What happened to the art bloggers? A number of art blogs I used to follow are no longer around. Others still exist but have not been updated in years. Some are still going, but blogging doesn't seem to be as big as it was over a decade ago. Many artists I know have turned to social media sites that are perhaps better suited for posting images, and that offer more immediate audience reaction ("likes", comments, etc.)
So why start an art blog now? Well... the painter, Chuck Close, said there is no better time to paint than when people are saying that painting is dead. There are no expectations or established norms, and the artist is free to experiment wildly. Perhaps the same is true of blogging. I love to draw and paint, and I love to write, and blogging would seem like a natural way to combine words and images. I had intended to start an art blog years ago, but I was seduced by Facebook (with it's easy flow of likes and comments). Much of the energy I would have put into a blog went into Facebook posts. But Facebook has some limits on how art can be displayed, and I don't like how hard it is to find older posts (not to mention that I don't care for all the bickering, politicking, and random things that appear in my feed there). I would like to keep a record of my posts that is better organized; for example, in a blog I can organize posts into portrait demos, notes on perspective, animation backgrounds, sketchbooks, etc. So, I will use this blog to post drawings, paintings, art tutorials, and general thoughts on art, along with the occasional irreverent cartoon.
If blogging really is dead, then no one will pay attention to what I am doing, which means I can experiment wildly... and maybe even get away with it.
2 comments:
Dead? Hard to say. It's certainly not what it once was.
I've been blogging about design since 1997 at ideabook.com -- for a number of years I would add something three times a week and send out a summary of those posts once a month to a subscriber base of perhaps 25,000.
It was profitable then. Not huge amounts of money but tens of thousands of dollars a year between selling my books, books by others, and accumulating payments from Google ads. The main thing it afforded me was credibility with publishers like Random House and Peachpit, opportunities to write for publications like Before & After, Dynamic Graphics, Technique, Home Office Computing, and others, and lead clients to my door.
Most of all, it financed my curiosity. I visited tens of thousands of sites , met many interesting people, and saw a massive amount of creative work.
I still post occasionally but I'm most proud of the long history on the Wayback Machine. ( https://web.archive.org/web/20040618131257/http://www.ideabook.com/ ). Most of it is ephemeral, but the site archive provides a unique record of how graphic design has changed over the last 25-plus years.
Thanks Chuck! Wow, that is awesome! I really need to spend some time looking through that history at the Wayback Machine!
From what I can tell, a lot of animation folks seem to have moved away from blogging, but I actually like blogs. I hope to build up an archive of art demos here that will be more easily searchable than FB was.
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