Last week, I got the opportunity to work with the Crenshaw Imperial Plaza to create a street mural that spelled out "COMMUNITY". I'm actually not sure how they came to that decision, but when I was brought on, it was clear they wanted something in the spirit of the letters that have been recently used to spell out BLACK LIVES MATTER. While we were painting, a lot of the people that came by kept asking what we were spelling out. Many of them were expecting a BLM mural like they'd seen on the news, but were mildy surprised that we were doing something different. At least one person replied with "Good!" I didn't know their motivation, but I thought it was amusing.
This kind of project was a new one for me. Being out in the hot sun on hot concrete and sniffing industrial-grade paint was new for me. My legs and back were hurting from trying to navigate the proper stance to lay down the art. At some point, I had thoughts about what Michelangelo must felt creating the Sistene chapel ceiling. Of course, that was on another level. This must have a been a laugh to someone like that. New respect for public art.
Out of three artists, I was responsible for the 'COM' portion, Artist Marie Jose did the 'MUN' and Vanessa Rivera came through with the 'ITY'. You can find their links at the bottom of the post. If you're in the region, be sure you check it out.
So...I really got into creating online because of the ability to share the interesting people and experiences that I was coming across. I have some images that I don't usually show. They're always on my mind and will accompany my other posts. We'll see what happens.
This is my father Earl alongside one of my favorite image of his, a block printed painting known as "The Line". I found a photograph of the image and recreated it on the computer and got a large print made for his birthday. You can't tell here, but he's really happy about it. :).
I'm actually reminded of "The Line" as I see places like Wal-Mart and Ralph's with huge queues of people stretching around the block for some canned goods because yeah, everything is crazy right now.
The other half of my major influence is my mother, Shirley. All my life I knew her as an opera singer and professor of music at Florida A&M University. More than that, I knew her as an educator and a student. She was always on the hunt for knowledge and was willing to share it to everyone in her environment. Also, that's not a college student in the pictures, btw. She also taught young ones in few moments of "spare" time. Interestingly enough, she was strict, but never pushed the arts on me as the end all and be all of life. In fact, when I expressed interests in computers and video games, she was all for it even though it really wasn't her ballpark.
Dr Shirley showed me how to fight the fight to get to where you want to be. How to get around the obstacles. And how to get your music heard.
Note: I sent this message out earlier in February, but should have turned it into a blog post back then. Here it is now as late as it wants to be.
As we close out Black History Month, I am releasing "X.1" as an 8BitCubist print. It's a reminder of the enigmatic and controversial figure known as Malcolm X, who unapologetically fought for freedom from racism while in the crosshairs of opposition from numerous forces. His story is also an interesting one of religion and culture. I didn't want to do much else but make a simple statement with this one.
See, the game doesn't always have a happy ending, but must be played to completion to the best of your ability. It's also probably your favorite button.
Love him or not, if you haven't seen the Malcolm X film by Spike Lee, then you should have watched that by now. You can find that link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FtH94TiL0I
I just realized that I create no physical products. I am a complete idea/concept person, and I have been for decades. I mean that in the sense that most everything I do is non-physical. In fact, I started painting with actual materials to get more in touch with "real" life.
This is not a bad thing, though. Ideas and concepts are the basis of mathematics, books, ideologies, music, art, and so much more that enable us to navigate the physical world.
It's just this weird idea that I had that my output is basically virtual.
There's something not quite real about that.
There are a lot of people that aren't into the art scene (or whatever scene ), and they'll look for an easy fix for their itch. This usually means they'll end up consuming something mass-market and commodified. It's hard to win that game on creation alone. (If you can, you're in a good space.)
On eBay and other marketplaces, people are selling cheap "original" wall decor that are painted in assembly-line factories located in China, Mexico, Bangladesh, and across the US. (Or even think of art that is simply printed with embellishments.)
These items are usually copies of a style, direct facsimiles, or quick Photoshop edits. Aside from the legal and moral lameness involved, I don't think it's very good. But I understand the role it plays, and I'm not mad it it.
What you're seeing is a commodification of art on a large scale. (Notice that the image above says 24 sold.) While, I don't knock anyone that buys this stuff, I think you can do much better for yourself.
For a while, I only created original paintings and didn't do prints. The concept behind the art required that I create original works only. The philosophy had to do with creating representations of digital works in a 1-of-1 medium. It gets into a lot of artsy talk that I'd rather not get into now, but if you have one of those paintings, I will never create prints of those. Enjoy!
While a lot of artists create prints to supplement their original works, that's never factored into my art. In fact, I would almost rather not have to deal with the idea of prints at all, but times change.
Recently, my art has changed a bit, and the message no longer demands the works be unique offerings. So now, I have a started creating prints and will be creating them more often. In fact, the message/philosophy has changed so much that I have found myself with a print-first procedure. Basically, I create these images and then decide which ones I like enough to convert to paintings. Some of the prints are rather difficult to render as paintings, so there's that issue as well.
After the passing of Kobe Bryant I was inspired to create. It just happened that way. He is one of those figures that exemplified the push that I have been engaged with lately, so I felt I had to do what pop art does, speak on popular culture.
I always think deeply about those that have inspired me, and in the spirit of pop art, I created two pieces after Kobe's death. The first of these prints is called "24/8".
As usual, I went with what felt natural to me. But since it's the first tribute piece I've ever done, I felt weird about not going the usual tribute route. In fact, while typing this, I realized that I needed to delete all of my art-speak and just let you know what was on my mind as I constructed this image:
* an ode to Kobe's legacy
* the game we play
* the ball
* constancy
* forward motion
I will post about the second one a little later on. It's a bit more involved.
Being that I have a mind that pushes boundaries, I like to think I get comedy. Aside from being fucking hilarious at dinner parties, I did three summers worth of standup at the ACME Comedy Club in Minnesota. (Shout out to Nick Swardson who showed me what it means to be made of puuuurreeee eeeevilllll and to Victor Varnado who showed me what it meant to embrace the "fuck it" attitude.) Also, it's healthy for us to look at all sides of an issue.
But calling him right wrong isn't my point here. It's about crossing lines.
I'll start with this quote from the legend George Carlin, which may or may not be from him. He hasn't responded to my tweets, so I can't verify this part.
Okay. So was Ari Shaffir simply crossing lines that should be crossed? Was he just trolling? Because he really does troll people, but not like this.
At face value, line-crossing in comedy is fine. The craft is not necessarily about being "funny" or acceptable. The comic should be out there picking fights, ruffling feathers, making people think, pushing buttons, and even bombing in the presence of innocent civilians. (See what I did there?)
I mean that. For example, here are popular topics that comics SHOULD broach:
The sanctity of life
Race
Rape
Religion
Pregnancy
Prostrate cancer
Gender identity
Sex organs
Murder
Floridians
Politics
Physical differences
Joke thieves
Denial of mental health problems
Culture
Economic status
Social class
Failed marriages
Anything that has ever appeared in People magazine
It's all on the table. That's how it's supposed to be.
But the question is... HOW ARE YOU CROSSING THOSE LINES AND WHY?
Are you helping anyone? Did you make anyone think? Were new opinions formed? Did a reasonable dialog come up? Was it worth it?
See, this whole situation annoys me because I honestly can't stand our war on comedy. We're are a bit soft nowadays. We need comedy now more than ever. I want people to go outside without having anxiety attacks. Unfortunately, we've got Ari Shaffir going around making the situation worse. Even shock outlet Opie Radio had to call him out.
Pretty much.
At its best, comedy like this is lazy. At its worst, it's dangerous. Comedy is a powerful weapon that should only to be wielded by licensed skeptics, cynics, outcasts, and socially-malnourished intellects.
But wait. You don't think bad comedy can be dangerous? Remember the time Ari spoke about showing his privates to a six year old girl? Ehhhh...come on, dude. Do better.
So regardless of my personal feelings or my thoughts on celebrity worship, the "joke" failed because it was delivered improperly. It didn't help the case for art. It just seemed like some guy channeling his inner jerk. I don't know, maybe his career implosion can be used to open the door for better post-death comedy.
Finally, while I didn't want to come on here and stan for Kobe. I have much respect for the Black Mamba, so RIP to Kobe Bryant, his daughter Gianna, and everyone else that died. Click here to learn more about the lives that were lost.
In a world abuzz of social media discussion, we seem to forget that creatives have the power. I forget this all the time. While there's a lot of extremely relevant marketing discussion going on, it's mostly coming from the marketing people that don't specialize in content creation. That's the job of the creator, and it's a power that we should be tapping into much more.
We complain about social media, but it's our weapon moreso than thei
Say you're a writer. It's your place to create 60,000 words for a novel. You've got a lot of work to do in order to create a coherent piece of work. On the other side, it's the marketer's/advertiser's job to make 20-100 words of fantabulous copy and spin that into a multitude of views for your 60,000 words.
While this might not seem fair to you, please realize that you just wrote 60,000 words. You can *probably* figure out a way to write 20-100 and spread it out. And even if you aren't very good at creating those 20-100 words, the really hard part is getting over mental blocks, putting those words out, and convincing people to listen.
But honestly, that part is much easier.
Dive in.
Learn from others.
Get good at talking about your work.
Don't be so hard on yourself.
Content is still king.
- Mr Benja -
P.S. I'm not talking as if I'm some outgoing, social maven. I'm still working at this myself. :)
Alright. I have been avoiding this for a long time, but I said that in 2019 I was going to be making some changes, so a new website is in the works. I am a firm believer that websites are still relevant. People used to say they didn't need a website because they had "A Facebook". Now it's "An Instagram" or "A Twitter".
Fact is, those outlets are just outlets for those corporations.
I'm going with the white-walled look like this some of those art galleries use. I think this should work out just fine. More as it develops. I'll be dumping all sorts of good shit there.
UPDATE: No one really supported The Trap Vector, so I shuttered it in favor of continuing to work on The 8BitCubist
I've spoken about this briefly in other places, but I wanted to give a more proper explantation of The Trap Vector project. There’s enough information to go into that I’ve decided to break this posting into 7 parts.
This is the part where I define how The Trap Vector came to be.
Around 2011, I had just been laid off of my job at Rockstar San Diego, and I was beginning to become a little disillusioned with my career in the game industry and life. I had let politics wear on me, my family wasn’t doing that great, my social life wasn’t where I wanted it to be, and in general, I felt like I was fighting to stay afloat in quicksand.
I knew things had to change or I would fall into a pit of despair that I couldn’t pull myself out of, so I started changing course with a lot of my activities and really jumped into the fine arts, fashion, writing, improvement strategies/tactics, and started expanding my horizons.
I hadn’t felt that energized in a long time. In fact, the last time I felt like that was that time period in my life when my parents worked with me to expand my mind in numerous ways. It was a synergistic experience. I was that curious kid that wanted to see and learn everything I could. Over several years, they worked with me to give me powerful perspectives and insights on life. They had been to many different countries, met so many people, and seen so many different things that they felt it would be a shame for me to miss out on those experiences. That period of time stuck with me, and in my later years, the longing for those mind-expanding experiences came again.
Returning to the 2011 era, I needed to process what I was feeling/thinking/experiencing, so I developed a form of visual journaling that relied on an abstract language of forms and shapes. You will recognize the most prominent of those shapes as the arrow and the portal. These shapes came from various sources and don’t directly mean anything on their own, but they hold a lot of meaning for me. These representations are, after all, abstract.
For years, I maintained and refined this abstract language I was coming up with and came up with over 400 thoughtful concepts that have been archived and are now being released in the form of a fine art print project known as The Trap Vector.
In the last post, I talked about framing your prints. What I forgot to mention is how to flatten them. The Trap Vector prints come rolled in damage-resistant kraft tubes for safe transit. This is a common practice, especially for larger prints. As your art arrives, you'll want to flatten them out before storing/displaying them.
Here are some recommended steps:
Find a flat table or surface to lay your print on. It should be dry and free from dust/debris.
Open the tube and slowly pull the protective tissue paper to slide out the enclosed prints.
While leaving the tissue paper in place to protect the print, carefully unroll them so that the curl s are going into the flat surface.
It is NOT recommended that you reverse-roll the print in the opposite direction unless you have experience doing so.
Distribute a few books on each of the corners and in the center of the print. (If you don't have books, you can use some other flat-bottomed items that will keep your prints in place.)
Let your print sit for a while under the weight of the books. Usually, a day will be more than adequate, but you can probably get away with overnight or while you're off at a picnic.
Alternatively, if you get your prints professionally framed, you can just bring the rolled tube to your favorite framer, and they'll take care of everything for you.
Collecting prints? Of course you are. I was asked about what to do with prints if they aren't planning on putting them up on a wall just yet. You could simply keep them in the tube they were shipped in, but many opt for a storage solution of some type.
In general, you have three framing options:
Print Protectors - Not really framing, but you can store prints safely in protectors or portfolios like the ones available from Baroque or by searching on Amazon. Shop around to find what you need. This option is usually employed when collecting numerous prints.
Ready-Made Frames - This is the popular option. Head to your local framing shop such as Michaels, Art-To-Frame, or any place that sells frames and ask for styles in the desired size. You'll find something that looks good and won't destroy your wallet. Most prints for The Trap Vector are 18x24.
Professional Framing - This is the nicest and most expensive option. Michaels actually does custom framing and is a suitable start if you've never gone with the professional option. You can always ask a decorator or an artist/gallerist to recommend a framer near you if you want to go this route.
There are other options available, but these are the most common. If you have any ideas or comments, let me know!
I have three projects that I plan on getting worked on this year. I know that sounds like crazy talk, but I'm trying something out, here.
The common idea is that you should focus everything you are doing into laser-light precision and get that one thing done. I get it, and I believe that to be true in a general sense. In fact, The ONE Thing (by Jay Papasan and Gary Keller) is a great book that really got me to a good place with my productivity.
I know that I waste a lot of time, but when I'm most productive, I've found that I have a few things that I can roll onto. Basically, when one task is completing, I can roll onto another one without losing momentum. If I have to keep doing the same thing, I can sometimes burn myself out. I'll have to work on embracing the monotony, but that's how it happens right now.
Also, when I pour a lot of energy into something, it seems like people back away from the energy instead of responding positively to it. I don't know what that's about, but I've often been told to "calm down" on social media and in life. I've been told that I'm "too much". So pffft...I have to spread things out a bit or create new outlets.
Project 1 - The Trap Vector
The Trap Vector is my fine art print project. It's my lead-off effort for the year. It's a follow-up of sorts to a lot of the personal thoughts and feelings I was having for the past seven years. The genesis probably started well before that, but that's what it's about right now.
This outlet gets out my artsy fartsy concepts.
Project 2 - Transcendent Press
Transcendent Press is my writing project. If I could, I would probably just write for about a month, and then come out with some stone tablets full of god-like text. Then I'd realize it needs editing and I'd go away for another month. This doesn't fit in my plans right now, so writing is going to have to take the long and laborious route.
This outlet gets out my most heady creative ideas, and is currently my biggest long-range goal. I have a book planned for sometime this year, and I've gotten to work on it.
Project 3 - The 8BitCubist
Oh boy. A lot of people have been wondering what happened to the 8BitCubist from a while ago, and simply put, the band broke up. I mean, we didn't break up, but we went our separate ways, and the venture was never meant to be a solo one. So over time, I needed to put the brakes on it to figure out what the next iteration was going to be about. I am not going to be putting this in full force for the near term, but it's coming.
I think a podcast and apparel will do good to start with.
I'll do some other posts outlining what's coming I'm learning in 2019 in greater detail.
Let me know what you think of the plan so far.
In 2010, I created an art initiative called The 8BitCubist. I'm sure many of you reading this are familiar with it. The friends and I . It was a good four-plus years of art-making, events, podcasting, and generally having a good time with friends.
But things evolve, and the band went their separate ways all went our separate ways. Personally speaking, I was pushed to the forefront of the art side of things, and that caused me to spin off into making my own art brand a much bigger thing than I originally intended.
But there is a part of the philosophy and idea of The 8BitCubist that I want to keep going, so the site will be relaunching this week with that in mind. I'll take time to build it up, but I just wanted to let everyone know what was happening.
And while I'm here, I'll also go ahead and thank Jeff Junio, Raphael Phillips, Marcellus Barnes, Theo Harvey, Ryan Dormanesh, Josh Lange, Daren Bader, Andy Lowe, Andrew Wilson, Cleo McKeever, Ashphord Jacoway, Aubree Miller, Tiny Nightmare, MegaRan, Aly Mayhem, Shayne Anigan, Keisha Howard, Thumbprint Gallery, Gam3rCon, The 10th St Theatre, Brian Bielawski, Lauren Selman, Jennifer Schumaker, Walter Meyer, JoJo Brazell, Amy Fan, Tony Hulse, Aloha, Brendan MacNeil, Annalice Heinz, William Morgan, Josh Stolze, JC Mendez, El Gun Legro, MC Lars, and a whole slew of other people.
