Vibrations of Self Love

(originally written and illustrated September 21, 2019)

I don’t want to get into a debate about the validity of crystals in healing or anything else metaphysical - it’s not for me and if it makes you feel good, I’m glad you found something to help. 

I see a lot of internet posts, primarily on Instagram, with a lot of crystals. So many crystals. It seems like everyone has crystals. You likely have at least one crystal in your home (between the overlap in my friends sphere this just seems likely). I own crystals, most of which I’ve had since high school. I carry them around with me from place to place, apartment to house - they migrated with me from Virginia to Missouri. They’re pretty things from nature, they refract sunlight, and would seem to be pretty effective for throwing at people (sharp, heavy rocks, right?).

I have no idea where they came from.

They may have had tags on them at one point - claiming an origin - but it seems likely that they didn’t. 

Crystals are everywhere - at the art show I went to a month ago (so many crystals), at the psychic fair I went to last year (SO MANY CRYSTALS), at the street fair in Seattle I was at a few years back (so many crystals). I’ve seen them labeled with their origin, and not labeled.

I’ve never once asked how they were mined.

Mining feels like a loaded word. For me it conjures images of dark holes in the ground, coal, miners lung, child labor, and envronmental destruction. I think of blood diamonds, and Centralia Pennsylvania, and underpaid mud covered laborers.

I don’t think about crystals. Which come from the ground. And are mined. Out of the ground. Primarily from countries with very lax or nonexistent labor and environmental laws because that’s going to cost less and Americans are nothing if not constantly on the lookout for the best deal.

The top exporting countries in 2015 for quartz were China, Turkey and India; exporting over 184 million dollars in quartz combined.

SO. MANY. CRYSTALS.

I’m putting a link here to the article that got me thinking about this. I’d really like to encourage you to read it. Or go google search “impact of crystal mining” - it’s 10 minutes of your day just do it. I have no problem with you using your quartz and moonstone to heal your spirit, or channel love into the world, or make a promise to the earth. But there’s got to be a way to do that without screwing up the planet any more, or what’s the point?

Dating Advice for Graphic Designers

As a designer and manager, over the years I’ve posted many job listings and reviewed hundreds of portfolios. I have a few hundred reasons why people didn’t get hired and a handful of reasons that they do. The reasons why not are surprisingly redundant. Here are some dos-and-don’ts of the graphic design job-seeker world:

Be Visual

Your expertise is visual. Make the information you present, from resume to portfolio, reflective of that. Your resume sets a mood before anyone even looks at your portfolio. Many application sites require .doc formats and for that I apologize. No graphic designer should be asked to step up and step down at the same time. The problem is relatively easily solved: Prepare 2 versions and use the PDF version whenever possible. We both know that a Word doc is, by nature, boring and does not inspire curiosity or interest.

Get Help Where You Need It

Your expertise is not necessarily words, and that’s okay. You and I are not different in that way. I seek and find solutions to this problem: everything from a wordsmith friend to a professional proofreader to a spell check feature that exists (in Word documents… and everywhere else). Spelling errors count: all spelling errors, any spelling error, anywhere. They all count. Use your resources, find your solutions.

Links Matter

The link to your portfolio (if it’s a website – and it should exist at least be one in bare bones) should be easy to find. All links on your resume should be clickable. The point of a link is not “copy-paste.” I do not recommend QR codes – like, seriously, just don’t – if I’m on my computer and have to pull out my phone to figure out how to find you, I’m not going to bother. If I have to “Edit” your PDF so I can copy the website address for your site, I’m going to start out irritated. Personally, I look at your portfolio before I ever read much into a resume or cover letter. If the portfolio isn’t readily available, I move on.

 Speaking of clicking links - if your portfolio is a PDF that includes buttons, make sure all of the buttons work. Better to let your reviewer use the Acrobat back and forth buttons than come across a faulty button – it reads as a mistake, which presents you as someone who is sloppy, prone to mistakes, and uncaring about the work you put out. Making my job harder hurts you more than it hurts me. I have a lot of work to review – be the one who gets it right.

The Internet Matters

Speaking of the internet, be mindful of your web presence. If your portfolio is your Instagram, your Instagram needs to be your portfolio and not pictures of your niece and your puppy. Your personal life is great, and wonderful, and important, but curate what of it you share on your professional documents and accounts. You never know what a prospective employer is going to find off-putting, even subconsciously.

Speaking of websites, know your design strengths. Every visual designer has a forte: some interactive, some print, some multi-format. Great! You don’t have to show me your best website, you have to show me on your website how your skills translate into the specific skills I need. Visual design is a communication, so know your audience.

Be Good at The Job

It is 100% possible to include too many things in your portfolio – it should not be an archive of everything you’ve created since high school. The recommended standard is 10-12 pieces. Whether more or less: quality always over quantity. Include only the things you are most proud of and that relate to the kinds of positions you’re applying for. Stay on task: make sure your design skills will translate in your reviewer’s mind to another type of medium for which they are hiring. If your prospective employer creates greeting cards, make sure your portfolio includes greeting-card-like things, not flower arrangements and film projects. If you don’t have at least 10 professional quality pieces to include in your portfolio, you may not be quite ready for the professional world.

 If you do more than one type of design, separate them out into clearly labeled pages so I can easily find the things that pertain to my needs. Looking at the other cool things you do? That’s the icing on the cake. You don’t eat it without the cake. 

 It is absolutely possible to over-design your shit. Leaving breathing space. Curate your color palette. It is absolutely impossible to be all things to all people, so be the best you can to the people who need to know you the most. Some people like bells and whistles. Some people find them noisy. Make thoughtful choices about showing your strengths versus showing your everything. You are being judged on every choice you make.

 Follow-up messages are a great way to keep yourself in your interviewer’s thoughts; be friendly and non-demanding about it. Express interest and enthusiasm and then let it be. You don’t have compel them to you, let your work be compelling. A no-obligation-to-reply note can be a great way to stand out and stay top-of-mind.

Finally, keep in mind that sometimes there is just a better candidate for the job. I’m not just looking for a person who can do the job, I want the best person I can find because once I hire a person, I’m stuck with them for a long time ideally. The process of hiring and training new employees is time consuming, and generally we’re looking for low risk prospects who will be easy to train and will stick around for awhile, i.e. not quit, and not get fired. I’ve lost employees for various reasons and it’s pretty similar to a breakup a majority of the time. No one enjoys getting dumped, and only sociopaths enjoy doing the dumping.

And now a true story:

I had an applicant recently from within my company who was very very interested in transitioning into the Art Department. They had prior experience with other companies in similar sounding job roles, and an online portfolio that was fine ... but it wasn’t amazing. I moved on, and they were informed by HR that they would not be considered. 

This person didn’t agree with my decision.  They brought in additional portfolio materials and asked me, through HR, to reconsider. 

At the time I was working from home (we’re in a pandemic after all) and had no desire to drive into the office to view additional material from a candidate who I was already not interested in. This development had a secondary aspect to consider as well - if this material was so much better than the previous material, why wasn’t it on their website? And before I go on - think about that for a moment, why wasn’t it on their website? At this point my sum total of knowledge of the person is that they have some professional experience, and that the work I’ve seen wasn’t exciting. Now I’m wondering if there is some knowledge gap and they don’t know how to get these pieces onto the website, or perhaps they were unmotivated to do so without provocation. Is this a problem of technology? Or knowledge? Or motivation? I’m looking for ambitious, adventurous, self motivated artists who are hungry to improve and learn without prodding from me. My mood is quickly swinging from uninterested to feeling like I’ve dodged a bullet; and they were informed by HR that I was still not interested.

When all of this didn’t net the applicant the results they wanted, they walked into the head of the companies office and asked for an explanation about why they didn’t get an interview (HR had warned me that they were “persistent”) - leading me to write them a fairly concise email detailing what I was looking for and how it was lacking in what they submitted. A month after that they were demanding a portfolio review and advice on how they could improve.

If you ever met someone who was romantically interested in you, who you were not at all interested in in return, you can probably imagine how I was feeling at this point. I declined and was presented with new data. I declined, and they went and complained to my dad (not my actual dad, my metaphorical-for-the-point-of-this-analogy dad). I declined again in more explicit terms, and now I’m being asked for dating advice. 

This is my dating advice.

In short:

You’re an artist, be an artist.

Ask the appropriate channels for help, especially with things you aren’t good at.

If you want to be a professional, make sure everything you present is professional.

Present your best work in the best way possible.

Make it easy for me, or whomever, to look at.

Persistence can be a quality or flaw depending on the situation - read the room, act like an adult.

Not an Essay

None of this means anything. I’m am posting this here not for sympathy or empathy or even comment, but for a place to put a train of thoughts I’ve been cycling through - to get them out of my head. None of this changes my actions or my outlook, not much anyway. I am what I am, and I create the things I create not for reaction or innovation but because they are the things that are in me to be made. Again, not for comment or pity. Just to say a thing that’s in me. 

There was an article in the Washington Post about an “artist,” who is using AI to create images based on his own thoughts, which he is then sending to China to have anonymously painted on canvases, which are selling in auctions and at galleries for massive sums of money; or at least what I (another “artist”) consider to be massive sums of money. What is and isn’t considered to be art has always been a subjective scale full of grey. When I was in school studying illustration I was told (accurately) that I could never get a doctorate in Illustration because it wasn’t considered to be art - a Masters was the end of my educational line; and yet despite the fact that I did not ever and still do not work commercially as an illustrator (not entirely true, but true enough for this) I still use the term illustrator for myself because an illustration in my mind tells a story, and I’ve long considered to be myself a storyteller. I honestly don’t know what else to call myself, I don’t have the right word for it. “Artist” is too broad. “Painter” is too narrow. “Fine Artist” feels inaccurate. I’ve on and off called myself an Alchemist depending upon what I was doing at the time, as a person who takes things and changes their quality and value, but this feels more like a gimmick which in all honesty I probably need.

So I am an artist, but I do not create “art” - or I do create art but with a labeling problem. Is it an Illustration if I create it for myself, rather than a publisher? Is it “fine art” if it sits in a bin in my studio, waiting to be done something with?  

But back to that article - art is subjective, and an “artist” can now create widely successful art without ever having touched the final product himself - which is also nothing new. Kinkade and Barsamian have been doing this very successfully for decades. Mass produced original art. Mass production. Mass production at wildly inflated prices based on the whims of those with the disposable income to spend it. 

A group in Paris wants to “democratize art” using AI, but when the piece in question sells for over 400,000 dollars in auction, are they democratizing art for the people, or for creators? Taking the value out of years of study and practice in a field that is already wretchedly hard to make a living in, and putting more money in the hands of those with access to technology and the will to put it to use. Looking at a market that is so insidiously twisted in on itself in a self consuming knot, recognizing the magnetic draw of the next gimmick, and exploiting it. But then, how very different is that from the advent of Impressionism, or Digital Painting?

Perhaps very different, when the “creator” never makes a single mark. But is a piece as a concept executed by an Other enough to make something art? Is an idea art? Is it art once it’s something that can be bought and sold or traded or bartered? On that path, is dance art? Is a creation that crutches itself on someone elses creation art? Is it art if it doesn’t exist outside of the moment in time it exists in? Is the dance piece as a whole art, or is each performance of the same choreography it’s own individual work? And does it even matter considering the subjective nature of it all?

And my reaction, my personal reaction to all of this, is a kind of despair. Despair for an art community struggling to get by. Despair for generations of art students who will spend hundred of thousands of dollars for formal art training, only to be made more and more obsolete by changing technology. And not just obsolete, unnecessary.

We are becoming unnecessary. 

I am becoming unnecessary. Something I’d really hoped to achieve only when my hands or eyes finally gave out as I aged.

Or is this another passing fad? Are these pieces selling because they are the first of their kind and eventually we will, for the most part, return to our collective senses and move on? Or find some middle ground? Utilizing the technology and meshing it back in with that acquired technique and practice into something more recognizably created rather than constructed.

This is all on the heels of a thought that popped into my head while walking through the Philadelphia airport, which became to me a tenth circle of hell. The place looks like the set of the original Blade Runner before everything got dirty and old.  You can’t plug devices into an outlet with paying to activate it. And as far as I can tell the populace is a collective bunch of nosey assholes (as evidenced by the fight I heard break out between a bunch of 20-somethings and a waiter about them getting into his personal business) - yes, there are interlaced assumptions on where anyone in the airport at any given moment is originating from, but without evidence the the contrary plus local accents/dialects, I’m sticking with my initial opinion not that it matters because airport culture is its own monstrous construction. 

 But my thought, while walking through this future dystopian nightmarescape ran along the lines of “I don’t want to be one of Picasso’s ex-wives,” meaning a footnote in history to be mentioned only in reference to the people with whom she was associated. Like anyone else if I’m to be remembered, let it be on my own merit. But what even is that? I don’t create anything with a thought to where it will be 5 years in the future, let alone 50.  My actions tend more toward the reactionary “I don’t want this,” than the proactive “I do want that.” It’s a thought pattern I may need to change if I really don’t want to be one of history’s ex-wives. I’d rather be forgotten, nothing at all; and perhaps that’s the more likely outcome regardless of what I do.

    None of this means anything. Tonight, like many nights, I will work in one studio or another - on a painting or a dance - on the works that hold meaning for me. This despair will dissolve or deepen, but will be worked through regardless. I’m not an MIT grad to develop AI to create the future of art, I don’t have access to a factory of college grads to reproduce work on a mass scale; neither am I interested in either of those paths. The “democratization” of art looks to me more like the “capitalization” of a system that was already systemically broken, has been broken for a very long time. 

My goal is not to worry about the events outside of my control, but to simply be aware of them. It is the sum total of what I can do.