Leaving Social Media

"My life as an artist" – as in deciding that art is the thing I would like to pursue in life – is very much rooted in social media. Around 2005 I decided that I wanted to try and give being an Artist a shot. Years before that I was really just a kid who loved Manga and Anime and whose favorite pastime – next to playing video games – had been copying drawings out of my favorite Mangas or the occasional Character Illustration found in a video game magazine. It took some more time until I discovered online forums which were purely dedicated to "Entertainment art," mostly for video games and movies. These forums were crowded by industry professionals sharing their amazing works but also with guys like me who discovered through these places that being an Artist could actually be a job that one could pursue. Participating was easy: You created a thread and posted your work, not only your finished paintings and designs but also your daily studies, which you would then get critiqued by the community. These forums were awesome places. For the longest time the atmosphere was so inspiring, seeing all those people dedicate their lives to becoming better at drawing and painting while having so many accomplished professionals around who were so incredibly eager to help was, in my opinion, truly the best entry into the world of art a kid like me could have. These forums were hands down the places where I not only learned how to draw but where I also learned how to do it by myself. From what I learned during that time I was able to get my very first full-time position as a concept artist for the video game industry in 2011.

Without social media, I definitely would not be an Artist. I've been working in the Entertainment industry for almost 15 years now. I still am. 99% of the jobs I had the pleasure to work on "reached me" through the internet, most of them through social media.

Some 3-ish years ago I decided that while I love being an Illustrator, I would like to take another step and truly focus on my personal art, trying to dip a few toes into the world of fine art, working mostly in traditional oil paint. Yet again, social media has proven to be a great way to show my work. Over the years, however, the social media landscape has changed a ton. From community-based spaces where you could grow among peers, it has turned into this overwhelming universe of individuals, each trying to stand out in hopes of reaching ANYBODY who might be interested in what they're doing.

For a while this actually worked fine because it seemed that despite this new type of system it was still possible to create somewhat stable communities. I feel like this has changed a lot over the last two years or so.

From the very beginning the nature of the game was to create "content" that would be able to catch and hopefully hold the attention of a potential audience for long enough to be able to create a "following." Naturally the relationship between the creator and his community shifted to one of creator and audience, of salesman and customers. While there isn’t anything wrong with that per se, problems arise when a field like Art suddenly has to share the stage with Memes, comedy, cooking hacks, and outright brain rot.

It. does. not. work.

Art is more than that. Art needs more room than that. Art – as I see it – is supposed to be slow, it's thoughtful. It's supposed to be thought about, talked about, read about. Every aspect of art takes time! It must!

So that's it for me. I decided to leave social media at least to present the Art that I make. I have thought a lot about how I would like to handle that step. I think due to my "upbringing" in art being all online, I always really liked to share it with people that way, but due to the necessities of social media I could never do it in a way that I liked to. It took much too long but I finally decided that truly the only way to do it for me was to be completely separatee from any kind of social media, away from "content," away from monetization.

I want to share long-form slow recordings of my process and I want to share walls of text depicting my thoughts on the work I do.

My work is my life. If I reduce the presentation of my work to fit today's social media standards, I reduce myself. I'm absolutely done with that.

Now here we are. This is today's introductory text I guess. I have a ton of ideas for this place. What I’d like to share is my process on a painting-by-painting basis, and I’d like to talk about it along the way. I don't have ONE specific direction in mind as I prefer to handle all this on a painting-to-painting basis for now. What I can guarantee you is that it's going to be SLOW! Many real-time recordings of my process, much thinking about it expressed in long texts like this one.

As an accompaniying video for today I'd like to show you the very first lay on for a HUGE piece I am currently working on. It's going to take ages for it to be done but I plan to record a lot of the process for it, so I decided it would be a nice thing to share to get started.

Now as much as I want to get rid of social media, I don't want to get rid of community. Hence there is the possibility to leave a comment. Not to feed an algorithm, but simply to let me know whether you enjoy my work or not.

I feel truly happy starting this. I have no expectations other than for it to be an outlet for my work and my thoughts. If some of you out there enjoy that kind of thing, let me know!