small posts to be enjoyed en masse

as I continue to chip away at my website, and get a feel for wordpress’s new full site editor capacity, I’m more excited than ever about what I can do with my website and also having some decision paralysis around what to do next, you know?

I think I mentioned this in an earlier post but I’m not in dire need of a portfolio site right now; for various reasons I’m not actively courting freelance art gigs, including but not limited to the state of my dominant hand, and the permanent salaried art director position I currently hold. it also seems likely to me that should I need to find a new job, I would likely seek out another art directing job; and the professional materials required to land one of those are not nearly as dependent on a portfolio of paintings as prior jobs in my career have been.

however I do really love sharing the work I’m doing, and have done, on the internet. and some of my work has a structure on its own, like my watercolor maps forming a pretty cohesive collection, or my crystal islands, or my comic work. I think those can all be their own sort of raison d’etre on the internet. but 99% of the things I make are much less organized than that, so I was wondering if it would make sense to simply approach things from an archival standpoint.

the nice thing about WordPress is the amount of metadata you can include in a post by having both the posted on date and the most recently modified date, as well as any custom Fields I choose to include, as well as tagging things like the medium or subject matter, and of course categorizing things. I feel like I would enjoy having a chronological archive of my own creative work on the internet in a way where I could find things if I wanted to share them in particular, but also in a way where it would be straightforward to do some curation to form a narrative around my own development or exploration of different mediums or ideas. like I think it’s pretty funny that I have almost three decades of my own artwork and that despite this depth of time and a huge range of skill, it’s all clearly made by the same nerd.

but I also have a little voice in my head that says this is hilariously self-centered and self-aggrandizing – and I have a slightly louder voice in my head that points out that this is maybe not something that I want to share publicly on the internet? but maybe that is easier to judge on a Case by case basis. like no, I’m not uploading my grade 9 handwritten novel, hahaha, can you imagine, dear God – but some of my grade nine drawings feel like important parts of my creative journey? God that’s so pretentious. anyways if I’m going to talk into the void on the internet I guess I can talk about whatever the hell I want, but I am curious if there’s a precedent for people maintaining archives of their creative lives publicly, and of course if there’s any interest from anyone else in this sort of thing.

living through this dominant hand stuff has certainly made me more self-reflective about my art right now anyways so, maybe this is something that feels like the right choice today and then in a year or two or three I will either choose to take down or feel deeply embarrassed by having done ever. future me will just have to deal though.

Since moving apartments, I’ve been feeling a kind of spring cleaning urge for all of my things physical and it turns out, digital. Since my physical belongings are an unmanageable mountain of family heirlooms in the form of bankers boxes full of loose photographs, and artifacts from my grandmother’s childhood that nobody can identify but also nobody ever threw out, I’ve been feeling like I should try something a little bit more manageable first.

By that I mean, my digital life. I have maintained a personal website on the internet since 1997; for the majority of that time, my personal website has served primarily as a portfolio of my artwork. However, that’s not necessary right now, for a couple of reasons:

A) Careerwise, I’m working as a salaried, permanent art director at a videogame company. I’m not only not currently looking for a job, but my prior approach to jobhunting, having a collection of examples of my concept art and illustration, probably isn’t the best way to find another salaried art director job in future. While it might be one part of that hunt, I suspect I will also need examples of the finished games, as well as all the other things people use to get real jobs like references, etc. This means that a personal portfolio site won’t be the make or break in my future job hunt at this time.

B) Perhaps even more importantly, though, I don’t know that a portfolio of my prior work is going to be a particularly accurate demonstration of what my work going forward is going to look like. Since my arm surgery, I’m learning to draw with my left hand, and since I don’t have anywhere near the physical control over it that I did over my dominant hand, my approach to making art is being forced to change. And it’s very early days, right now I’m still teaching myself to write legibly, and building the muscles it takes to do that. Line control and mark making with appeal are simply not on the short-term schedule. So much as I am proud of, and attached to my prior work, my prior style, and my prior process, it feels dishonest to promise those to future clients. Or to myself, really. So a portfolio format just asks a lot of questions I have no answers to at this time.

Other reasons for having my work on the internet include selling it, which I certainly love to do, but between moving and my arm and paperwork, right now I’m just selling PDFs in a pay what you want capacity on my gumroad store. I do hope to get back into designing products and selling playmaps and so on, but it’s the right choice right now to keep that on hold.

So I’m a bit at a loss for what to do with my personal website, is the TLDR of all this. I really got out of the habit of blogging or writing personal thoughts on the Internet when we entered the everything is problematic phase of cultural conversations; I would like to reclaim that but it might be safer to do so in the less personal/more anonymous space of cohost or tumblr or such. I’m certainly curious to hear people’s thoughts on that!

One angle I had thought of was approaching my website as an archive, as opposed to a portfolio; I can be a bit obsessive about tracking the chronology of things, why not take advantage of that? But I don’t know if that has any interest to anybody aside from myself, though I guess that’s reason enough to do it. I had considered blogging about the process of learning to use my nondominant hand/retraining my dominant hand once we know what its final capacity will be, and I have been keeping personal notes on all of this, but I don’t think this is something I can share publicly in real-time. It’s a bit intense. Maybe years down the road I’ll be able to condense it into a simpler narrative that I’m comfortable sharing?

Unfortunately all of this is tied up in my process of relearning to create right now; I’m not sure that I really need outside help figuring this out, as much as I need just the space to dump thoughts out of my head. But if you do have thoughts, or stuff you’d like to see from me, or questions, certainly let me know!

Thanks for reading this hot mess!

(dictated but not read)