APRIL 24th 2008

Going to the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and etc., scratching my head is a luxury I can’t afford, however with this little time I have, I decided to relax for a second and put my thoughts down.
Being an artist is probably what I will be for the rest of my life, which is both sad and exciting at the same time.
Exciting: because I get to do what I love.
Sad: because I won’t get to do any other thing but this. I mean, really? Getting a job is just going to get worse.
I was at the NY con on Saturday and saw all these artists who were successful and all the other ones who weren’t as successful. And it wasn’t really because the successful ones were any more talented than the unsuccessful ones. It was just funny to see what majority of people (who aren’t artists) like to pay for. Who decides what bad art is anyway? As long as you please the majority of people (who have no idea or personal opinion about art) you become the greatest artist in the world. What about the rest of us who don’t really care what majority of people want? What about us who just want to do art because of art’s sake? I don’t want to sound like a retard artist who thinks they’re better than anybody else or don’t really care about other people’s opinion. Quite the contrary, I live by the Jante law, I’m from Scandinavia for Pontius Pilate’s sake. To make this short, I don’t think I’m better than anybody, and I actually would love to hear people’s TRUE opinion about anything I do. I admit though, I am to some degree an “art snob”. But everybody has standards, and having high standards will just help you learn and grow. So for people out there who thinks everybody is “awesome!” and has no real personal opinion about anything OR just says good things about someone’s art just to not hurt their feelings: “grow balls!!”
In a perfect world people care about other people. This means you respond to what they do because you’re interested in what they do (I’m not talking about just art. it could be anything from cooking to building a spaceship). And by responding I mean you really look at what they’ve done and point out the things you like and the points that you think that could have been done differently to make the work better. Simply praising someone’s work without any helpful comment is just going to boost that person’s ego and they will never grow. And if you ONLY criticize someone’s work just because you want to disintegrate someone’s dignity is not constructive either. I don’t want to sound like I’m preaching so I’ll stop this right here.
Back to my point about doing art for art’s sake, Joe Kubert told me that I should give my employees what they want even if I’m not satisfied with it. He came up with several scenarios, where the employee likes the crappy drawings I’ve done and is willing to pay me for it. Do I sell it? Do I tell them no? do I do more work for them afterwards? To be honest, I didn’t know what to answer him. I mean he was right when he said that we artists expect a lot from ourselves and want everything to be perfect and that sometimes we should just let the employee decide weather or not the art is good or bad. But I think if you’re completely dissatisfied with what you’ve done you shouldn’t even show it to anyone to get a job in first place. If you don’t really like what you’re doing why would you even bother doing it? You might as well just work at Macy’s.
Anyway, I better end this now. This is frustrating me. And here I was thinking this was going to relax me a little bit.