Art

Posted on Sunday 03/18 at 17:12

Yesterday, while walking through the Mile End in Montréal after brunch, and before heading to a cafe to do some work, I bought some wooden canvases at an art shop. I’d had an idea in my head for the past two years. Simply put, could I make drawings of galaxies and stars using black chalk, on cardboard, and put it in cafes? Would people buy it?

When I saw the wooden slats, I had a different idea. If I grabbed a sharpie, I could draw some comics in the style of my old webcomic. This afternoon, after lunch, I sat down, looked through my archives for good comics. There are few - I was in a pretty miserable part of my life when I produced them, and a lot of the comics didn’t translate well to stand-alone art pieces. But a few did.

I’ve been scribbling my blank man and his bearded friend through notebooks for the past decade, and it was nice to see them on something approaching an actual canvas. I used a sharpie. The whole process took perhaps twenty minutes.

Unfortunately, I took photos of the art, while it was taped to a wall, using my iPhone. I should have used my camera. When I went to the cafe where I hope to display it tomorrow, to build a website and to do some afternoon coffee hacks, I found that my iPhone didn’t register the photos as new - well, all but one. For the next hour, I increasingly struggled to find a way to transfer photos from my iPhone to my computer. They were in my Photo stream, but not…

… and I don’t even want to talk about it. Eventually, I left the cafe, so full of rage and impotence that I didn’t bother to finish my coffee. I walked home, wondering where all of this rage came from, and why Apple products anger me so much when their UX is so atrocious (did I believe that they would be better than this? Why?). When I got home, I messaged the photos to myself on my wifi, which was much faster than the cafes. And, after half an hour of editing the styles of my website a bit and making sure that the post looked alright, I launched a small page for these pieces. The longest part of the process was just copying over six 1mb photos from my phone to my computer. Weirdly, it took longer to do that than it did to successfully implement OAuth for my Jekyll site.

All of these art pieces are, of course, for sale, as they are part of this project. I’d like to sell them for $100USD each, because I spent roughly four hours on all of this work, and that makes up for my hourly work. As far as their intrinsic work, you’d have to ask an art critic. I know I am happy to have them, and I’m happy to have the Maunderings back in my life again.

Tomorrow morning, I go to the cafe and see if they’ll hang them for me. If not, back to the drawing board.

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Beam me home, Scotty!