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On my way home last night I tried to figure out who I could talk to regarding Devil’s complaint from the day before. Believe me, I know my puppets well and I know what they are going to say. Chance would say: “Go for it”. Pirate would say “Whatever brings in the most dosh”. Mouse is ruled out as everybody would know I have a problem straight away…. I don’t particularly like that.

Anyway when I arrived home, Bad Conscience was already sitting on my couch. He must have let himself in with the key hidden under the planter box. Of all the puppets, Mouse aside, he is the worst to try and discuss issues with. You go round and round in little circles and never get anywhere. Maybe his blurry eyes prevent him from seeing things clearly. Ah well, we spent an evening in silence regurgitating old issues.

Last night Devil paid me a visit. He wanted to talk to me as the spokesperson of the dede puppets. They are all very concerned. I didn’t know the dede puppets had a spokesperson. Honestly I don’t think he was voted in. But he obviously thinks he is the Patron Saint of the dede puppets, as he is the oldest. (Patron Saint… it’s a bit rich isn’t it?)

Anyway, he said they are all concerned about where the dede puppet blog is going. He reminded me I had promised to set it up for the dedes as a forum. He, Devil,  now accuses me of hijacking it for my other artwork. He actually said, “What’s so beautiful about a Giant Weta, all  the dede puppets have nicer eyes…” He quoted the one post where I said it is all about eyes at the moment.

Okay, point taken. Devil himself has gorgeous eyes… I still think (and I am not being defensive here) there should be a place for other photographs on the blog.

So, we had this long and heated discussion about whether I should be allowed to put other artwork up. In the end I had this feeling he was mainly miffed with me because the film features Pirate and Mouse. He insisted it was him who broke the news of the book to Mouse, so he should have been in the film. I promised him he will be in the next one. (We are moving towards winter and I will have more time to do this kind of stuff). I basically made this promise to get him off my back. It was past midnight when he finally disappeared.

It took more than an hour to get the smell of sulpher out of the house. This is the reason, why I normally like to catch up with Devil at the pub.

I think I will canvas the other dede puppets about what they think on the subject. I am still not sure whether he made a mountain out of a mole hill.

At the moment I feel like my Nosy Neighbour puppet. In this image by Sonya Roussina he looks pretty depressed. Everything seems to have come to a halt, even though I have so many things nearly finished… My dede puppet film is done, but I can’t put it up on Youtube before I have one more thing sorted on our Web page. I was so sure I will publish both this weekend, but now this weekend is gone and it still isn’t up. Ah well… Such is life. I still haven’t started on my Procrastinator puppet either.

 

 

With this post, my self-imposed seclusion is coming to an end. I am back to writing my blog as part of my daily routine. I had a very, very strong urge to remain silent for a while. I was surprised though, how much I missed writing, even though I am only doing it for a bit over two months. The artworks I have created last week are as private as my thoughts and won’t make it onto the blog.

Another one of my tree eye series.  It is called “Tears from the depth of some divine despair”. Which in turn is the second line of a beautiful poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson called Tears, idle tears. My current tears are not idle: Good bye, mum.

It’s Friday again and looking back at the week it wasn’t a particularly successful one. I’ve set out to do all these things and I ended up with half finished jobs, jobs not started, as well as having done things that needn’t to be done this week and also dealt with stuff originally not anticipated. To cut a long story short, my to do list hasn’t changed much since Monday, but I haven’t been idle this week either. I guess that’s life.

Today I have four things to finish on my to do list and I hope I will have completed them by tonight. So, let’s not procrastinate further and get on with it.

Moving on

I was hoping, once the launch is over, I can slow down a bit. But I can’t. I have no idea what drives me at the moment and where the energy is coming from. I have two new photographic projects, I would like to embark on, though the puppets are still requiring all of my attention. I am currently putting a proposal together for an exhibition in a gallery and I am also about to send a couple of books to the mothership (that is the newspaper the puppets are made of). I will labour over that particular letter for a while, as I will have to write it in German. Even though German is my mother tongue, it won’t come easy as I haven’t written a letter in my native language for yonkers. I don’t even know the proper format anymore.

I still have to update our website, but I think I will capitulate here. Down the corridor is a company that does web sites and they will be able to solve the technical problems much quicker and more elegantly than I ever could. This will free me up to do things I really like to do. Time is an extremely precious commodity… But what am I telling you (:

I’ve noticed, that my posts don’t get many likes at the moment… Sorry if I bore you, what I am writing here is more like a diary, basically for me to remember in a year’s time what it was like. I am also writing for my students as they will have to put themselves on the line once they will have completed their studies. I hope sharing what I go through will help. As one artist friend of mine told me: “When you go out there and exhibit, you are nailing your heart to the wall.” I don’t know if these were his own words, but they stuck!

So, the book is launched. I had my five minutes of fame, and now I am left with the minor problem of selling the print run. At the moment you can’t get the book anywhere else than in my office. And boy, every poor person who comes through the door, is greeted by three puppets and a grinning me. If they want it or not, they have to listen to my story and nobody leaves the room without having bought a book. It won’t be long and I will have exhausted all the people I know and I will  slide back into my hermit state, because everybody is avoiding me (just kidding).

Being a real artist, of course I have procrastinated the selling task.  I always said, once I have the books in my hot little hands, I will put them up on fishpond.co.nz (that is sort of the New Zealand answer to Amazon) and also on our own website. I dutifully read up about how to put a paypal button on a website and I am in the process of updating the website generally. Paypal says it takes 15 minutes to set up the button… Yeah right! I haven’t figured out yet, how you can charge different shipping costs for people here and overseas. But maybe I am just too tired now. Tomorrow is a public holiday in New Zealand and I will try with a fresh mind then. Thankfully, I have to sell books and not cream cakes. So it doesn’t matter if they are not sold by the weekend.

I have sent the 2 required copies to Legal Deposit Office of the National Library yesterday, that means that the book is now officially published in New Zealand. That’s at least something!

 

what's next

When I was tidying up in the Gallery yesterday, I overheard a conversation between Devil’s Advocate and Sunny Boy. Sunny was very excited how well everything went on Thursday night and said confidently we all could go on holiday now – The Gold Coast would be nice, thank you! He even suggested, I should pay for the entire troupe, as I must have made loads of money by selling the book. But Devil’s advocate has a good head on his shoulders and put Sunny right… He said: “This was only the beginning. The majority of work is still to come”. Ah, Sunny is such a dreamer…

So, it is all set up for the big night at the Gallery. Here L’artiste, Detail and Skeleton are having a chat about what to expect. They don’t seem to be particularly happy campers. I will report tomorrow how they liked it.

I still have to do some name plates for the puppets, but most importantly, the wine is in the fridge… I even rehearsed my puppet show this morning at breakfast with two spectators. They had some really good input. My biggest problem will be to make sure, I am not laughing the loudest about my own jokes.