Looking Forward, Looking Back

I think it’s pretty typical to use the end of a year to look back and reflect on what happened, what didn’t happen, accomplishments, failures, and what-if’s. 2024 has been a rollercoaster, an evolution, and a year of discovery - and 2025 is going to be even worse! (Or better? Maybe both. Probably both.)

Project Updates

Dollhouse - I fixed some fallen shelves, hung some interior art, worked on the exterior (finished windows, flower window boxes) but otherwise haven’t really touched it. I ought to take some really good progress photos/videos for a post.

Beetle Impasto Painting - I did finish that beetle painting!

Sea Holly Impasto Painting - Untouched

Tattoo design for a friend - Finished!

Furbinator - Untouched

the writing project - Progress has been made.

the shrimp - Untouched

the window book - Untouched

Temperature Quilt - Untouched

Annatar

The robe is sewn, lined, and trimmed. So trimmed: custome embellished piping and beading on the sleeves, foil stamped trim on the hem which is now being embroidered. The shirt is sewn, ruched sleeves and all with some fuck-ass button holes which are fortunately covered up by black glass buttons. I’m thinking about embroidering snakes along the cuffs but haven’t quite worked out the technique between the ruching and the fact that they’re already sewn. The belt is essentially finished aside from adding grommets to the back which I’m waiting on for fit (there’s been a weightloss journey this year which has plateau’d recently but I still have four months until March) - but also I’m still thinking about making a leather version - not that I’ve ever done any leather tooling before.

Which leaves the collar. The leather I initially ordered was thicker than I want for the “feathers”, I ordered more different hopefully thinner leather; and I have yet to decide on the shape/I have to commit to cutting leather and I’m procrastinating as much as possible so I and think through it longer.

2025

Bingo Card - I made one. And I probably already have to change is because the day I finished inking it - because I decided to illustrate it this year - the husband revealed to me the Flat Earth WAS ALREADY going to Antarctica, because some guy offered to pay for them to go to “prove” the earth is flat. Except they’ve almost all backed out because they’re all actually grifters preying on humanity; and now the bar has shifted and I’m sure it will be Firmament or Bust.

2025 Reading List

My reading list, documented here, because accountability. One of the podcasts I have loved in the past was the British History Podcast. I don’t know enough about British History to listen with a critical ear, but it seems balanced? And also left me searching for something similiar with American History - which this recent election and a pointed question from my mother earlier this year left me wanting to explore further and really deep dive into. The History of the American's podcast was a surface level answer to this - but ultimately I found the personality/attitude of the host Jack Henneman to be overly obnoxious and weirdly dismissive of a lot of points that were important to me, and I found myself cranky every time I listened and had to stop.

In short, I’ve put together my own reading list/curriculum to enable me to participate in conversations with facts behind ideas, and because facts sit in my brain more permanently when I take note and write about them after - that will be happening here. Ideally I’d like to finish a book a week, but with everything else in my life… well we’ll see how that goes.

Silversmithing

By hook or by crook, I’m starting my silversmithing learning journey in 2025. I have a plan. I have a bunch of books. I have the emotional support of the husband, although he’s going to be very busy working on his thesis.

The Democratization of Nothing

I’m thinking about AI again…

Art is a tricky subject - getting away from “What even is art anyway?”, it’s a concept that is rife with contradictions. Art is both for everyone, and also not for everyone - can be made by anyone, and yet not everyone can make it, and even more importantly: not everyone can make a living at it.

For Everyone, and Yet Not

Historically, only the very rich had access to even seeing art. Museums in an ancient context were a place for philosophical debate and introspection - a museum as a place to view art didn’t exist until the 15th century, and the first open to the public museum (rather than a rich mans private collection to share with his rich friends) didn’t open until 1683. From there the history of publicly available museums is spotty…

As time has passed, more art has become more accessible to the public through museums, through print and the innovation of art books and reproductions, and eventually through the internet and the myriad ways anyone with a phone and a wifi signal has access to everything from museum collections to individual artists instagram pages. This greater access has had a cascading effect on the people who make, or would be inclined to make art, because seeing great art inspires great art. Seeing what other people have accomplished inspires other people to push farther.

In addition to access to seeing art - the tools for creating art have also become more accessible. Earlier painters had to make their own paints by grinding pigments from stones and ash and plants (and mummies). The knowledge of how to do this, how to stretch a canvas, what paper to use all had to be learned from other painters - and all of these materials are costly. Even today, nice professional quality paint can be exceedingly expensive depending on the pigment. The availability of synthetic pigments, commercially available paints, and eventually student grade materials made the bar of entry ever easier to pass through. Eventually the innovation of digital media lowered that bar even further - the one time purchase of a tablet, digital pencil and procreate can set an artist up for years without any additional cost, let alone storage concerns - because what do you do with the heaps of pieces you can’t sell?

Art knowledge, lessons, specifics on media (watercolor techniques vs oil for example) are more readily available now than ever before. No longer do you need an apprenticeship with the one artist you’ve ever heard of - there are specialized schools, private lessons, uncounted how-to books, and endless internet tutorials. I’ve often joked with my husband that if I’d had the available information there is now when I was first starting out, my entire life would be on a different trajectory.

The history of art is the democratization of art. We live in a time when anyone with the will to put in the hours can become an artist, in practice if not in profession. And if you only want to own art rather than make it - there are countless artists available to you at the click of the button, and nearly every price point. If you can’t afford an original, buy a print - and if even that is too much, stealing a screenshot to keep as your computer desktop is easy enough for anyone. If this artist is too expensive, there are thousands more. And yet…

And yet some tech bros are so hard pressed - either that they can’t make art, or can’t buy art - that they have to crow about the democratization of art with the introduction of AI systems. Because “now everyone can make art” - forgetting that that has always been a possibility, working artists just put in the hours first to hone a craft; dismissing that generating an image with a text prompt isn’t really making anything at all, and that the source images that the AI model was built off of were all stolen from people who put many more into their work than the programmers did creating an algorithm. I do wonder if they’ll be crowing about the “democratization of finance”, or the “democratization of software development” when AI is competently capable of doing those jobs as well. I haven’t messed around with MidJourney or any other AI image generators enough to see where they are in taking critique, or making small revisions. In my job I have seen an influx of imagery submitted by high school students who want something shiny for the low low cost of free, and at least a few posts from artists and designers who have been let go from their jobs because they were replaced with AI.

How hard would it have been to only train AI models on art in the public domain - to give those models the same art education that any college graduate would get and see what evolved from that? Something far more interesting I think than the overly plasticized look so many ai images have now when the ai hasn’t been directed to copy a specific artist.

Progress is inevitable, but a thing that you can get for free has no value. I can see a future in which art become harder to access, because to give access to a thing is to have a thing stolen - this has already been a problem for years with unscrupulous individuals and companies stealing art images from the internet to turn a profit on a cheaply made t-shirt or sticker, that all of this art has now been scraped from social media is just a cherry on top of a pile of bullshit. The desire of cheaply made goods, and the refusal to take no for an answer will in the long run rob everyone after.

Progress is inevitable, unless it’s built on exploitation and the exploited have just enough power to take control over their own production. Artists faced with a world in which noone listens to their concerns will draw back into safe spaces, will stop posting art so publicly, will revert back to physical media which is more complicated to steal.

Progress is inevitable until progress eats itself.

What's in a Name?

The Nelson Atkins’s current special exhibit is Hokusai: Waves of Inspiration from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Husband and I saw it at the beginning of this month, and I highly recommend it. I was familiar with Hokusai before we went - I’m not sure anyone is unfamiliar with him, though whether or not they know his name (or names?) is going to vary. Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave) is one of those pieces that has infected and permeated our culture so thoroughly that I don’t think we can disentangle from it, nor would I want to. The Great Wave is one of those pieces of art that sits in a person forever, and always has some new aspect to lose yourself in - the curls of the foam, Mt Fuji in the background, the boats… which is evidenced by the numerous parodies of the piece that have come into the world. An estimated 8000 original copies, of which 200 still exist.

Under the Wave off Kanagawa, Hokusai

One small morsel of information about Hokusai sat with me and resonated throughout the exhibition - that Hokusai frequently changed his name to fit with the art he was making at the time. I have throughout my own art career felt more kinship with different names depending on what I was doing, in addition to wanting to separate my artist identities based on the medium at the time. The importance of an artists name isn’t something I’ve come across being discussed frequently - the only one who comes to mind if Marie Cassatt, who was born Mary but changed her name to Marie to sound more french for better art sales in an age when her sex was working against her.

My own struggles my my name started early, with kids in kindergarten teasing me for my last name - DeMars. Realistically, I was just a weird kid and they would have teased me for any reason, my name just became an easy target - but being called a martian really upset me, so much so that my mother looked up the meaning of it to assuage my fears that it was the worst; and for a time after that I just introduced myself to everyone as “Michelle Marie of the Sea”. But from that point on, that name was mine in the most visceral sense of the word - I owned it, it belonged to me.

The rest of it has not been so easy to capitulate with.

For the longest time, Michelle DeMars has felt too informal and ordinary - really having mroe to do with my own self image and the use of it in day to day term; while Marie DeMars felt too formal and bourgeoisie, in addition to feeling intensely uncomfortable telling everyone who’d know me for more than a minute “Please call me Marie now, I reject the other name”. And also I didn’t reject the other name, it was still mine.

When I started dancing, the whole idea of dance names dominated the conversation of how to present yourself as a performer - because for a middle eastern dance, audiences expected a middle eastern name despite a majority of the performers being a bunch of white ladies searching for culture and exoticism in the fallout following 9/11. There was a whole schtick of a dance teacher bequeathing a dance name before your first recital - one of my own tried to name me Shadan because I was “gazelle-like”, which also felt awkward and not me - but I used it as a second name for a long while because “that’s what you did” and I was terrified of upsetting my teacher by rejecting this name (who also in retrospect sort of ran her classes like a cult) - and she ended up being upset I wasn’t using it as a primary name anyhow so it didn’t even matter. Later I changed to my middle and last name - primarily because I was a white girl, and my white girl name was perfectly fine for a white girl bellydancing. And from that point on I had two sets of people in my life - people who knew me as Michelle, and people who knew me as Marie.

Eventually these people met, and despite my terror of awkwardness - it was fine. Most people call me Michelle now - and it’s my automatic response when introducing myself. My name as a whole feels more me than parts of it separated from each other - but any piece of it alone also works. There is a part of me that wishes my parents had given me my grandmothers first name instead of her middle, but it’s been 43 years and that ship has long since sailed.

In a more modern sense, maybe all artists struggle with this in a way with online handles and domains - do you use your name or some catchy quip or phrase? Which will be more memorable? Which will resonate more with your target audience? Which will still be relevant in 10 years time? Or five? Or even one?

In any case - it’s comforting to know that even someone as skill, transformative, prolific and influential as Hosukai also struggle with something as mundane as what to call himself. And also that exhibit is really amazing and if you’re in the KC area you should totally check it out.

I am tired, & we haven't even started yet.

Omg the last 30 days… to say a lot has happened is an understatement - and that’s personally in addition to everything else in the wide world at large. To address the personal items without the external chaos feels cheap and disingenuous, so…

To say I’m unhappy with the outcome of the election would be to put too mildly what has become an ever present booming of foreboding in my ears - flowery language for “I don’t feel good about this at all” - and at the same time I remain completely unsurprised. That a populace with decreasing media literacy has taken that same unwillingness to read between the lines into the voting booth was honestly to be expected. That fear-mongering dominated over hope is unsurprising. I feel there’s been a long tradition of voting against something else rather than for something - and by and large that pretty much played out last week exactly.

I am still processing it all, unsurprised and still stunned and forming all of my usual backup and contingency plans. To voice too loudly the concerns I have about future policies seems hasty, and also I’m too preoccupied with that effing Cabinet nominations. Mostly I think I plan to read a lot, and think about what I’ve read.

And make a 2025 bingo card, for my sanity.

In a more personal mode - I finished some things. Two things. The beetle impasto painting, & the tattoo design. I haven’t finished any of the books I start reading, but I have purchased 9 more volumes of varying subjects.

We (husband and I) also went to the Nelson to see the Hokusai exhibit - which I may have to write about later because this is enough of a disjointed mess of a post without dragging another artist into it.

And then there’s Annatar…

That’s actually coming along really well.

Morgoth’s crown - constructed of wire, paper maché, hot glue, more hot glue, heavy gel medium, paint and silver gilding is finished. There was a moment when my husband - coming home from a long library day to find me on the couch covered in paint and things, made mention of the fact that I could probably find a 3D print pattern of it in a minute and use either of our college’s labs to print it out in a fraction of the time I was spending on it. And yes, I could - in fact I did. One etsy vendor selling the pattern for 6 dollars, and another selling the print for less than 40. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to make it - and it turned out pretty well.

The belt - pattern changed for reasons is also pretty much complete - it just needs grommets which will take all of 5 minutes. I learned a whole heap about crafting with EVA foam - how to carve and cut and paste it. Priming, and the 7 layers of paint it took for full coverage.

The robe/dress is coming along - I did a muslin mockup for the first time in my life. Ordered fabric swatches from Mood and a company in Portugal to find the right fabric - which I then silkscreened to get that gorgeous pattern onto. That pattern itself was about 8 hours of obsessively studying various screen shots to find most of the angles of, and it’s close. Not perfect, but 75% accurate. Fortunately I work at a company that does silkscreening, and was able to have the screen burned there, and then do the actual printing myself after hours on the partially sewn robe. I may yet go into the seams and create joining lines so that the seams all “match”, but I also may not as they are largely not too noticeable and the paint strokes I’d inevitably make may stick out more than the gaps do. There’s some possible refitting to do, embroidery to add, the trim to finish which is a beautiful gold print fabric I’m going to foil stamp over as the very last thing as the foil itself probably won’t stand up to excess handling.

Additionally the shirt is 50% complete. And after all of that, or next thing to start at least is that leather wing collar. And buy a wig. And then it’s done?

And once it’s finished I expect to collapse for a bit in a fit of “what now?”

Probably some coding.




October Accounting

Current List of Unfinished Projects

  • Dollhouse

  • Beetle Impasto Painting

  • Sea Holly Impasto Painting

  • Tattoo design for a friend

  • Furbinator

  • the writing project

  • the shrimp

  • Books I’ve started reading:

    • Morgoth’s Ring, J.R.R. Tolkein

    • Paths Through the Forest: A Biography of the Brothers Grimm, Murray B. Peppard

    • An Encyclopedia of Fairies, Katharine Briggs

    • The Ladies of Grace Adieu, Sussanna Clarke

    • Jefferson’s Daughters, Catherine Kerrison

    • The Book of Frank Herbert

    • Acceptance, Jeff Vandermeer

    • Unruly, David Mitchell

    • Poverty, by America, Matthew Desmond

    • Into the Bright Sunshine, Samuel G. Freedman

    • A Life Discarded, Alexander Masters

    • The Code Book, Simon Singh

    • A Forest of Kings, Linda Schele and David Friedel

  • the window book

  • Temperature Quilt (doesn’t really count because it can’t be finished until 2026)

  • and probably some other things I’m just forgetting right now…

…which is to say, I don’t need to add another project to this list, but I am creating a Rings of Power Annatar cosplay, and I’m starting this weekend.

Because why wouldn’t I want to dress up as a femme version of this toxic obsessive gaslighter? And honestly I relish the idea of running around at a Con handing out rings to people, especially all of the Galadriels on the floor.

The first thing to take care of is making the crown, which I can do without any of this things I need to order to make the rest of it - wire, paper maché, plaster and paint - all which I have on hand; while I wait for leather and patterns and fabric samples and fabric. How gloss and metallic can I get a finish with no metal involved? I intend to find out.

And maybe inbetween steps while I’m waiting on materials I can finish one or two things off of that list…