There was some good news in month 7. One of my pieces is slotted to have a page in an art magazine. I’ll share more when it happens. I’m pretty sure if I can keep going long enough, eventually I’ll get some recognition and be able to keep making art. However, I’ll probably have to go back to work before that happens.
I still have 5 months left to do my own work.
Last month I lost a lot of money. Most of that went to a 3-month down-payment on rent for my new house (I’ll get most of that back eventually, but that doesn’t help me now); the cost of moving; a bicycle so I can get around; the ridiculous $85 fee for putting more pages in my passport; and the visa run to Laos (including transportation, hotel, and Laos + Thai visa fees). I will save money on rent every month, but that will only pay off in the long run.
As for my new home, I like Chiang Rai much better than Chiang Mai and living in a house better than a guesthouse. I prefer nature to the night life (I had nothing to do with the nightlife in CM), and living someplace that feels like Thailand rather than an expat and tourist hot spot with all the amenities. I think most other people would prefer Chiang Mai. It all depends on what one is looking for. I feel really lucky to live just blocks away from a river, and see lizards everywhere.
I bike to the river most days, and do a free workout with the machines, then loop back home through a back route. It’s all very healthy.
When it comes to the lizards, it helps if you like them when they start coming inside and hanging upside own on the ceiling.
The little ones are in every room, which is just one of the reasons I affectionately call this house “The Terrarium”.
Speaking of unusual creatures, I hope that if anyone reading this saw the stuff I posted about life on Mars realized it was a hoax, and that I created it.
The whole article and “Frontier Science Report” are completely bogus. I could best sum this up as a publicity stunt. The reasons I did it is because my KFC mutant chicken is my most popular post with over 25,000 views, I like pranks, and I get just a little annoyed at how gullible people are. This post is already my fifth most popular, but it hasn’t caught on. I have to hope that someone else with a lot more reach picks it up and decides to use it to get hits for themselves, and thus advertising $, and that I get a tiny fraction of those hits, which is nevertheless a landslide for me. I don’t get any advertising $. The reason to attract people to my blog is just to get my art more exposure. It’s become quite apparent that one can’t really sell fine art through a complete grassroots attempt. At least I can say I tried and got shat on, rather than I didn’t try at all. But I haven’t tried everything yet.
I’m a little disappointed in myself that I didn’t actually finish any significant new pieces this month. It’s largely due to the move and visa run and acclimating to my new situation, but I still fell like I wasted precious time. However, there are several pieces in the works, and one is almost ready. I’m also working on probably my most serious attempt at art criticism, which is a somewhat lengthy analysis of postmodernist philosophy and its influence on contemporary art. That one required a lot of research and rumination.
Nevertheless last month my blog received the most views so far, with over 12,000, but they were mostly for the stupid KFC chicken, and my critique of Milo Moire’s now infamous performance art piece in which she hatched paint filled eggs out of her privates onto a canvas. In other words it comes from people doing Google searches and being led to my blog, not from any interest in me or anything I’m doing. Gotta’ be realistic in order to come up with strategies for making progress.
~ Ends
WARNING: If you don’t want to endure the self-promo stuff I have to do to try to keep afloat, stop scrolling now. Content here is always free to you, but if someone wants a print, or to help out, I need to make that possible. I also offer prints for a minimal profit above production costs. In other words, they are inexpensive.
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Art & Crit by Eric Wayne 