Monthly round up – Month 2 – lived on $413

Two months of my year of art (which I hope to make into the rest of my life) are finished. If you don’t know, I’m paying for this. Stopped working for the man and now working for me, and much harder, on art. At the end of each month I’m trying to do a summation, and reevaluate my dwindling finances.

I thought I could survive on as little as $500 a month, which this month I proved is totally realizable. I only spent $413.  I even had two massages, and 2-3 beers. It helps that I do all my own laundry by hand, rarely eat Western food, hardly drink any alcohol, and never use the A/C. The project looks promising, but in order to keep my Visa going, I have to make expensive border runs and pay all sort of fees, which hurts.

This was the month of ART PRANK CRITICISM. I’d dare say it’s a new sort of blogging that incorporates, you guessed it: art, pranking, and criticism. Sadly, when I was posting what are some of my very best posts, unbeknownst to me my “feed was not validated”, which means my subscribers weren’t seeing them. Alas, I have assembled them in one place, and even made a custom widget in the right sidebar, which you can click on at any time to enter this zone of novel art and criticism. It’s the same image as you see above.

Among other things, I made faux magazine articles about art pieces I created for the occasion in order to illustrate my arguments, and challenge contemporary art dogma.

One event this month was my first sale of a piece this year. Someone bought my “Arousing Curiosity”, which I did roughly in the style of Jeff Koons’ so-called paintings, which are really his Photoshop collages painted wall-sized and photo-realistically by some hired artists. It was originally part of a critique of the most popular living American artist, and his work that sells for tens of millions, but I needed to beat him at his own game, and in so doing made a fine collage which I attributed to him! And THAT was part of the Art Prank Criticism series.

I just checked and it appears that the same person or company bought 2 of the pieces, framed. Oh boy. Why would they buy more than one, unless they wanted to resell them for a profit? Or maybe for interior decorating. Well, I made $8.50 on the combined sales. Nothing to get too excited about. I am not charging much for prints, and the lion’s share just goes for the materials involved. That should show up in my PayPal account next month. Now, if I had 60X the audience that I have, I might make enough similar sales to stay afloat. So, let people know about my blog if you dig it.

I stayed up all night last night to finish the B&W version of my Human Fly. I have arbitrary deadlines, and other objectives I require myself to meet. For example, I did an average of 3.5 hours of art per day last month, and that doesn’t include blogging, research, thinking, or breaks. It’s only for when I’m actually busy working at the computer in Photoshop. I figured out how many hours of work I’d need to do, if I was paid just $5 an hour for making art, to be able to survive. Then I divided it by 30. I don’t get paid that way, but for some reason the math made sense, and 3.5 hours of serious art time is difficult to achieve every day. Often I stayed up into the wee hours just to finish, and I’ve now become a night owl. I’m going to try to fix that this month, because I don’t think it’s good for my health. I’ll set an alarm and force myself to get started earlier.

Another thing I try to do each month is two serious new pieces. My brother suggested that, and I’m going with it. Anyway, I’m very pleased with my Fly. Because he’s inside, in a completely imagined space, following rules of perspective and shading (to the best of my ability), he’s completely artificial, and yet seems alive. This piece is a bit like being in the space of someone’s head. And what the fly is doing is a lot like what I was doing while creating him – not the barfing and porking on junk food, but the creating and experimenting using my imagination (and computers). Stay tuned for the color version.

And sometimes it’s worth putting something on a mug. Maybe someone will buy it – ’cause it looks cool – and I’ll make another $4.50. That’s my cut.

See ya’ next moth for another monthly round up.