Muse Flight | The visual Muses whisk me to new worlds of paints and pencils.

So I've started another blog, because my multi-disciplinary interests deserve separate and specific attention. Musedrive drove me in 2010 along the winding roads of the world of words, Museflight at Wordpress will soar me to the heights of imagination in the medium I feel very comfortable with: the visual arts.

As 2011 is the Year of the Rabbit - a most auspicious year of auspiciousness - I am determined to reignite my visual career in web design, painting and drawing. Asian Daily Paintings was the start of a 'Just Do it' mentality over the 'Think It Over' mentality that has dominated my life for far too long. Spontaneity and filling my time with every possible ounce of creativity is my new goal.

The TV weeps silently in the dark corner...

Have a look, but patience is key as I follow refreshment courses  in Adobe CS5 and Wordpress to squeeze the most know-how of how to do art and communicate it electronically. So many tools...so little time.

Muse Flight | The visual Muses whisk me to new worlds of paints and pencils.

The Imperfect Perfection

I have always been a little conspiracy nut. Another more polite term might be 'social mechanics interested'. I don't know when this started, but it was probably around the time when my inflated sense of justice caused me to get really annoyed with abusive powers in the world. You see, I don't like when people with power, fail to keep their morals in check. It's part helplessness, part frustration and let's be honest, a lack of faith in cosmic justice.

It was only later, when I became a Buddhist (however only in the most pragmatic of ways) that I tempered these emotions of injustice with a rationalization that how people behave shapes their character and ultimately lands them in a situation in which they reap what they've sown.

It was only a matter of time before one of the biggest injustices in our world - Big Brother mechanics - would manifest itself through my creativity. The young adult novel series 'Aelemental' taps into this to a certain degree, aligning personal teenage angst and insecurities with the corporate and governmental 'macro evils' of our world. But as the search for an agent continues and I focus on the more visual outlet to my creative Muses through Asian Daily Paintings, Big Brother was bound to pop up through my subconscious.

I have painted 17 daily paintings so far (and need 13 more for the Bangkok K-village Art Festival) and only now through the sheer unpredictability that is painting magic (?) has my masterpiece arrived. It went fast. A few scribbles, perfect follow up lines of black acrylic and there it was: the frustrated eyes of a faceless Big Brother. Despite (or maybe because) my intent on having the 'Glyphs' series present black/white with one bright color, I felt the stark hyperbole of Big Brother needed to be offset by the blandness of its intent - hence the grey. Not a line out of shape or superfluously used. I was very jazzed.

Just wanted to share the jazz. It eases the frustration. And maybe that's the true value of art in any form: it balances the universe and everything in it for us by giving our unspoken emotions a voice.

A Commitment to Creativity

As the search for an agent continues, the Muses don't stop whispering in my ear. I could of course buy earplugs, but something tells me that's not going to be enough. It never is. Expression. I need to channel the creativity into something and that something has just come around the corner in the form of 'Asian Daily Paintings'.

What is Asian Daily Paintings? It's an initiative set forward by Elsie Evans and myself to get a gathering of local and expat artists together and paint on a daily base. There are several rewards, the most obvious one is a collection of art, which we can then sell to the public or decorate our house with, but it goes further. Discipline, commitment, practice and the rhythm of creativity are the rewards that follow in a venture like this. Also it is nice to get local exposure and who knows what can come from that, right? Maybe a staff member of a hotel sees the art and suggests it to her boss, who then wants to contract the artist for an assignment. Or a random browse on the Internet by a journalist leads to curiosity enough to write an article about it. Maybe a friend of a friend who sees one of the paintings at his place decides to Google the artist and sees other creative projects (like Sesame Maps or Aelemental) he is doing.

The exposure and sale of art are of course great, but by-products of what's really important: the joy and fun in creating something spontaneous. Direct results. Not too much planning or thought - after all, you have to do one a day. Right now it takes me under an hour to paint a piece. I'm starting easy with a series called 'Glyphs'. They are 30cm x 30cm (sometimes larger, but as an exception to the rule) white canvases with a black abstract symbol painted on to it accompanied by one color.

It hearkens back to my university years when I used to doodle. While I listened to one monologue or another I would let my hand wander and scribble a few swirly lines, which I would then connect and 'flesh out'. An object or image of a concept would somehow always appear, which I would then give more character by adding a few color enhancements. I came up with dozens in my time, but of course they all got thrown out in my big move to Africa in 2002.

Now I'm redefining my creative expressions. Not with a young adult novel or scavenger maps for traveling kids (both pending representation). Not with 'i2u', my pro bono community IT work (which is pending backup with a web site and other promotional material). No, I'm going with painting. Besides...I still have 23 hours left in the day to do the rest, right?

A Wild Start

The Wild Hunt is on. It's the start of a new year and with it comes a fresh mentality. The Wild Hunt refers to the mythological concept of magical huntsmen unleashing chaos while chasing some boon or another. To me it means a wild abandon of the conventional ways as 2011 will become the year in which I reinvent my ways. The portents are present. According to Chinese astrology this is the year of the Rabbit and by being a 'Metal Pig' myself I am destined for great things - if I work on making them happen - which I will.

While I hunt for a new purpose in the computer world (and no, nothing like Tron: Legacy might suggest) I will continue to put the emphasis on creativity. In my work this not just means finding freelance work to support me and my family financially. I will be reaching out to my local community via a pro bono 'free expert for a day' project in which I hope to garner some word-of-mouth advertising. I call this my 'i2u' initiative (look for it soon on www.marcelclaxton.com/i2u).

While I hunt for an agent brave enough to tackle the next step in young adult fiction, I'll continue plotting book 2 of the Aelemental series. Ideas that don't fit within the series will find reality on my computer in the dark hours before hitting the sack. One of the ideas I have follows from that feeling everyone has when they wander through a bookstore and sees titles which boggle the rational mind (how is it possible THAT was published). We've all had that feeling, usually followed by a notion of 'Well, if they can write a book, then certainly I can.' So, that's exactly what the book will be about: an experiment to get a book about nothing and everything written in record time, published in even less time thereafter and on your e-reader before you know it. It's all doable in on the Internet nowadays.

I have several odd projects on the side, which I will indulge in (rebuilding a rickshaw from scratch, painting a series of paintings representing the Aelemental books, the Sesame Trail maps for young explorers, three different and distinct children's series involving alternate reality Earth settings), but they will have to wait until I get concrete results from Aelemental and IT work first. There is always room for dreams, but they need to be balanced with actual real life results. But the hunt is on...and all the muses are unleashed.

Happy New Year.

I Write Like...myself

I've been a little bit in a slump lately. There is no way I'll be able to wrap up the redrafting of Simon & Sally before the deadline hits next week. My motivation to write has hit another low. Somehow my creativity strikes me in different ways. Lately it's been with painting and I found myself catching up on a number of assignments, first making a Klimt-cartoon version of my wife for her birthday (she's big on Klimt). Then I went to work on a promise to a friend I made a long time ago. Next up if the mood still strikes me is the second painting in a series of five representing the five books I want to write about Simon & Sally. Maybe that will get me back on the horse again. Other than that I've been making a number of pencil and color pen sketches, some about Simon & Sally, some not.

But it's not all visually expressed creativity as I found myself pulled towards the latest viral website: I Write Like. It's basically a site where you dump a portion of your written word in (fiction, non-fiction, blog, whatever) and through some mathematical calculations compares you to famous writers and gives you the name of the writer whose work yours most resembles. Very fun if a little arbitrary. I dumped one of my blog entries in there and came up with David Foster Wallace, a 'post modern hysterical realistic' writer according to wikipedia. He alledgedly commited suicide and was known for his examination of the human condition. Admittedly I like to delve into the psyche myself, to see what makes me tick, but then again, don't we all when we write blogs? My actual writing on Simon & Sally invoked resemblances to Ian Fleming and Kurt Vonnegut, and that's only of the next two times I ran the 'I Write Like' machine.

I'm careful to not take this too seriously, especially because I know I have an over-nurtured sense of associative reasoning. It's too easy to say that I'm writing the next James Bond, or that my style resembles that of the early 20th century fiction writers. After all, I bet if I ran my collective work through the site a hundred times it would probably come up with fifty to a hundred different writers. So what does this say? I guess we are all influenced to a certain degree by those who went before us, but ultimately we mold our stories from our own collection of experiences, both real and fictitious. So we write like we are. I write like me. And I wouldn't want it any other way. After all, what's the point in being the next Stephen King or J.K.Rowling? They're still here, and following in someone's footsteps who has already died (like all three of my so-called style buddies) just puts unnecessary pressure to perform.

And that's the last thing I need now...pressure to perform. I just need to keep tuned to my Muses and wait when they are finished window shopping in the mall of my visual expression and return to the road of literature.