Thursday, February 12, 2009

Why do you hate me, my future biographer?

It's dangerous for me to post stuff that I write because in only two short sentences, I can totally make an ass of myself, stripping away whatever facade of social respectability I might have once had. Quotations from famous people and random soap box rants from me embellished with the occasional pretty picture seem to be the direction that WoofOink has taken in early 2009. This is all just my time capsule anyway, so that in case I ever become a famous artist 80 years after I'm dead, my future biographers will have more material about me.
"He was so incredibly egotistical, that he anticipated we would be writing a biography about him," they will write, "and the sheer arrogance with which he bandied about his digital monstrosities, as if he were the first to ever do them, surely seals Rachuba's fate as the first great buffoon of 21st century art."
Why do you hate me, my future biographer? Why will you waste so much of your time expressing your utter disdain for my work and for my life? Is it because I hate my own work, and I write self-deprecatory blog posts in the hopes of someday proving myself wrong? Is this why you will find me so loathsome, or is it perhaps because my grandson will be beating up your grandson on the schoolyard, and you'll be trying to figure out if he gets his tyrannical streak from me?
Well, I will simplify it for you as best I can. Sometimes I do hate my work. But regardless of my dissatisfaction with it, I am still glad that I did it. If you get nothing else out of my time capsule blog posts, then get this: it is better to make one really bad painting in your lifetime, than to never have painted at all. Everyone should at least try it and no matter what happens, I can say that I tried.
Worse than a bad review or negative criticism, the thing that is really painful to experience is for your work to be ignored. Apathy is the most brutal critique imaginable. I confess to you my weakness and my poverty of character: that several times a day, I check my Flickr page to see how many people have looked at, favorited, or commented on my work. The numbers are often rather disheartening, especially when I compare myself to all of the other artists who upload photos of their work to Flickr.
A thousand artists who truly have talent are there in this great on line realm. There they were, a thousand egos leaving behind a thousand fingerprints, as if these images would be arresting enough to grab the typical net surfer from his daily dosage of midget porn and fantasy football and make him say, "now that is fine art."
We are all just little kids, attaching our creations to the refrigerator door in the hopes of winning a complement from mommy or daddy. Why should I give a fuck? What does the opinion of somebody I don't even know really mean to me?
Because they ignore it, and in doing so they speak volumes. My reaction is twofold: part of me wishes to simply disengage from it all and delete my accounts with Flickr, Blogspot, Bluecanvas, etc. and the other part wants to try harder, to put more work into it, to reinvent myself each and every time. Maybe it is better to sum up the relationship I have with my own work as love-hate instead of just one or the other.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Behind The Cleaners



"Behind The Cleaners"
Digital collage, 2009



"Spiritual Circuit Board"
Digitally colored drawing, 2009.




Monday, February 9, 2009


"The Phantasmic Phourr"
Digitally colored drawing, 2009