Happy Birthday to Me

Banner-Header design for www.artbyjared.com website

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Its a bit Cheezeball, but I kinda like it...Hey, It's better than what I had up before...

This week has been punctuated by a bout of depression, which may or may not have anything to do with the fact that I turn 30 tomorrow. (Even though I am psyched for volleyball on Saturday...wheather permitting...) It’s a time for reflection, seeing as, if I live to be 90, I am a third of the way to the grave. Let’s not even contemplate the national average for men (which is 77.6 years) which puts me much closer to the halfway point than the “third” mark.

Anyway, it has led me to question whether I am effective at my chosen vocation, and what can be done to improve it. My problem is one of focus and time. I can’t seem to get things resolved (with a high degree of quality) fast enough to keep pace with things. I also can’t focus my energies if I know I won’t have a substantial amount of time to devote to it.

I have to sit down and really think through where I want my work to go. Much of the work I see on the internet is of really high quality. I feel that my work lacks this level of quality because I am not devoting enough time to it. Conversely, the rate of change and the level of visual sophistication in the general population has gone exponentially up in recent years. I can make things faster and better than ever before, but I still have an old fashioned way of thinking about the way my art fits into the world.

I also have a personal set of rules that may be outmoded. One of them is to not make works that are simplistic misinterpretations of surrealism. That is, take a subject, and then make it trippy or freaky. This is an artificial way of getting a result that looks cool, but contributes little to the debate (and does little to honor the true psychological roots of surrealism).

In the interests of getting better, I have developed a methodology for getting more out of my time over the next year. Since I seem to work well in a deadline situation, and also as a “burst” of energy, I developed a semester-like plan for myself in the coming year. I am committing myself to working on a set goal for quantity and quality of work on a semester basis. I have a midterm and a final planned for each three month period. These are just goalposts for me to chart my progress on, but they are also hard and fast deadlines that I can work towards. Let’s hope I can stick to it!