I was supposed to be writing at least one blog entry a month, if not more and yet suddenly it's well over 2 months since the last little ramble.
As the old school reports were so fond of saying "must try harder"
Okay, this is the second attempt at this entry, the first try reached new heights of rambling nonsense and went off in ever waffling tangents of no interest to anyone, especially me. Focus young Middleton, focus.
Time and Money
Right, first and biggest update since I was last here is that I took the leap and reduced my hours at the day job and dropped down to part time with the sole intention of giving myself more time and energy to spend on my creative passions. For those that don't know I work for the NHS (in the Health Records dept, for various local hospitals) and for years have been working full time with as much overtime as I could handle. The job (while not stressful) is physically exhausting, I'm on my feet for the majority of the day with lots of manual handling, added with the 5 mile bike commute each way I was always totally wiped out and good for nothing by the time I got home in the evening. However with my domestic situation changing a couple of years back and all those long hours paying off to meet all the financial criteria to enable my wife to move over from the states I was able to re-evaluate things. They'd already cut overtime at my job and then thought, fuck it, life is short and spoke to my boss asking if it would be possible to reduce my hours. She said that it wasn't possible at that moment but she'd keep it in mind. To be honest I kinda forgot about it, then at the start of last month she said that they could juggle the numbers enough for me to go down to 30 hours and I signed a contract update. To be honest I then had a total "Shit!!! What the fuck have I done???" moment, for in real terms I was basically taking a £300 a month pay cut of my own doing. I work for the NHS remember so I didn't earn much to begin with. Still, I figured if I stopped buying so much stuff (by stuff I pretty much mean books and records) and tried to be a bit smarter with food bills it'd be okay. A few weeks into this new routine, as great as finishing at 2pm every day and having every afternoon to concentrate on art I am having severe 'stuff' withdrawals and having to go back to watching every penny and still not making it to the next pay day which is sending me back into that "what the fuck have I done???" mode. Obviously if I could fill that £300 hole each month with art income would be the ideal scenario and aim, I just have to try not to either fall into a debt/depression hole in the meantime.
Having to worry about making money from my art very quickly sucks any creative energy I might have gained. As I think I mentioned in a previous post I unsuccessfully tried to go the full on 'self employed' artist route back in the early 2000's, it was stressful and I fell deep into the aforementioned financial and mental health black holes. Back then I was primarily working doing album covers, something I haven't done for a while and right now have no desire to get back into. In an ideal world I'm hoping that if I have the time to make art that I personally like and excites me, for myself, then it should follow that others will (hopefully) enjoy it too and want to give me money for it. The very small amount I make from print sales doesn't even being to make a dent in things plus I still haven't quite figured out how to keep peoples interest in that and direct folk to my web store without constantly spamming my social media pages. I feel like there is only so many times I can say "hey, I've got a fancy new lino print". To put things in context, unless I post something like that most days I get no traffic to my Big Cartel page and even when I recently posted some "hey come buy my wares" blurb on a Facebook page it got over 2000 views and a bunch of likes but generated only 2 orders. I might just add here that I am extremely and forever grateful to each and every print order I get and those 2 orders this week were certainly two times better than none.
Still, it's only a month or so into this and I need to figure out some sort of new routine so I make the best of my time. Whatever, even if I'm not sure what I'm doing I want to make sure I'm always doing something. I do have plenty of plans and don't want to let stressing about money suck the life out of it, so time to chill and focus. As I said life is short and to be honest I'm not sure there would have ever been a 'best time' to make this jump so I just need to grab the opportunity and do my best to make it work.
Oh, but if you had wanted to buy a print from me but never got around to it, now would be a great time, thanks. Buy my gubbins here - Bonehive - Big Cartel Store
Book projects
For those of you who follow my often neglected Facebook and Instagram pages might have seen a post from a month or so ago where I was canvassing interest in an idea I'd been ruminating on, that being putting together a little book of a selection of sketchbook pages. Thanks to the many of you that gave me such positive feedback and said they'd be interested in such a venture. It's definitely something I plan on moving forward with and have been busy going through my stack of sketchbooks selecting which pages I think I might like to share and scanning them in to work on. I'm sure the selection process is going to get endlessly revised but I currently have about 130 odd possible pages. I also need to still think about a design and format but hopefully I can start pulling that all together in the not too distant future and then get it up for pre-order so I can gauge the demand. Obviously it's all new and not something I've done before so don't want to end up with a house full of stacks of unsold books.
Having said that never to make things simple or easy for myself I started thinking about another. separate book I want to do. This second one purely focusing on my pen and ink stuff, I know that this is the style I mainly started in and also primarily the work that most people seem to know me for, especially within the punk scene. It seems to be a medium I have a love/hate relationship with, there have been long periods where I've felt like I would rather gouge my own eyes out than work in that style again but then I get a hankering out of nowhere, screw up my eyes and settle back into hours/weeks/months of interminable detailed dot work. I have to say though once I've got a composition drawn up there is a special kind of satisfaction as the drawing pulls itself together. Anyway, as I was sorting through various stuff I discovered I had a bit more of this style than I thought. I've always felt it is somehow separate to a lot of the other work I do so gathering it all together (along with preliminary sketches) I feel wold be a worthwhile project. I think this will take a lot more work putting together than the sketchbook idea and I'm still not sure which to do first. I think I'll do all the scanning for both projects first and then decide. Either which way I'm feeling pretty committed to the ideas and plan on getting both of these out before the end of the year. There'll be progress updates as I go.
Other stuffs
As always I seem to have a million other projects on the go or on the ever increasing back burner. Actually I don't think that back burner works anymore there are so many random things piled up on it, many of them dusty from years of neglect. Oh well, I'll get around to them one day. Honest.
Music related, I finally finished pulling everything together for the Angst - Practice and Live 1986 CD release which is coming out on Malaysian label Black Konflik, hopefully sometime in October. For more info on who Angst briefly were check back to my first blog post as there's a little potted history plus YouTube links. Still seems kinda crazy that the noise we made in some little rehearsal room some 35 years ago that was then forgotten on a cheap cassette and buried in various boxes and cupboards in various houses over the decades should now be seeing the light of day on a CD, if someone had told us that back then not sure what we'd have made of it, well probably just laughed and said "fuck right off!!"
Also waiting for me to finish cover art is the long overdue D.I 'Dance of the Plague Bearer' 12", this is 5 re-recorded old tunes that we recorded back in 2017 during the recording of Husk, it was supposed to come out soon after followed by a CD compilation of all D.I stuff recorded since we got back together in 2007. I've been having a huge creative block with this, constantly working up ideas and then rejecting them, to be honest I just want this DONE (a sentiment I'm sure shared by Snapa who runs the label and has been patiently waiting for YEARS). The back cover and labels are done at least so that's something.
Then when these are done I need to finally turn my attention to getting a Spine Wrench discography sorted for which I have a couple of interested labels waiting in the wings. This is another project that I first got asked about many years ago and has just been forever on the to-do lost. The main problem with this is that the masters have long since been lost in the mists of time so I will need to digitize everything from cassette and then get it all re-eq's and mastered. Bri Doom has done a great job with the old D.I and Angst stuff though so I'm sure I'll be employing his great audio skills again to get that all compiled.
I have to say I have come to realize that all these musical projects (and come to think of it the art book stuff) are all concerned with historical material, much of it 20 or 30 odd years old. I'm keen not to be forever looking backwards and really need some new exciting projects to sink my teeth in to. Thankfully I've got the small group show with friends that's booked for November to work towards getting some new paintings and drawings together for. Band wise, hopefully D.I will get back into writing mode again soon, we had written 3 new songs before the pandemic hit and everything got put on hold. I went back and listened to the rehearsal recordings of those recently and had forgotten how good they were sounding. Our plan was/is to get enough new stuff together for a new full length album at some point. Plus hopefully Haavat will be back practicing and writing again soon. Anyway, much to keep me busy and off the streets.
Cheers to those who made it this far, you win a penny chew of your choice.
