Mind your own business

Avoid conventional, it is dead.

Creative abstraction

Art is a caricature, an emphasis on the essence of an ordinary, everyday subject. Everything around us can be seen as an ordinary everyday subject or any single thing around us can be isolated and its beauty and uniqueness revealed by close study. The character or uniqueness of anything is realized by focusing on it. This uniqueness is often characterized in art.

Characteristics are the credentials that give something its flavor. A caricature can emphasize many different features… form as in a sculpture, emotion as in a song, color as in a painting, line as in fashion.

The ocean is an ordinary blend of air and water mixed with salts, life and light. Yet a caricature can capture the essence of this subject, enough to charm the senses and to convince the eye of its nearness to reality. A caricature is made up of the key characteristics that summarize the subject.

My work captures the essence of beauty, that is peculiar to the sea. My art is realistic… but it’s not. It looks like the ocean, but then again… the ocean does not have lumps of paint in it. The ocean does not have wriggly white lines all over it, yet from a distance… it seems to.

Art is a caricature of life. My work is a caricature of the living beauty of the sea. My art characterizes a moment of the ocean's perpetual motion.

A caricature highlights the character, the individuality and uniqueness of the subject. Most people have very little character, they are only watered down versions of themselves. A character stands out as an individual and an object of interest.

People who are average, ordinary and careful have placed severe limitations on their own expression. They are not caricatures, they have made themselves into wisps of what they could be, confining their ideas to match the imagined expectations of an unimaginative society.

Those few in the world who are not afraid to be themselves, stand out as oddities. These are the creative individuals that are often mocked. They are misunderstood because their visions are not shared by safe society. Society functions on an agreed platform of mediocrity and blandness. There is no room for an individual in a safe society.

People with personality, or character, are full of their own being. They are not afraid to step into new ideas and to test non-conformist patterns of behavior. These oddities are the ‘characters’ that add light to an otherwise drab collection of unimaginative human beings. These people are the brightly-colored living art forms that offend the dreary gray masses around them.

My art is not the sea, it is a caricature of the sea. It is the essence of the sea. My art is a caricature of the ever-changing magnificence surrounding our planet.

Creativity overload

Yes I know, settle down Col, what are you trying to prove? Well the truth is, I have found something new to be passionate about and I am doing something about it. I am taking action (some call it work) to make my new passion, my new job!

This week I wrote a book for 12 year olds and up. It is a simplified version of last weeks book – ‘How to get a Free Website’. This one is called ‘Be Cool, Get a Free Website’.

I think kids have a lot to gain by learning this skill very early in their digital upbringing. It won’t be long and they will be out there with the rest of us trying to find that magic formula that lets us make lots of money with little effort.

Having a website and knowing how to maintain it yourself is a skill that many people would love to have. It gives the small business person a definite advantage. Some kids will develop their sites over the years to become gateways to wealth. Some will play. Some will turn them into social pages and who knows what might develop from that?

Get your kids off the games and let them develop a skill that will give them an advantage for years to come. Give them a dose of new creativity, something different to stimulate their creative hearts.

Your website is your business card. Learn to use it and to take advantage of it while you are young and when you reach ‘old’, you will have an extra weapon to get more, more ,more of whatever it is that you want!

So this week I wrote another book. Big deal! The point of the story is… if you want something, get up and do something about getting it, now!

Creative ways to lose another week

This week I wrote a book, well it’s really a training manual. It came about because I wanted to show non-technical types how to get a free website. It was an intense effort but  I am pleased with the results.

A few people have already bought it and the instructions must be clear because nobody has contacted me to ask “What do you mean by that?” or “Can I have my money back, you idiot!” This is a good sign.

I am an artist with a technical background. This helps me unravel technical complexities and explain them with everyday simplicity. To me it’s revealing secrets that the technical hierarchy want to keep for themselves. Nothing personal, they just want your money, that’s all.

It’s hard enough to make your way through this soup called life without being left in the dark because you are not at all technically gifted. So I think I have helped simplify life by presenting this world with my new simple book.

In fact if it works like I think it should, most readers will only get half way through it and they will scream out “I get it”. Then they will hurl the pdf out of the window, to be free to create unlimited websites, each oozing with personal opinions and private snippets of wisdom for the internet consumer to gobble up.

So the moral of the story is, right now, right at this moment, you have some unique talent or understanding. Something that you understand or can do better than anyone else. Think about it and maybe it would be fun for you to present it to the world wrapped in your unique style, next week. Don't put it off, commit to it and start it now!

I wrote a book because that is one of the things that I am suited to doing, not because I am cleverer than you. It’s simply something that I can do. What can you do that is a personal and individual extra that only you can give the world next week? This week I wrote a book… next week I think I will concentrate on selling it!

ps. wannna free website?