As to making terrible art… that’s actually the reason I majored in biology rather than art. To make a living with the art degree, you really need to be in graphic design, and I can just imagine how much that would suck your soul out. I like doing design work, but if I had to sit for 8 hr. a day every day doing it? I didn’t think I’d have anything left for “my” art.

That said, I recently decided to start painting a few more sell-able things. The goal is to have art that is fun to make, not too time intensive, and something that I might actually be able to make money on. To that end, I did an enormous landscape from my last trip to Colorado:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v48/werdnus/ThreeStooges.jpg

And to give you some size concept:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v48/werdnus/ThreeStoogesScale.jpg

It was a lot of fun, because I stretched the paper first, which was novel. Painting on stretched paper is really neat; no deformation at all. And that whole thing took only three hours! And it turned out well! What do you think — something I can get away with selling?

You can’t hold the designer responsible for this, he churned it outt, sure, but he didn’t ask to be given that sum of money… they gave it to him voluntarily.

I still think it should have been held as a national competition, get the school kids and communities involved. The UK government has done a really good job with making it’s own people feel detached from these games…

I’m tempted to suggest that you start making terrible art, see how far you can get with it… it’s not selling out, it’s selling short.

…

You know, I say that, but I recently participated in an art show/contest for biological art, the purpose of which was to choose some art for the new biology building they just finished constructing on campus here. Four purchase awards, $500 each. There were about 200 entered pieces, and as I walked around the show, I realized that I’d probably not win, because there was a lot of really quality art there. Entry had, however, not been juried, so there was also a lot of really bad art there, too. When they announced the purchase awards I just cringed, three out of four were pieces I’d looked at and said to myself, “man, good that guy entry wasn’t juried.” I wish I had pictures so I could express how truly awful some of these were. The group choosing the awards were two biology faculty members, and two art faculty members. No accounting for tastes I guess.

Meh, sport, yay, not.

£400000

It’s the logo that keeps giving… disappointment, that is.