Archives for posts with tag: life
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Ok, ok – not ok

September 16, 2012 //
0

A few years back I attended a training course for a volunteer organisation. One could describe the course as psychology for lay people. Most of it was common sense. But there was this one diagram describing the basic mental attitudes, which I found very good. I re-drew it this morning; something I wanted to do for some time. Yep, I know representatives of each and every one of those four catagories.

Personally, I am oscillating between the two left images (as I guess most women do!) When I am in the top left, everything is honky dory. I strongly believe in win-win situations and I work hard to achieve them. When I am in the bottom left, my soul mate comes in very handy :). Thank you!

Problems arise, when I come across someone who has the mental attitude of the top right quadrant. Often I simply walk away, but I can also turn into a lioness, particularly if  a third party is involved. Lioness mode, believe me, is not a pretty picture and it is very exhausting, so I try to avoid it… Unfortunately I am not always successful.

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Categories Art, Fun, Life, Relationships, Social Network

Ultimately…

September 15, 2012 //
2

Further to my post of yesterday… I had a few conversations since and I realised I wasn’t entirely clear in what I’ve said.

It is very sad, but ultimately I think (and this is my very own cheerless opinion) we are alone in the world. I believe there is no way, one human being can ever completely know and comprehend another living being (often we don’t know ourselves). At the same time we crave for others to understand our individuality, we are searching for closeness, for acceptance. We want to be understood, we want to be looked after, we want others to help us carry our burden and share our plight. We want  for someone to complement what we are lacking. We want, we want, we want… But of course on our terms… People are selfish! But if we wouldn’t look after ourselves who would?

I can understand that humans look to Him and find solace. We are here on borrowed time and only once, so we have to make the best of it! There might be re-incarnation. I don’t know. I will find out one day. In the meantime I try to be nice to people. I say I try, as it doesn’t always work this way… I have no influence on how people perceive me. They might not like my frown lines, they might not like the pitch of my voice or my accent… all things I can’t change, and I shrug my shoulders and say: their problem not mine… On the other hand, if somebody is grumpy… How do I know what happened to them before we bumped into each other? Maybe their wife just left them, or their father had a car accident, or their child was diagnosed with an untreatable disease. Their grumpiness might not have anything to do with me at all…

It is this split second of eternity in which we meet and make a decision about whether we like or dislike a person. Scaaaaryyyy! And, be honest, once we have formed an opinion about someone it is very, very difficult to change.

To cut a long story short, what I am advocating is, find yourself a person who has similar values as you have, fall in love with this person and note, IN love is a completely different feeling than love itself. Being in love is a wonderful folly, and a period of exaggeration and best behaviour. Love itself is a feeling that has to be nourished to grow, a feeling of warmth despite all the flaws, the farts and burps. If it is allowed to grow it will lead to the ultimate trust… in the acceptance  of two people in their individuality and differences. And this is what I mean by soul mate.

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Categories Art, Life, Relationships

My secret to Happiness

September 14, 2012 //
5

First a warning: Most people actually don’t want to be happy –  as truly happy people are so, so boring. What makes life interesting are the spikes, not equilibrium.

I have learned to embrace my ups and downs. I have learned that the proverbial brick wall stops me only temporarily. I don’t have to force my way through it, there is always a way around it. Finding  this detour often requires a pause, to sit down and ponder.

On my personal list of happiness there are only two items, and they are by no means fame and riches. On my list is one item you should have and one you shouldn’t. Not too difficult, is it?

The item you absolutely need to have is a soul mate!

What you need to get rid of are any personal expectations you have of him/her, so that you will keep this gem  for a long long time to come!

As easy as…

Funnily enough, most of my friends seem to think the first part is the difficult one. In fact it is the second, the working on the relationship, trying not to re-model the person you’ve found to fit your ideas. Without expectation the ideas will grow together in due time :)

Then when you hit the brick wall your fall will be cushioned!

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Categories Art, Fun, Life, Relationships, Social Network

As time goes by

September 13, 2012 //
0

I use my art to dissect ideas that float around my head. It relaxes me tremendously and helps to solve any difficult issues I have to deal with.

When I was at school, my doodling habits drove my teachers absolutely bonkers. I never finished a period with any sort of usable notes and therefore couldn’t revise at home. In the end I got kicked out of school because my English and French weren’t up to scratch…  Ah well, as time goes by… I wish my English teacher could hear me now.

I am still doodling when I am in meetings, some habits never die! Funnily enough, I can take in conversations much better when I do this. I am pretty sure all the other doodlers out there will agree :)

 

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Categories Art, Fun, Life

Puzzle

September 12, 2012 //
4

It takes twenty-one days of hard work to form a good habit. Why does it only take three to slip back into bad ones?

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Categories Art, Digital art, Life, Social Network

Finally…

September 11, 2012 //
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…The complete Like – What? installation. The figures are looking outwards and the connections at the modems form a pentagram. The heads are sitting on clay balls at the top of aluminum tubes and when somebody walks past they sway ever so slightly. I will leave the rest of the interpretation up to you…. you know the characters already :)

I wanted to make new puppets last weekend, but got side-tracked with revamping my blog. I updated the Home page and the About page and added the Milestones menu, though I haven’t added the installation characters to the Character page yet. This will have to wait until next weekend.

I am now in my seventh month of writing this blog and I do notice a gradual change from the initial difficulties of sharing my art with an unknown audience. It has become easier over time. The biggest hurdle for me is seeing how many gifted people are out there, and I wonder who should read all this….  I personally would like to have more time to spend reading the other blogs and discover new ones. In the end it is no different to real life is it? You have a couple of blogs you always check up on. You hang out with some more than with others, but  it changes over time until you suddenly notice that you haven’t seen one for a while.

A big fat Thank you  to all the people who check regularly on my progress. I really appreciate it!

I will have to concentrate on my book for a while and I was going to check out LULU last night, but then I skyped for ages with the other side of the world, so this didn’t happen. I came across a German self-publishing site called Tredition, this could become plan B.

Reading today’s post again, I notice it is all about what I wanted to do but didn’t … I guess I will have to start on my Procrastinator puppet soon.

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Categories Art, Books, Self-publishing

Smug

September 10, 2012 //
4

Smug Little Devil is the last of the figures of the installation. He does his own thing and makes sure it is always to his advantage. Empathy is a word he has never heard of. At first he seems friendly enough, but when you know him better, you will find out this is the only emotion he ever shows; a smug grin. There is no way you can figure out what he is up to, but the horns give it away, it’s nothing good :).

Now that the whole thing with the Art Awards is over, I have to re-think my marketing strategy for Hermit’s Web, my book.  I still have to contact German publishers… the Frankfurt book fair is only a month away. Personally I think the story is very suitable for the German market, after all I am German and it shows in my sense of humour (okay, some people say the Germans don’t have one – we do… admittedly it’s sometimes a bit obscure).

Lately I am also considering a paper back issue to sell via Amazon. I am looking into Create Space to publish on demand (the book gets printed when somebody orders it). I have been a bit reluctant  to pursue this option, as I have no experience with their print quality – in particular their colour quality. With the puppets, my book has of course colour images throughout. My worry is if they are reproduced in poor quality, it does more harm than good – Oh, these artists are picky!

Anyway, on the upside, my friends in Europe could order their copy more conveniently. So this option will get pushed around in my head for a little longer.

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Categories Art, Books, Hand Puppets, Life

Parallel world

September 9, 2012 //
0

Introducing Ms SM today. She is the fourth one of the installation puppets. I don’t know her real name. It might be Sue or Sophie Miller or even Steven, who knows. I don’t know what she looks like without her mask, but I hear she is an accountant in a big corporation and pretty dull to talk to. She just hides her real self from her colleagues by fading into the background during the day. A precaution that makes her own life more bearable. “Normal” people wouldn’t understand. Being her is difficult enough, even without all the ridicule and bullying. It can’t be easy to live two lives. Of course her web friends understand… she feels safer there than in “reality”.

Originally this puppet was supposed to be  Witch Version 2. Only when she was completed did she reveal her real identity. She was virtually begging me to be allowed to become Ms SM.

To link it back to yesterday’s post: Is she living a lie?

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Categories Art, Hand Puppets, Life

The truth?

September 8, 2012 //
6

I am staying with the Liar this morning. I read an interesting post about lying on a fellow blogger’s site (Moments Matter). The response I’d started to write got a bit too long, so I decided I pick up the subject on my own blog, particularly as it fits with yesterday’s post.

I personally gave up lying a long time ago, basically because I found lying extremely stressful. Once I realised I couldn’t keep track of who I had told what, I decided to tell it how it is/was. And voila… no more fluster! This is a very bold statement and it is of course only possible with factual lies. For example, if I say I have been to Mexico, but in fact I have never been there. The fact is wrong and ergo it is a lie. (…these lies are so easy to debunk, so why bother!).

This is the kind of lie I mentioned yesterday, when the male editor pretended to be a women. These lies are told to deliberately deceive and in my opinion are despicable.

Everything else that is not a fact, is an opinion.

If I dislike your painting/dress/new boyfriend and you ask me what I really think of it, I can always say it’s not for me, but that is just my opinion. It goes the other way round as well,  because, if you don’t lie you have to tell the truth… The big question remains; what is the truth? Most of the time the truth is just an opinion and everybody is entitled to their own. I might not like it, but I would rather hear their truth (opinion) than being told what someone thinks I might like to hear…. Uhhhuuu it’s getting really complicated now!

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Categories Art, Hand Puppets, Life

Liar

September 7, 2012 //
2

This one is Liar. His long nose is a give-away (sorry, it is not very clear on the photo). To impress people he embellishes everything he says.  His hair is made up of a net  full of smallish fish… that is all he can catch with his tall  tales. Sometimes I wonder if he believes his own stories. He certainly doesn’t look like a very happy person.

I started working with computers in the early eighties of the last century! I am showing my age now :)…  My first job was at a computer book publisher. I was the first person in the office to get a hard drive… the envy of the entire company.  All the others still had to fluff around with the “5 and a quarter inch” disks. If you have ever seen one of them, you know why they were called floppy. My dad bought his first computer in the late ’70s. A Commodore with a tape recorder attached as a storage medium… so a hard drive was pretty cool. But everything moved very quickly from there on.

I don’t reminiscent much about the times, I hardly have contact to my peers from then, but I clearly remember the gold rush aura that surrounded us. We were cool, man, and we owned the world. In reality we were pasty-faced nocturnal creatures, trying to find our place in society by simply creating a new one. Chat rooms were all the rage in our circles.  (Remember those prehistoric modems on which you had to place the hand-set of the telephone?)  The Web wasn’t invented then and there was no commerce on the internet, it was primarily a military and scholarly network. (By the way, monitors came in a choice of green or amber and when you wanted to create a graph you had to stack asterisks on top of each other, do I need to say more?)

In the editor’s room we had a bet going. One of the male editors had to pretend to be a woman in the chat rooms. To win the bet – a crate of beer – he had to keep it up for six months undetected. He won! This experience was quite an eye-opener and I guess it explains my suspicions of social networks.

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Categories Art, Fun, Hand Puppets, Life
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