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.

Behind The Cleaners

"Behind The Cleaners"
Digital collage, 2009

"Spiritual Circuit Board"
Digitally colored drawing, 2009.

"The Phantasmic Phourr"
Digitally colored drawing, 2009

Quote of the day: Carl Jung

"Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is 'man' in a higher sense— he is 'collective man' — one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic forms of mankind."

"We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions."

- Carl Jung

Quote of the day: Federico Fellini

"I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it."

- Federico Fellini

Hot Gruel For You!

"Hot Gruel For You"
Digitally re-vamped sketchbook page, 2009.

"The Psychedelic Adventures of Danny DeVito's Stunt Double "
Digitally re-vamped sketchbook page, 2009.
(a collaborative drawing between me and Jeanne)

My goal in life is basically twofold: one day, I hope to make something so awesome that people won't even be able to fucking believe it. I mean so totally and completely bad-ass that nobody can ignore it, and everybody will love it and want to have sex with it. People will just be going about, minding their own business, when suddenly they'll see it, and it will stop them in their tracks! They'll collapse then and there, right on the street, quivering in the fetal position because it will completely blow their minds!
Oh sure, there'll eventually be a backlash against it - but the pungent opinions of all of the nay-sayers will only pique the curiosity of others even more! The raging debate over its artistic worth will ascertain that plenty of people will be talking about it for many years to come. All publicity is good publicity.
As for me I'll be laughing: "ha ha ha!" Every evening, I will wallow naked in the filthy money that my creation has made for me. I'll light a cigar with a $100 bill and blow smoke in the face of my biographer as I dictate the story of my amazing life to him. "Oh sure, I was down on my luck for a while," I will say, "But I didn't realize at the time that not getting strapped down with some stupid day job was the best thing that could have happened to my career. I mean really, how could I have thought of something like this if I were sweating my balls off in a Chuck E Cheese costume, serving sub par pizza to ungrateful brats every day?"
My other great ambition, which will take place because of the unbelievable success of the first, is to digitally encode the consciousnesses of me, Jeanne, and Daisy so that they can be uploaded into indestructible android bodies after we die. We will even be able to merge into one super android, and a little robot Daisy will be able to "eject" from our chest, just like Soundwave from Transformers.
We'll say, "Daisy! Eject! Operation: defecation" And she'll shit on whoever we want her to (and yes, it has been proven that feces can be artificially created- look up "The Cloaca" if you don't believe me). Then and there, all mysteries of existence will be solved. We will all move on to immortal android bodies, colonize outer space, and lock arms and sing Queen's "We are the champions" in one big, jubilant celebration.

Quote of the day: Penn Jillette

"Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision."

- Penn Jillette