie, a giant soulless mall with the added bonus feature of insufferable traffic jams) and moved to Vancouver Island, which is more like a series of old timey strip malls connected by one dumb highway and a lot of unmarked backroads (seriously, this place doesn’t understand the concept of putting road signs at rural intersections…), which I think you’ll agree is a vast improvement.
In between all this was my project Zamo the Destroyer, which started as a webcomic, then went on hiatus, then became a podcast which is currently on hiatus but I plan to do a new episode soon. I had an iguana for 10 years and believe me when I say that not doing an episode for 10 months is entirely in keeping with their work ethics (or lack thereof), so let’s call the current hiatus “authenticity.”
Anyway, along the way I had several false starts of getting back to visual arts but I think this time it’s gonna stick, so I figured I should rejig the website to reflect that. It’ll take a while, I’m sure, because I have a work ethic like my late iguana’s I’m doing some mixed media stuff that makes it easy to bog down in one segment of the work before I can get stuff finished, but I’ll try to blog along the way and share some images, etc.
To that end, here’s a view of the windowsill next to my desk. Some of those mixed media segments are stacked up there, and you can see a ton of weeds chunk of my English cottage garden out front.
In a nutshell, here’s the art I’m working on at the moment:
- Mini graphic books/comics about European folklore and pagan customs
- Art prints and coloring pages of the same
- A Zamo anthology and new episodes (after naptime, of course)
- Pretending like I’m gonna weed the garden
- A mixed media painting series having to do with now-reviled feminine accoutrements like high heels and perfume
- Stepping stones for my garden using up my years-untouched old stained glass hoard for mosaic decoration
- A DIY Foundation term, to try to learn the important things I missed out on while avoiding the bullshit I could have done without
- Working through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way to get unblocked (it’s working)
- I’ll be revising my YouTube channel to reflect the new direction too, which should confuse the people who subscribed when I was doing FlossTube videos about cross-stitching other people’s designs
TL; DR: back to the drawing board in the art school sense of the word.
