All Contents Copyright 2006 by J R Compton. All Rights Reserved.

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Sharp Leading Edge of a Stadium from the Highway

'm kinda sorry I started this edgy/scary stuff in regard to our October 28th show. My intentions were pristine. But my clumsy way of writing it out got worse and worse.

It's been too long again, but then maybe it always will be. Maybe even it should be. I used to promise Midnight Rambles every month and even delivered that schedule awhile. Then they came slower. They're not quite coming slowest now, but it's getting that way, and I worried about it for a while, but now it seems just about right.

Like when my body needs sleep, I let it, if I possibly can — without wondering too much why or what if. When Midnight Rambles require my attention, they take over like The Borg. Wham! No discussion, just rambling. Words flow like big rain over dry creeks.

This one actually has a couple of recursing themes, which you might discover soon enough I don't have to tell you. Not all of these pictures are from coming back from TCU in Fort Worth with my piece from the AiM Show — that photo was called Fish Fight, and I never thought it was particularly edgy in any way. I just liked it.

And one of the ones I submitted with it, which was declined by this year's juror, who actually said something about each piece in the general assembly in her juror's lecture that I declined to drive a hundred miles round trip to see after being so very disappointed with the two previous jurors who could only think and talk about their own endless endeavors, so I missed the one time my work got mentioned publicly, was much prettier though apparently not as appealing to this particular professional juror.

Except for the Hanging Committee our Big As Night show won't be jurred or judged or much of anything else in the choosing department. Members brought work. We hung it. All. We declined nothing (except one piece, I forget whose).

String Theory

Some of the words on this page started out on the Big As Night Too page, which proposed, described, organized and now harbors a review of our October 28, 2006 one-night exhibition at 419 South Tyler, just down the stret from MFA Gallery in Oak Cliff.

I wish I'd saved everything that had been on that page, but I didn't figure that out till the Wednesday night we all delivered our work. By then, I'd pitched a lot of writing to various points that had been on that page.

Now, when stuff needs is deleted from that page, it is scooped up and deposited without much organization — yet — onto The Other Page.

More will grow as this page rambles on in typical Midnight Ramble fashion. This one began just before 8 pm Sunday October 15, 2006 after Anna and I spent most of this afternoon meandering the White Rock Lake Artists Studio Tour, about which I'll probably write a grand, glorious and extremely long-winded story by the first week in November, after our Big As Night show, and then after we catch up with our sleep and the projects we've let slide till then.

I keep wondering how the persons written about and whose work I photographed are taking what I'd written so far, then I realized I have yet to publish it. Upload it to the site...

Without ever quite sticking to a theme, all this Ramble's images (except the 'keets) are borrowed from My Edgy stack, which is to say these are images I thought I might need to show at Big As Night, Too (I always always want to spell that Big Ass Night. Now, maybe, finally, I will lose that compulsion.)

More about this major misdirection below.

Some things are better left unfollowed through with. Others tend to wander around aimlessly till they bump into something and have to find a new direction.

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Keets Flying Low

I am seriously reconsidering whether to have a Subscriber level for anything but a way for readers to contribute to this site without having to spend very much money.

There have never been more than six Subscribers at a time and usually fewer. And because almost every Supporting Member who responded to my initial posting of a Members-Only (M-O) page about the Big As Night Too show asked me for their User I.D and Passwords — proving they had not, had not recently or had only rarely accessed the M–O pages I have spent some time and energy on over the last several years.

True, I had never put nearly enough time and energy in those pages to make them extremely valuable. The Ops pages were always a passive activity involving rewriting and posting and querying places that send partial information, so I could post the opportunities we do get on that page.

It will help to draw more opportunities by posting all of them where everybody can see them all together.

See Supporting Member Jeanne Sturdevant's brave feedback to this question near the bottom of this page.

Right now, while I reconsider the Subscriber Level, I have placed all current Artist Opportunities on the freebie, no-password-needed Artists Opportunities Page, to better serve ALL DallasArtsRevue readers. Which pretty much removes the only other reason for Subscribers to subscribe.

Please feed me back if you have any feelings whatsoever about my current Subscribers crisis. I'm holding one check back from my always hungry bank account, waiting to see whether anybody needs a Subscriber Level without the benefit of Members-Only pages.

The M-O Pages were another noble experiment that failed in my ongoing throw-them-up-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks procedure.

I still remember learning how to sail butter patties when I worked at the Slop Pot washing dishes at the U of Dallas cafeteria.

Learning how meant a majority of butter patties sticking to a wall. There were a lot of near misses, but many more utter failures and a lot more butter patties sticking to the floor or other students. I don't think we ever butter patted a teacher...

Other, more successful DallasArtsRevue experiments include Supporting Memberships, which have enabled me to keep this thing financially afloat— as well as significantly expanding my opportunities to show good, great and interesting work on this site. That experiment is certainly a win-win win.

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I have already decided I have no objections to Supporting Member artists listing price$ for their work on their pages. I'm not at all sure why I ever did. People need to know these things. I used to know an artist whose primary purpose for attending exhibitions was to see how much other artists charged for their work. Besides, if someone wants to buy, that's handy information...

I include photographs of actual artists' studios as often as I can, so potential artists can begin or continue to figure out how other people do it — make this art stuff. Our participation in this year's White Rock Lake Artists Studio Tour is especially filled with such pictures. Which may help account for the remarkable popularity of art tour pages on this site.

I love that a lot of people read what I write about art, but it's long baffled me why tour pages are so damned popular. I'm thinking bare glimpses of process might have something to do with it. Then again, tours are usually more popularly promoted than plain old art shows. Mayhaps many people plant to go on these things, don't then live vicariously through our tour stories.

Of course, my usual interface with which pages are popular have more to do with the little hit counters I see on the bottoms of so many pages than what the site reports report.

Reading those reports gave a skewed view of what this site is about. Better, perhaps to do what it is I do semi-automatically than to steer toward the topics on the more popular pages. All my life I've been told that I should plan what I do before I do it, and always always always it works out better when I do not.

Valley Balloon

I don't make outlines before I write a story. I don't previsualize photographs, or rarely. My house might benefit from such plans — it's almost always disorderly, although when stuff starts growing — or stinking — I stop it in its tracks. Zap flying critters with Clorox spary. But my life and my arts are so very much more interesting, exciting and enticing when I don't plan ahead.

I'm not an agenderizer or itinerarier. When I go travel solo, I pick a direction and just go. I have maps and I even use them sometimes, but if I get lost along the way, that's fine. No problem. Lost is good. It helps me discover things I'd never plan to.

Rambles are my perfect vehicle.

It probably helps that I've been writing awhile. My first serious scribing was for the school newspaper at the U of Dallas in probably 1963 or 4. I'd written for school before that, of course, to mixed results, but it was very probably journalism that set me free from the pitfalls of prior planning. Once we get Who, What, When, Why and Where — not to mention How — ingrained in our minds, writing is a matter of getting inspired and setting fingers to keyboard.

Sometimes I know ahead of time I will write about so and so or such and such, but I don't do reviews on requests — although sometimes those open my eyes to the possibilities — I usually wait for inspiration. It's never far behind.

To truly get in tune with the Universe, it often helps to untune the tuners. Fly out into the static between stations.

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Bright Triangle

Other noble experimental pages that have caught on and actually became useful include the I Want (You want, you email me what you want; I post it on that page, and we all hope you get what you want or at least know you tried), Lost Artist (Several have been found and at least more people are looking) and the long-running Artists With Web Pages pages.

I keep wondering whether an Artists With Email Addresses Page would drive me back to drugs. Since 1/3 of all email address change every year, it could be briefly useful and always a nightmare to keep up. Luckily, I don't have the time nor inclination, only the concept. But wouldn't it be neat to be able to email any Dallas artist from one page on the internet?

All DallasArtsRevue Resource Pages are listed and linked from our Resources Index.

For a long time the Dallas-Area Visual Art Groups page was our most popular Resource Page. Now that honor may go to the How to Design and Distribute Invitational Postcards page, although I believe some other large, world-wide group got sucked into that one, and I'm hoping the same will happen with How to Photograph Art, How to Start Showing Your Art, and my eventual How to Make an Artist's Web Site, How to Promote & Publicize Your Work and How to Produce an Art Show, which — ironically— is what our Big As Night Too page is all about (albeit passively).

There will probably be others. How these things usually start is some reader will ask me something I think I don't know squat about, I'll think about it, then what I thought I didn't know comes gushing out and I have to put it somewhere.

White Stairs

I used to think in PageMaker (long since supplanted by In Design and Quirk Express graphic arts) software. Now I think in web pages, although not particularly high-techy ones. A couple people have lately thanked me for having extremely easy to navigate and quick-loading pages.

The former took a long time to figure out and even longer to implement. Much of my impromptu help was going other directions. This site is still not as easy to navigate as I'd like, and I'm still working on it, but I've learned not to pay too much attention to automatically generated site reports that tell me how many 404s readers get.

DreamHost (our web host) promised a customized 404 page like we used to have with the far (8 times) more expensive Earthlink, but like many DreamHost features it doesn't work. Meaning I don't know how many 404s readers have to endure, I only know how many I have to endure. And I'm careful not to calculate how high that number must be for everybody else or what I'd have to do about it if I were as conscientious as I like to think I were.

Recognizing that most people (not including me) now have high-speed internet access, I've lately let big stories (Like The EASL Heist — Art in the Dark and the upcoming but yet-unnamed White Rock Lake Artists Studio Tour story) drag out to superhuman lengths, but they're still full of fast-loading images, and they are easy to navigate to and from.

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Hand Wave Smile on the Highway

 

My Edgy by J R Compton

I told other DARts artists to find edgy art to show in Big As Night, Too. Stuff that scared them to show. Then I wondered what in my work was edgy, or could be, and I was not all sure what that is, or even if it is.

Till Anna drove us back from Fort Worth from picking up my photo from the AiM show, and I with my camera blazed at almost everything I saw. That in that moment, those nanoseconds, right there and then, you-blink-and-it's-gone appealed to my eye, my brain, my clicking finger — grand fun, shooting with no more than parts of seconds to decide what needs shooting, and shooting and shooting.

Kinda like automatic writing. The sort of stuff I love shooting that's every where, but it was so easy flying by it at 60 mph. Then traffic slowed to nearly stopped awhile, and we enjoyed the people in other cars along with us and photographing them and stuff on the side of the road I'd been watching ahead through the cars.

6 Flags Lines & Space

I love hands and hand pictures, and that hand shot is a little piece of a big picture so it's grainy, but it's got shiny reflections, and the girl in the car had a big smile in the rearview that I didn't plan on and it just happened and I didn't see that till later and wow.

Then we rolled fast past the highway edge of Six Flags, and I love shooting all those repeating patterns and strange stringy steel shapes and fierce colors, and grabbed shots through there clickity-click, and got some amazing stuff that I'd probably never show, except maybe online too small after thinking about it too long and putting it off and being too scared to show anybody who I get to be in unguarded moments just me and my camera and a tiny slice of my mind staying glued through the lens.

I always like showing recent recent work, and maybe it's easier for photographers but this Grab Shot series is gonna be from last week, earlier this month, and that's recent.

Still dunno if that's edgy, but it felt real, and it's sure as hell me. So maybe it is.
 

Talking with friends since I thought I'd finished writing this, I realized that though the first Big As Night artists created work this critic saw as edgy, that's not what they were going for. Each of those individuals were making the best art they could with their chosen mediums, skills and experience. Edgy happens when we are ourselves expressing who we are in our art, not when we're trying to make it palatable or trendy.

It has to do with developing our own style by doing it often enough and freely enough — and getting better at it, to attain a visual consistency. So it becomes our style, even though we may not be able to identify it, may even be unsure what it is we do that is so special.

But it is.
 

In the end, I abandoned all these images as hopelessly trailing edge — so much like my previous work that I have names for all their motifs — The Cloaked Car, Random Lines, Stairs, Chairs & Fences, Water Tank Parts and Surface Squiggles.

Instead, I settled into an existential theme that shouldn't be difficult to discern, involving work wholly created this week recent, once I quit worrying myself about edges.
 

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Blue Car Cover

Your feedback to this Midnight Ramble —
You don't even have to sign your name.
Just email the editor.

J.R.

Although I've opted to pass up the Tyler Street exhibit ...I have peeked at the page you set up. In response to your statement:

> I am also freaked out that the majority of those who say they will be in the show not having any idea what heir user i.d and passwords are. That means all the time and trouble I put into M-O (members-only) pages are likely a big waste. Perhaps I should just make the M-O opportunities and Media pages public. Any yea or nay? <

Members Only pages were (in theory) a nice perk of membership. However, I've found these pages pretty limited in scope. I supplement the M/O pages with membership in www.theartlist.com at $15/year, a good value, especially compared to the cost of an online subscription to Art Calendar at $33/year.

When I want to access M/O pages, I have to look up my user ID and password. If it was a better resource, I'd use it more often and might then remember it.

I'm boggled at how much you do keep up with on dallasartsrevue and mention my feelings about the limited offering of the M/O pages as an observation, not a complaint ;-)

All the best,
Jeanne 

Boat House Reflections

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