Update

I haven't bee getting much work done lately.  I have once again run into a bottleneck with supplies and money.   That's not completely true I guess.  There has been money to buy supplies, but it's usually a choice between art supplies and other things.  Over the last couple of months I've been choosing the other things.  I really get tired of the juggling act.  I get tired of not having enough money, time, energy to do everything that I need to.  I thought I might make a series of small works again.  I still have supplies for that.  It's funny though I've been trying to make a go of it for the last month or so  I find I can't do it.  The ideas seem to have out grown that small format and no matter how I tried I couldn't force them back into it.

Well I've finally started to restock on art supplies and I'm gearing up for another round of art making.  I've got a few more ideas to work on for the Hollow Men series.  A couple of days ago I watched a Japanese movie called Pulse.  It's kind of hard to explain it.  The plot didn't make a lot of sense.  The basic idea behind it was to have everyone in the world just fade away, to become ghost.  It was kind of a reflection of how the modern world isolates people from one another to the point they might as well be ghost.  There is an American version coming out sometime this summer.  I have no idea what that going to be like.  Anyway,  it gave me a whole bunch of ideas.  I never really thought my own work was about isolation but more about  wearing a  facade and the facade slowing becoming all that's left of the person who wears it.  Isolation is certainly part of it though.  The idea needs some more thought I think.

Comments

[brocktonrwoodson]

About the theme of the Pulse movie. I think that the mass migration towards solitude is a part of the evolutionary process that humanity is going through right now. I don't have much to back up the idea except for a gut feeling. If so many people are experience this then it may be possible that it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's kind of a necessary situation for an artist from what I know. Maybe the concept of everyone becoming ghosts is representative of a spiritual transition. Makes me think about Nuns and Monks. They're kind of ghost like.

[Howard]

I'm not so sure it's evolution. It's has more to do with the our cultures infuation with new technologies. If it's new it must be better. Talking on the phone is better than talking in person and talking to your friends while buying toilet paper at the drugstore is even better. People put more value chatting to someone they don't know beyond the internet on the other side of the world about what they are having for lunch than to their neighbors and wonder why they feel so alone. Have you noticed how it seems to be socially acceptable to answer cell phones no matter what, in noisy clubs, dinner with friends, out taking a hike in the woods. The cell phone trumps all. Why is a phone call so much more important than whats happening right in front of you? It all has to do with what a culture values and right now our culture is starstruck with all these gizmos.