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I was given a Lumi Inkodye Sunfold kit by a very generous friend, and I finally had a chance to play around with it during a recent heatwave. After waiting for ages to try it out, I was totally hooked!
When I started blogging seriously in 2015, I didn’t really have a clue about the craft of blogging, or that there even was such a thing. The concept of writing vs blogging didn’t cross my mind.
I assumed that good writing would translate to good blogging, and good blogging would eventually translate to a successful blog. However, I failed to appreciate the conventions that have grown up around commercial blogging, that have separated it from other forms of writing or even from personal blogging.
I’d been chipping away at a blog since 2014, putting together posts with witty, intriguing titles and sparky, self-referential language: posts that I was pleased with, and thought would be helpful.
Little did I know my writing wasn’t helping anyone at all, and it definitely wasn’t helping my blog. What was I doing wrong? I hadn’t grasped the difference between writing and blogging.
Blogging – and by this I mean commercial, or ‘for-profit’ blogging (whether you make a profit or not) does not function in the same world as literature. This doesn’t mean that it’s inferior; it means that to succeed at it, you must learn its conventions and why they exist.
Blogs exist online, and their functions are primarily to entertain and inform. Some people read blogs to gain an insight into the blogger’s personal life; others read blogs to learn something that they think will be valuable for their own lives. So far, we could say that we read books for the same reasons – isn’t that what biographies and how-to books do anyway?
Well, yes, but the fundamental difference is the medium – the internet. The internet changes everything. It makes that chunk of information immediate, accessible and (usually)Â pinned down to a point in time. If you want, you can follow in real time, never miss an update, and it’s usually all for free.
And there’s the other difference – the cost. The internet appears free. I say ‘appears’, because there’s always someone paying – not just for the monthly broadband connection, but for the content itself. Just like tv, those being entertained or informed aren’t the consumers, they’re the products; the real paying customers are the brands who want to advertise to readers/viewers.
So because information is free, and you can find almost anything, the internet is the place to turn for answers to all of your questions. Solutions come fast and easy (and because of fierce competition from an ever-increasing amount of content, will only get faster and faster) so no-one has any time for slow information. Readers go online to search for answers and solutions, not to browse idly until they find you.
Blogs have got to pitch their answers and solutions in a crowded marketplace. Print authors don’t need to worry about titles, SEO and keywords, but bloggers do.
In this world, the literary yields place to the literal.
When I took some time to look at some successful blogs, I was initially shocked by the low quality of the language structure, grammar and spelling used… but it dawned on me that it simply didn’t matter to the people who counted – the audience.
The readers of a mummy blog or a fashion blog aren’t likely to care about the mistakes that will be certain to rile the readers of a blog about grammar.
That’s not to say that these readers won’t notice the mistakes; what I mean is that if they do notice, they are willing to make concessions for them. When readers connect with a blog author, they are willing to skip past typos, spelling and grammar mistakes.
They want to connect with the author’s life and experiences, and formal writing skills aren’t necessarily the key to that emotional connection.
To adapt successfully from literary writing to blogging, bear these essentials in mind:
Titles which are clever allusions to the body of the article might work well for your novel’s chapter headings, but your readers of your novel are already invested, and they’ll read that chapter anyway. If a blog reader can’t tell what your post is about when they encounter the title on a cluttered search engine results page or Twitter feed, they’ll click on something they can decipher more easily.
Further reading: The Psychology Of Blog Post Titles
Reading online is different to reading on the printed page; keep your paragraphs short – even a single sentence if necessary.
This might depend entirely on your audience, but if you’re writing for the general population as opposed to a technically minded, specialised group, you will have to adapt your language to be simple and easily understood. This is not the same as dumbing down; it’s just a question of selecting the right tools for the right occasion.
My art posts tended to suffer from the kind of academic tone I’d been using for my MA essays, until I realised that this gave me the appearance of being a lot more stiff than I actually am, and also put me off writing anything for the blog in the first place!
I used to rail against these, but they are successful for very specific reasons: they deliver a bite of their content immediately, hooking the reader’s attention, and they let the reader know how much time they will have to commit to the article.
Take it easy with the listicles though – too many and you’ll disappear into the homogenous blog quicksand.
The internet has fuelled a surge in pictorial communication. Your blog posts will need images in order to stand out and be shared on social networks… even if these images are simply a mashup of coloured fonts.
As for search engine optimisation, keywords and marketing – these are things that artists and writers may be reluctant to get to grips with, but can’t be ignored. I’ll get on to those in another post, but I’ll leave a question for another post as well – do you really need a blog anyway?
What do you think about my ideas? Let me know – leave your thoughts in the comments below.
The question of subject is one that constantly reoccurs to me:
What should I paint?
Why do I want to create a work about this?
Should I?
Is it worthwhile?
What will everyone else think?
Having a sense of self consciousness is vital to thinking critically about my own work, but I may just be the kind of person who thinks themselves out of action.
Usually what I consider the most successful work comes about when I stop obsessing about the reasons I feel interested in something and simply explore the idea.
The major editing has to take place during the creation, or even afterwards, or else I have the tendency to talk myself out of every idea. This excess of thought is probably what kept me away from painting for many years. Only since I have given myself permission to fail have I been able to see results.
Having a visual record of a thought gives me a chance to assess its strengths, weaknesses and future development… and these infantile records often come to have their own lives independent of whatever work they may have triggered.
You only figure out what you should be painting by trying a bit of everything.
Over the years, because of knocking around and trying different things, I’ve realised that I gravitate towards depicting the human figure, and that everything surrounding exists in its orbit. The landscape exists because it is viewed by the person. The objects have been arranged by, or carelessly left behind by someone, who may reappear at any moment. Although the places, rooms and objects hold their own value, it is the people populating the spaces I return to instinctively.
Just how to use this, now, is the thing I’m continually working at.
Of course, not all of my work revolves around painting portraits; some of my recent text-based prints focused solely on handwriting and colour. It’s possibly a strange departure, but when I consider how much a part of me my writing is as well, the text pieces are a natural progression of my words flowing into the visual.
I love examining the nuances of faces, and the angles and relation of each part to the next. Portraiture has fascinated me since I was a child. The capacity to render another person’s likeness is a tremendous thing to discover as a young person, but the discovery that that capacity in itself is not enough, is even more so. That’s what spurs you on to make art.
When a painting is finished, and it represents many hours of contemplating another person’s face, attempting to conjure up some representation of their personality, you are left with the realisation that it is incredibly fragile.
I should paint the idea I can’t do without. Here’s what it is for me:
A portrait – a depiction of a human being – can lose its meaning in a second, all because of what the subject does, or perhaps no longer does. The person changes continually whilst their image remains the same. It will never remain an accurate representation of that person; it can only be a representation of a subject at a single point, as seen through the mind of the artist.
It’s an exchange between two people who will never be the same two people again.Then, when either the artist changes her mind, or the subject changes himself (or is unwillingly/unknowingly changed), that representation can crumble into something quite meaningless.
That brief glimpse of meaning is what I want to paint.
Ultimately it’s the meaning of the object or image, more than the object or image itself, that will give your work purpose and lead you on to the next step of your work. Start with something – anything – and mess around until you know what you don’t want to paint and what you want to.
The next time you think, “what should I paint?”, think about it as, “what do I want to say?”
You’ll often hear bodybuilding described by its practitioners and admirers as an art form.
Naturally, the medium frequently referenced is sculpture; it’s often invoked in the way that developing certain muscles is referred to as “sculpting”, and it leans on the languages of ancient nude statuary and the Neoclassical tradition.
Bodybuilders accept their place in the story of the idealised (predominantly male) body and they relish it. More than any artist in the contemporary era, the muscle-bound gym-goer carries the torch for the display of the body and the decisions as to what constitutes the ideal body. Now, more than ever, it’s acceptable to see muscles on display almost everywhere, and the depiction of the anatomical figure rests in the hands of advertisers and marketers instead of artists.
For some years I’ve been interested in the history of the male figure in Western art, but that’s not the main reason why I’ve started to make art about bodybuilding.
It’s the actual process of transformation that I find interesting, and the determination behind that process. We’re all being physically transformed, whether we like it or not: children grow, we get old, and most of us get a bit fatter with time. Passive transformations like these happen to us without being noticed, until we end up in a very different state after a few years have gone by.
Bodybuilding is a process of wilfully transforming from one state to another through a violent process; it’s the ripping of muscle fibres on a minute scale that creates the need for the muscles to repair and grow. There’s a fascinating force of will that goes into trying to control one’s body and manipulate it into something it would not naturally become.
My own interest in the culture started when I was very little, with my mother’s friend Tony “Broad Back” Parris, a well-known figure in Barbadian bodybuilding. I remember visiting him and having him lift me far above his head with one hand – he was definitely a figure to look up to!
Bodybuilding is an overwhelmingly male pursuit, and I think it comes down to our inherent social expectations. That’s not to say that there aren’t lots of amazing and noteworthy female bodybuilders – it’s just that most women don’t size each other up on the basis of how big their biceps are.
Men still compete with other men in a race to be the biggest, while women are still conditioned to want to become smaller.
Nowhere does this seem more pointed than when looking at the art and illustration that accompanies bodybuilder culture – the visual language of bodybuilding. Of course, a lot of it has to do with the photography of competitors, as the purpose of posing is to display one’s body to one’s best advantage, and photography for posterity is essential.
But I’m talking more about the way in which built-up bodies are interpreted in visual culture, by fans of the sport and amateurs, as well as by designers and illustrators creating images for wider consumption.
In so many images, proportions are distorted to those incompatible with human life… it’s as if there is no such thing as “big enough”, no pleasure in keeping within the realms of reality. The most superhero-like beings amongst us are still contorted and stretched beyond all recognition. It’s as though those who are most keen to absorb this kind of visual spectacle get hooked and start to seek out more extreme bodies than the pec deck could ever provide.
Not convinced? Do a Google search for bodybuilder art, and skip through YouTube thumbnails of bodybuilding videos. The dedication to freakishly Photoshopped images is impressive.
To me, it’s as if these bodies, that have been pushed to the edge of human capability and live in the realm of fantasy, are never seen as fantastical enough by their audience. They inspire thoughts of more are always pushed to being something more, something superhuman and, of course, superheroic.
Sure, it’s easy for a traditionally focused, representational artist to see something uncomfortable in the work of a predominantly comics-based segment of visual culture, but I see my art as celebrating the human endeavour and not just the end spectacle.
Instead of pushing the fantastical, spectacular aspect of the forcefully altered body, I take a more naturalistic approach, rendering bodies in a contemporary realist style. My goal isn’t to idealise any further than the model has been able to idealise himself; it’s to express admiration for the process of transformation – guided, willful, and of course, difficult self transformation.
I’ve always considered myself to be in the anti-consumerism camp, but gradually, I started to question myself. As I started to lean towards selling my work (or at least considering making some new art for sale, something I had not wanted to do for a long time), I wondered if I could still be anti-consumerist. How true can that be of anyone who offers anything for sale?Consumerism is about more than simply buying, though; it’s the buying into the incessant bombardment of products and services that we’re told we need to become, and then remain, happy and acceptable to others. I knew this, but my aversion to selling came from something else.
For years I’d been the charity shop regular, happy in my penny-pinching, eco-smug ways. I also had a period of intensive making for a craft business I ran, which eventually led to my shrieking and running away from all aspects of routine production and making anything for sale. I basically overdid it and ended up hating it, so any way that I could make a living from art that didn’t involve selling art sounded absolutely perfect.
In time I came back around to the idea of making work for sale. I had to play around with the idea of purposefully making something for sale that expressed my dislike for both selling and buying.
It started off by developing a screen printed image from my handwritten instruction: “don’t buy this.”
The great thing about it was that whilst it was displayed in a gallery setting, it would make perfect sense. After the point of sale, would it work as a message? The message would have been ignored, but the art would exist in the process of a buyer seeing and acknowledging my message, and either accepting or ignoring it… the process of selling would be part of the artwork.
Maybe it would work as a warning not to buy into the message at all – the message of conceptual art itself.
By shifting the artwork from a screen print – the pop art cousin in the fine art family – to print-on-demand goods, the whole thing turned into a conceptual art exercise.
Thanks to print-on-demand I have little control over the actual product, but the fact that my message is applied to a product links me to it, or embeds me in it. Perhaps that’s the purest form of a conceptual work of art – an idea that can embed the artist within anything.
Each one of us would take something different from a product like this, which is essentially a message. Too simple? Too convoluted? Recently, I’ve come to appreciate the quality of simplicity. Artists can tend to overstate the obvious out of fear of appearing to lack depth, but this often ends in a deep pool of artspeak.
Perhaps the most exciting thing about using a print-on-demand service to distribute my work is seeing what it’s applied to in actuality.
​I love that someone chose this for a laptop skin. I love the curious crossover of selling non-consumerist consumables.
Letting part of the artwork-making fall into the hand of the buyer is actually a lot of fun – I hope that’s true on the other side as well.
Original screen printed work is available in my shop.
