Time Spent Making Art: THE MOST DIFFICULT THING.........

Saturday 10 November 2012

THE MOST DIFFICULT THING.........

Google was incorporated in 1998 with a mission statement
"to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”.

Back in 1998, or thereabouts, at about the same time that Larry Page and Sergey Brin were busy developing Google and were playing around with the concept in their friend’s garage I was thrashing about deciding whether a sketchbook of drawings and paintings of Algonquin Provincial Park was a viable project. I believed that it was. However, publishers that I approached were not at all interested. It wasn’t so much that I was an unknown quantity in so much as my art was concerned, it was just that in the minds of the publishers Tom Thomson had done it all. I was not to be put off and decided that I’d self publish. I explored Algonquin Provincial Park accumulating sketches and paintings and proceeded to put together a book entitled, “WHERE RAVEN PLAYS – An Artist’s Guide to Algonquin Provincial Park” that contained upwards of 180 of my sketches and paintings. As the cost of printing a book consisting of approximately 200 pages filled with illustrations was extremely expensive I undertook to teach myself how to produce a PDF document, and published digitally. Now, this was back in the year 2000 when desktop computers had little memory and the internet was, for most, just a topic of conversation. Publishing digitally meant producing what was referred to as a CD-ROM. I actually wrote and produced two books at this time and published, or produced, some 1,500 CD-ROMs packaging them similar to a music CD. In 2002 I had an exhibition of many of the Algonquin sketches and paintings and arranged to have a computer running the CD-ROMs on a continuous loop. They were found to be interesting, but as many would mention, “no one will ever read a book on a computer”.

Move along ten years later and the CD-ROM, now referred to as an ebook , has become as, or more, popular than the paper book. In fact it’s thought, that as the book morphs into its new format, the paper book will eventually disappear.

Google was incorporated in June of 1998 with a mission statement "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Quite a task when one takes into account that information is being generated every second of every day and will continue to be generated until the end of human civilization, at which time the universal accessibility of the world’s information will no longer be relevant.

Relevancy, that’s what I’m questioning at the moment, my own relevancy when it comes to making art. The most difficult thing about old age is the letting go of dreams and ambitions, accepting that everything that one had to say has been said and that it’s no longer necessary to push and shove to be heard. Perhaps, it's time to accept that I've said all that I have to say. Perhaps.