ヤムステレオ

A strange thing happened when everyone started making digital art and I stayed stuck in the stone age.

I started feeling like any art I made was amateurish.

Real art, surely, had to be screen printed or made with oil paints on a large canvas. Or sleek and slick like plastic at the mall.

My pencil and sharpie drawings, rife with eraser marks and glue stains didn’t cut it. Relegated to scribbles and doodles.

Cue the art trauma.

Stay tuned for part 2 where I’ll tell you how I managed to turn things around. Weirdly enough, it kinda started with this colorized vector image of Pattie Boyd, famous rockstar girlfriend/wife of the 1960s.

The other day I said the weirdest thing and it caught on for a whole 5 seconds!

That got me thinking.

Andy Warhol famously said that everyone would have their 15 minutes of fame. He sort of foresaw the world we would be living in in 2025. Everyone wants to be something. Everyone wants to matter. Everyone wants passive. income. income. income. The attention economy. If I make enough slop, maybe someone will notice me.

I’m old enough to remember the world wide web before it became a sea of ads. We used to have screen names because the idea of putting your identity out there for everyone to see was actually kind of insane? I didn’t even have a digital camera until I was 26 years old.

I thought it would be fun to create a website in the spirit of the early internet. I used to make websites on geocities. I used to use websites called “chickpages” and “gurl.com!” I knew these names were cringe at the time, but I thought they were funny and also I was super into riot grrl and making zines and I thought maybe this is where I might find my people.

And actually, I sort of did find my people! Ahh, the internet. I remember went you weren’t so full of ads.