more website thoughts

as I continue to chip away at my website, and get a feel for wordpress’s new full site editor capacity, I’m more excited than ever about what I can do with my website and also having some decision paralysis around what to do next, you know?

I think I mentioned this in an earlier post but I’m not in dire need of a portfolio site right now; for various reasons I’m not actively courting freelance art gigs, including but not limited to the state of my dominant hand, and the permanent salaried art director position I currently hold. it also seems likely to me that should I need to find a new job, I would likely seek out another art directing job; and the professional materials required to land one of those are not nearly as dependent on a portfolio of paintings as prior jobs in my career have been.

however I do really love sharing the work I’m doing, and have done, on the internet. and some of my work has a structure on its own, like my watercolor maps forming a pretty cohesive collection, or my crystal islands, or my comic work. I think those can all be their own sort of raison d’etre on the internet. but 99% of the things I make are much less organized than that, so I was wondering if it would make sense to simply approach things from an archival standpoint.

the nice thing about WordPress is the amount of metadata you can include in a post by having both the posted on date and the most recently modified date, as well as any custom Fields I choose to include, as well as tagging things like the medium or subject matter, and of course categorizing things. I feel like I would enjoy having a chronological archive of my own creative work on the internet in a way where I could find things if I wanted to share them in particular, but also in a way where it would be straightforward to do some curation to form a narrative around my own development or exploration of different mediums or ideas. like I think it’s pretty funny that I have almost three decades of my own artwork and that despite this depth of time and a huge range of skill, it’s all clearly made by the same nerd.

but I also have a little voice in my head that says this is hilariously self-centered and self-aggrandizing – and I have a slightly louder voice in my head that points out that this is maybe not something that I want to share publicly on the internet? but maybe that is easier to judge on a Case by case basis. like no, I’m not uploading my grade 9 handwritten novel, hahaha, can you imagine, dear God – but some of my grade nine drawings feel like important parts of my creative journey? God that’s so pretentious. anyways if I’m going to talk into the void on the internet I guess I can talk about whatever the hell I want, but I am curious if there’s a precedent for people maintaining archives of their creative lives publicly, and of course if there’s any interest from anyone else in this sort of thing.

living through this dominant hand stuff has certainly made me more self-reflective about my art right now anyways so, maybe this is something that feels like the right choice today and then in a year or two or three I will either choose to take down or feel deeply embarrassed by having done ever. future me will just have to deal though.



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