Archives for posts with tag: reflections

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!

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 :)

 

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?

…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.

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.

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!

We had a visitor for a few weeks who is leaving today. We were supposed to travel around much more than we did. Never mind! You can see a lot of the country from the car, just passing by.  Here a few impressions I took on the way up to the North. I love to see the country flying by. I certainly have to get out more. That’s my resolution for the next few month…. summer is on its way too :)

So, last night was the night of the Awards! And I can finally show images of my artwork publicly. I’ve chosen the Alien, as that is what I felt like last night. The event was really interesting and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Not sure if I would put another artwork into the competition, at least not one that is as delicate as the one this time. One thing I learned last night… There is a fine line between delicate and flimsy, and it is all in the presentation.

My artwork is a very, very delicate one, with many different layers and one has to engage with it for a while to discover their multitude. With so many other artworks squeezed into the available space and the huge amount of people shuffling past, it looked flimsy. One lady knocked one of my figures over, looked at it briefly and very quickly disappeared into the crowd. No attempt was made to set up the figure again. Another visitor, who had observed the incident, kindly put it upright again, but didn’t want to spend too much time doing it, I assume, so people wouldn’t think he knocked the thing over. But I was the lucky one, another artist had a piece of her installation knocked off the top. At least my figures don’t break!

There is some really amazing artwork there, so it is worthwhile going and having a look. The Finalists were divided into two groups, the travelling show from which the winners were chosen and the Salon de Refusé. The artworks of the second group will stay in Auckland until mid November. Fitting in all the artwork doesn’t  leave much space for them to breathe. And we all know art needs space… Watching the people, it seemed hardly anybody looked at any artwork for more than a couple of seconds. No surprise really, there is so much to see and all the people to look at too… I am pleased I didn’t miss it.

The last image was about feeling small and unimportant, in the sense of having absolutely no impact on the big wide world – of being incapable of making an impression. This smallness of being is the connection to today’s photograph.

In the light of a beautiful sunset the feeling of smallness is awe!

My little church yesterday was missing it’s bell in the belfry.  This is my link to today’s image. The bell here – the largest swinging bell in the world – hangs in the Cathedral of Cologne. It is 3.20 meters high and weights 24000 kg. Absolutely gigantic. The silhouetted people  illustrate the dimensions perfectly. They are reduced to small vulnerable particles here in a world constructed by man.

The story goes  that when the bell was installed in 1924 it didn’t fit through the portal. They had to remove the main column with the statue of Mary in the entrance. It took a few weeks to move the bell into its final place, 53 meters up in the tower. It was supposed to be rung for the first time at Christmas, but after the first few warm-up swings, the rope tore. Some changes to the clapper and how it was hung were needed and it took another ten months before it was finally heard.

I wonder if it was just classified as minor set-back in the bigger scheme of things?