I went to school and studied in the "fine art" program. There was constant pressure to make what they call high art. I went through the program for five years and I still have no idea what that means. Now I have an extremely jaded view of the art world and I haven't touched a paint brush since I graduated, but that's a different story I guess. What I found was that we were all really bad illustrators. We were suppose to pick a concept and paint about it. Because if you couldn't talk about your painting in critique and have some meaning behind it then it wasn't a good painting. Problem was in an attempt to make "high art" the product would come out so convoluted and cluttered with garbage that no one could possible ever really figure out what the hell it was suppose to be.

So, jaded and depressed, I met some people from the graphic design department and discovered I really liked them a lot better. They were down to earth and easy to talk to, and their sketch books were filled with doodles that looked a lot more like the kind of stuff I did in secret that my painting friends weren't ever suppose to know about because it was a shameful act of betrayal. So now out of school I draw for the sake of drawing and enjoy it, and I'm working on becoming an illustrator of children's books and maybe I'll do a few album covers here and there. That would keep me pretty happy. Though I've started to find a few clinches in the graphics art field too. Like the trends kind of bother me. I've noticed it a lot lately and it seems like everything's starting to look the same lately. The little ghosty shaped things in particular are completely on my nerves. They are everywhere and they're completely unoriginal and becoming less and less creative by the millisecond. I guess that's just the nature of the business though. This field has an extremely wide range of talent, the good, the bad, and the ugly. So when someone really hits on something out of this world awesome, everybody else wants in on the profits. The good thing is, there's enough really good talent out there to save us from overwhelming bad trends and they come up with great stuff that's always original and refreshing and it keeps the whole process going, and the market moving. I don't think I'm one of those people but I hope I can learn a lot from them, and maybe I'll be up there with that caliber of ideas and work someday. I think I just need some time to set my mind straight after art school, there's still a lot of tired old bullshit sitting in the attic that needs to get cleaned out before I can have fresh, uninhibited ideas again.

Thanks for listening to my blurb of the day.