The Artist

A little schpiel our son David wrote about being an artist

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Text reads:

So this is where I say how special I am, and tell you how the culmination of my college education and a bunch of posters has been "A Journey of the Mind of a Lone Designer", or maybe I should ask you to "Look... closer." Frankly I'm not that special. I'm just a design monkey with failing vision due to staring at a Mac G4 in a black hole called the computer lab that sucks my life away and smells like a gym as I steal ideas from other artists in hopes that some great CEO will say "I loooove your work" or "I need a monkey to click a mouse" so that I can make more money and buy my Denali complete with a kicking sound system that would make any Fry's employee jealous and any powerhouse no-neck jock want to be me because my liftkit is high enough to get a nosebleed in order to make sure no one passes me on the I-8 because I live in American and I HAVE THE RIGHT TO.

Either way. my art is not original. That's just the way the art world works. We all steal from each other. I could try to be cool and say that I OBEYED Shepard Fairey who changed my life, but in reality my first influence would be Sesame Street. I mean, come on, the creative minds of this kid's show were seriously floating on a big sweet cloud of Mary J. And I suppose that was good for me. Sesame Street employed the largest number of independent animators. About 60% of the show consisted of animations and, after watching for 5+ years, it has had an influence on me. Their creativity and simply tweaky imaginations pushes my creativity to produce work, in print or in multimedia, which hopefully is not typical.

Ryan McGuiness is one of the first artists that I saw who influenced how I viewed and did my own art. He continued the pushing of ideas and tweaking of projects that could simply be mundane. And hopefully my work does not always have an unreserved feel or look to it. For after R. Paul Kinsman got me excited about typography (what kind of a sicko am I?), the cleanliness and clarity of Wolfgang Weingard began to show in some of my pieces.

I could go on and on about how the Ames Bros., e-boy, Bob Sabiston, hip-hop art, Eugene and Jim, Clarke, Heidi, Matty, Wylie, Joel, and Clyde the Safety Frog all shaped my existence as an artist because I've stolen ideas from every one of them. So the fact of the matter is, I am not original. I'm just not that genius. But I am resourceful. And I think that is what every artist should be. And I know that you are really here for the free food or you want to steal ideas from me, and that's okay because those are also both resourceful.

These influential artists tell me that being an artist is a good thing, and, much more than that, a necessary gift. It is what we are created to do. So it is my hope that we as artists can get past feeling special and learn to use the gift of being an artist for reasons other than catching No-Neck's attention, and, yes to continue to steal from each other.

Listen to a song David wrote for Joanna
View a project David worked on