Mood: Getting on and climbing out of my fog of funk
Listening to: Bee Gees tape
Folk are supposed to give honest (but tactful) appraisals of each other's work on an art site I'm on, but that can be a hard thing to do, presumably for the following reasons:
- "don't want to hurt their feelings"
- "not sure I know enough to be able to judge"
- "don't want to get involved; too busy"
- "don't want to lose my friends"
- "I'm sure they can see their own mistakes, or will eventually"
- "someone else will bring it up; I don't have to"
- "I don't want to end up getting nasty messages"
- "if I don't like it, silence will tell them all they need to know"
Number 8 is the most depressing.
I've had my weak moments - in fact,
most of the time I'm weak, and either I point out all the best features then shuffle off cravenly, or say nothing at all. But occasionally (usually when I see enough in the picture that I like) I'll stick my head over the parapet and say "wonder what it'd look like if you..."
And so far nobody's put a bullet through my helmet.
Well, there was one glancing shot I wasn't sure of, just a private message that seemed to suggest the photo was just how it was, and couldn't be re-shot - take it or leave it. Ignored that one!
Actually, it's amazing how thick my skin has become lately, but every so often an arrow will strike home, and I'll curl up in front of the TV for a couple of days. Every day that you post or comment on the internet, you know you're risking that.
A couple of weeks ago on the art site I spotted a thumbnail I quite liked, but when I called up the image full-size it struck me as strange and unsatisfying. When you run your eyes over a picture, you like it to be sharp here, soft there, and nothing interrupting the flow of it without reason. It's almost as if you know already how that picture should look, and you're comparing the real one with the ideal.
The one I was looking at fell short - nobody would ever have framed it and put it on their wall, or used it in a magazine advert. I still believe that.
There had been two or three comments already, saying "very nice."
I screwed my courage to the sticking place and said, "well I liked the such and such, which caused me to open the thumbnail, but
(blah tactful blah tactful blah) - keep working on it!"
I kept an eye on it to see if anybody else agreed with me, or in case I got a response from the photographer. He never did respond, but the list of comments grew as long as my arm and longer still. Every day there would be a few more, and every single one of them said:
"Oh, wonderful work, my dear! This needs nothing changed. I love this."
I seriously began to wonder what was wrong with me, especially as I had been watching another photographer whose works are (without fail) dull, featureless and oversharpened. But everyone else falls into ecstasies over her gallery. It's almost as though she has groupies - but surely they're groupies for a reason?
It really makes me wonder if my sense of aesthetics is broken. I got so desperate I called in Mum for her opinion on the photographer with the groupies. She scrolled through the gallery, said "BORING!", got out of her chair, and left. All in three seconds flat.
Can't just be me, then?
The last straw thudded onto my back when the image I'd criticized in the comments was put on the site's front page. It's not 'image of the week' or anything like that; they just get together a group of images to share the limelight for a while and to reel the casual surfers in. I have a sneaky feeling at least one of my images got in there; a handful of comments came out of the blue from people who don't normally comment on my stuff - but it was never proven! That's why I tell people "I found this image on the front page" - just so they know. They're usually pleased enough to say "thanks for telling me."
The moderators don't put anything they don't like on the front page, so when I saw that half-baked picture up there, I started to lose my grip. I said to myself, "I really must be missing something! How can I ever expect to turn out good work myself when I don't recognize it in others?"
It's possible that certain images naturally look more beautiful on a PC. My Mac sits next to my PC, and I can see the differences clearly. The Mac brightens everything up, tones everything down and warms the colour - thus things stand out that aren't even visible on the PC. It's caught me out in the past when I thought I'd made a nice graphic on the PC, but it looked absolutely horrible on the Mac - you could see the areas I thought were carefully blended into the background.... So perhaps I could see flaws in the picture that the PC users couldn't.
I was on the point of posting a thread in the discussion forums to ask if people viewed wallpapers full size (largest size size possible) before commenting - they will miss grain, blemishes and other peculiarities if they don't. I never got that far - it appears that other people had been simmering silently as well.
Someone exploded into life and posted a thread asking why people will butter up everybody else rather than be honest - we are supposed to be helping each other, not over-inflating egos. There followed a long and interesting discussion... buoyed up by it, I found a wallpaper by a 15 year-old. He's only received a few comments, mostly by others around the same age who saw his works as 'cool'. They were, but could be cooler still. I said I liked it a lot, but what I looked for in a picture was...
(blah tactful blah tactful blah).
For a couple of days, all was silent (nothing unusual in that, so it didn't trouble me).
Earlier last night I was watching
Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome, all the time thinking about StumbleUpon, people (both online and offline), my blogs and every other online presence I have. I felt singularly useless, as though I'm just whispering into a void. Who cares what I think? What difference does any of it make? I'm not really helping myself or anyone else, and StumbleUpon is lots of fun but a huge waste of time. All it is, is a jumble of odd photos, cartoons, videos and pages of links and tips being shuttled around... some of it useful but most not.
My jaw set hard as I watched Mad Max... I'm quite sure he'd have stared me into the ground if I started waffling to him about blogs, StumbleUpon and online communities in general.
I still had to check my email, so (having left the computer off all day) I went upstairs about 23:00 and fired up the Mac. Even while I was waiting for it to power up, I was grumbling to myself "why am I doing this, even though I just told myself it was as piffle before the wind, and unimportant in anyone's life...? I should leave it till tomorrow."
But I found a response from the 15 year-old artist: "Thanks for your advice, I'm actually working on redoing that particular piece right now and that seems to be exactly what I couldn't figure out about the first draft."
See, I can make a difference!
Whoo.
That was probably one of the nicest things somebody's said to me for a while - that I offered something useful at the right moment. Even if it was via the anonymous, wayward, unheeding, overloaded, shadowy internet!
PS: You don't have to believe my remarks about StumbleUpon, which came out of a fit of depression. While there, I have found many pages of more than passing interest to me, and amongst them was this article on the
rival attractions of Facebook and StumbleUpon. Ultimately it's what people choose to make of the tools they have. In StumbleUpon's case, it's all about quality content - we have to fix on that and not on traffic. Forget the traffic - choose quality over quantity, and give good solid reviews so that people know where you're coming from.
I'm not especially keen on stumbling across isolated pictures... there are many beautiful ones for sure, but they seem so much out of context. (What? Who? Where? Why?) I don't often rate those at all, but I'll rate an entire site of pictures so that people can look themselves.
I'll pick out specific blog posts for StumbleUpon attention - we should see more of those, and not just from the techy or news blogs.
PPS: I won't be doing that right now - got to get on with some work. To help me in that, I should turn off the computer... with its siren call and its myriad of shadowy souls...
. Perhaps some of the other site glitches will be sorted out as well, in time. That recent problem with new posts not appearing on the home page has already been dealt with.
