What is this...High Quality Fish Content?*** Restless Things???
I’ve spent many many years sharing my work on various platforms, and the most recent iteration of social media is a horrifically toxic place for an artist’s mindset. It’s invaluable to connect your work with so many strangers, but with algorithmic fuckery and the increasing angling towards “shopping mall” - plus the limited interface of viewing artwork on a phone screen in between sponsored ads - it has felt very bad, for very many reasons, for a very long time.
Over my lifetime as an artist, my richest drawing practice has always been in my sketchbooks. It’s never been so much of a choice, but a bodily function - a way of expressing the vast amount of input from daily life, visual images, and note taking, or even a handy way to distract myself from the worst parts of being out in the world. But over the recent years my sketchbook practice has dropped off - committing to tattooing meant my artistic energy was being committed to a full time job, and on reflection - getting my first iPhone in 2010 (and subsequently) effectively maimed my private practice all together. Tattooing is such a fully consuming job as an artist that it wasn’t until years later that I realized what I had been missing.
For every young artist who has asked me for advice, I’ve always exalted the sketchbook as essential to creativity - almost hypocritically as a “professional” artist who is nostalgic for their own abandoned practice. The past few years I’ve kept a moleskine, dipping into it occasionally but never maintaining the consistent relationship - when I used to complete a sketchbook once a year brimming with paintings, notes, sketches and collage. As someone with so much affection for the tactile and the analog, all this creative work of collecting, processing and digesting has become digital with social media and smartphones - literally less tangible for my hands and more slippery for my brain to hold onto.
So here I am in the best effort of accountability - committing to a sketchbook practice once again. This has been a long time coming, social media as an artist has its purpose but my effort is better spent (and presented) elsewhere - for the sake of the image, for the sake of the writing, for the sake of not participating in a platform that turns artists into “content creators” and their artwork into “content” competing for a fraction of the attention span on a scrolling screen. And while the sketchbook is the main driver of this, each new post will be in the form of a newsletter, but also archived here in blog form, with a comments section too.
Any support of my work is greatly appreciated, and financial support facilitates the work I make - and while I will hardly be disappearing from social media, this will be where my effort is best placed both in service to me and in service to you by your subscribing. I very much hope to make it worth your while.
Thank you for joining me in this new venture in whatever manner you can. - SB