I tried

The words “I tried.. I tried…” come from my itunes… Deerhunter’s “Activia” plays on my itunes… its sounds like my own personal mantra. “I tried.. I tried…” Maybe lyrics from a Modest Mouse song is more suiting: “Life handed us a paycheck and we said we worked harder than this!” Worked hard I have… and will continue to do, probably till I just drop dead. Every single day, I get up, eat breakfast, check my email, check the job posting sites and get to work on my art. I work until lunch, sometimes I continue on after lunch and into the afternoon. Sometimes I take a break and do something else, but I always go back to it at some point. Will I get the recognition that I could possibly hope for? Is it overly ambitious? Maybe foolishly ambitious. Maybe I shouldn’t shoot for the stars, shouldn’t shoot for the best of the best while those who only work half as hard get the bigger rewards. Like that girl in my typography class in college who everyone claimed never did anything but got an “A,” while I got a “B” when I put blood, sweat and tears into my final project. She also was offered a way more exciting sounding position when we graduated. I got an internship that lasted two weeks before they told me not to come in until they had called me. Its been ten years, I don’t think they’re calling back.

Maybe some people are just lucky. Sometimes I feel lucky, other times I feel like a complete f’n failure. I have a degree in art and design. I’ve had few jobs as a designer. My art career seemed to be going better than my graphic design career, now I don’t know what happened. I was having steady solo shows and group shows now I’m lucky anyone even responds to my art, let alone purchase it… or exhibit it. I was incredibly passionate about design, unfortunately, I was unable to find a job in the field that I was equally passionate about. I stare at the AIGA website and think, I used to be like that. I used to be up on the design world. I used to care that my designs were more than centered, in a script font, and looked nice. I was a form follows function type o’gal. I cared about typography. I cared about an interesting composition. Then, I became bitter about the whole thing. I couldn’t find a creative design job that seemed to follow the design beliefs I did.. I wasn’t good enough for those. I was good enough for whatever came my way and on paper that’s not good enough. Needing to pay bills isn’t a good enough excuse to go from graphic designer to waitress to photo assistant.

My sole comforts became not my job but painting, drawing, writing, photography. They make my own personal world a bit more tolerable. Like the Anaïs Nin quote: “When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.” Thinking on that quote I realize how sad it really is. How she must’ve felt when she wrote it. If your world is just satisfactory and “tolerable” and not “joyous,” “wonderful,” or “happy.”  I want to believe in the book “Zen and the Art of Happiness” and all those other self-help books. I want to believe that “YES I can.” Now if only the rest of the universe would comply with me…

update

As I’ve said in the last post geocities, my web host, is going by the wayside as Yahoo likes money.. hey we all like to be paid, I liked my well designed freebie site. I’m a little sad about it. I’ve decided that I will, at some point this year get a non-freebie site.. geocities was insanely easy to use and I’m pretty certain that the web host that I’m planning on going with may take a learning curve… so, I’ve set up a temporary site with wordpress:http://melanieducharme.wordpress.com/

The freebie, wordpress blog thing uses frames, which at least organizes the information and its not just a blog. Unfortunately, I had to use *gasp* a pre-fab template, anyone that knows me, knows this broke my graphic designer heart to do… I also had to use photobucket in order to post a group of images under my ‘drawing’ and ‘paintings’ tabs.. unfortunately, photobucket does not approve of this image:


much in the same way that myspace doesn’t approve of my self-portrait:

That is when I put my added feature of a link to my wooloo.org account, so everyone can enjoy the ‘naughty’ pictures that I paint: http://www.wooloo.org/metaphormel

now… I get to update/trash my business card! again, thanks yahoo.com.

Capital “P”

Providence (RI) has come up with a new slogan “Creative Capital,” which the Providence Journal seems slightly critical of because, the city of Providence outsourced the job to a firm in Tennessee to come up with not only the slogan, but also the logo design concept. However, they were nice enough to pass on the logo design concept to a firm in Pawtucket. This same firm out of Tennessee has allegedly come up with other great slogans for other cities… at least we weren’t Dayton, OH that got “Originals Wanted.” That one cracked me up. One critic of the “Creative Captital” campaign thought it just plain sad that the city had to outsource to Tennessee to come up with a slogan/design concept to show how creative and artistic our city is. However, I am for canning the “Reniannce City” slogan and showing everyone what great talent RI has… but

The logo design is also a bit questionable. The ‘logo’ is an orange capital “P” In a fun side note I used to refer to the Nine Inch Nails song “Capital G” as “Capital P.” Back to the logo in question. The “P” has according to the design firm, has unique serifs not found in typography: it has a serif at the top of the letter that points backwards, to symbolize the past. And only a part of a serif on the bottom, pointing forward to symbolize the future. Yeah, pretty much no one outside the AIGA (American Graphic Design Institute) is going to get it… or maybe even care. The president of the local chapter of the AIGA is shitting himself over the orange “P” because it can be blown up, scaled down, put on stationary, a tramp stamp, ect and still keeps its design aesthetic! Then again, its not like the local chapter of the AIGA is going to say anything bad about other local designers, they’re probably all friends! The only thing is.. the minute I seen the picture of the capital “P”, I thought, isn’t that an existing font? You can’t fool me on fonts, I once had a job in which I had to recreate alot of menus and in recreating them, I needed to know my fonts. Also, I had this crazy typography professor at UMASS, named Laura, who made us study and take a test on determining which font was which. And yet, I’ve never made much of a living as a graphic designer, because only the AIGA or other designers care about this shit. Though, I do wish I still had that book Howard Glasser at UMASS made us buy (that I sold to Cellar Books), that had a half a zillion examples of fonts in it, so much easier than sitting at my computer with the picture going through all the fonts on the computer. I’ve narrowed it down. Its funny because the first thing I said aloud was, “wow a capital “P” to symbolize our Creative Captial, they may as well have Helvetica as the font!” and they did. I swear its Helvetica bold or at least based on it, with two serifs added, which one can simply do in Adobe Illustrator. Shit, why did I quit being a designer?! I could’ve gotten $30,000 (to date) to design a “P!”

the orange “P”

the font Helvetica at 144 point

unemployment and art.

I got my last unemployment installment, now I get to file for extended benefits, weeee! As I hung up the phone I said, “Thanks America!” here’s your American dream. I have a bachelors degree, true its in fine arts but it was a concentration in graphic design/typography. I should’ve landed a few poorly paid, boring layout type jobs but not even that! As a graphic designer I am, much like my paintings overlooked for someone else…. I hate to say it, but I’ve probably not gotten jobs because of some guy who could do the job, not necessarily better.. its a male dominated field. Its a boy’s club.

It cracks me up when I read things about gender and socialization and they always claim that the ‘arts’ are mainly a ‘female’ thing, clearly they didn’t do too much of a study. Try to name off 5 female graphic designers that are famous for graphic design. Zuzanna Licko, if the name doesn’t strike you perhaps the magazine, Emigre, will, she’s the co-founder of it with husband, Rudy Vanderlands. The other famous female graphic designer I can think of off the top of my head is, April Greiman. And of the two woman, I only like one: Zuzanna Licko.

Its like trying to name 5 female rock musicians that radio stations regularly play on a daily basis … if it were a drinking game no one everyone could still safely drive home later.

the purpose of art

I frequently visit bust magazine’s forums.. today some chic posted in the artist forum: what is the purpose of art? as an artist I figured I should respond:

art has many purposes.

Sometimes art serves a function such as in graphic design, architecture, ect. its purpose is obvious, its there for a reason.

Sometimes it functions as a communicator of ideas or aesthetic beauty such as in music, poetry, sculpture. Political art or conceptual art would communicate an idea. Conceptual art (for those who don’t know) is art where the idea/concept is more important than the thing your looking at. For Conceptual art see: Christian Boltanski, or Illya Kabakov.

Art is universal, many times it transcends language, like when you listen to a song in a language you don’t understand but you still think its a great tune.

Art can also be therapeutic, because it is universal, subjective, and an expression of the artist’s ideas, and feelings. Kim Gordon (of Sonic Youth) once said in an interview, that she always feels good about herself after she has created something. I wholeheartedly agree with her statement.

Performance, visual, and literary arts kept me out of a lot of trouble as a teenager. I wrote, I danced, I sang, I drew, I painted. It was the reason I went to school, and I know of many artists who say the same thing.