Day 12: welp, THAT happened

Today’s update is to let you know that I finally bit the bullet¹ and emailed a bunch of galleries and sanctuaries about my art.

This was singularly horrible and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Art is intensely personal, and the inevitable well-meaning no-thankses threaten to hit me and my sweet little rejection-sensitive snowflake heart like a blast furnace from Hades. I am not looking forward to gallery-owners having the entirely reasonable opinion that my art is not for them or their customers.

That said, despite dreading sending those emails for years — I really do mean years, I’d have approached galleries properly a long time ago if I hadn’t been so petrified of the process — once I was actually writing them I wasn’t too worried at all. I was just stringing some words together and attaching some stuff and hitting send. I do it a bunch of times every day. And as for putting my art out there, it occurs to me now that approaching several galleries should be much less scary than putting my art on Reddit where a million or two people might see it, and in fact just did. And also that sending a few emails should be less scary than sending emails to couple of thousand people, which I do quite often.²

In the spirit of celebrating things that are self-improving but are not traditionally-coded self-improvement or productivity-hustling: I looked after my daughter for most of the day. It was wonderful. She is the sweetest little girl. She points at everything and wants to know its name. (She is obsessed with the artwork on our walls; I have to take her on regular gallery tours.) She laughs at a lot but very especially at burps and farts. She likes my silly videos. She really liked the duck video, which is how I should have known that it had a bit of viral potential. She’s a great test audience.

She is at this moment having a grand old howl upstairs and I will have to lug her around the house while patting her nappy-clad butt and singing the Happy Song which will hopefully lull her. For the third time tonight. So far. I love her so much.

Here is today’s video, in response to the typically horrible news that OpenAI (chaos be upon them) have released a video generator that produces near undetectable AI slop. All human creativity and potential rendered into one big stupid chum bucket. Revolting. I hate it so much.

I will email more galleries tomorrow.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

1. This is not the metaphor some people think it is, so I’d best explain briefly. It references the days of pre-anaesthetic surgery where patients would be given a bullet (wrapped in cloth) to bite on while having a limb sawed off or some such. I have heard of people thinking it means something even darker. It doesn’t.
2. Not always often enough, but I’m improving! 12 days straight!