Feb 11
Turpentine
Everyone knows the street idiom “ether”, verbally assaulting opponents, pretenders and haters until they evaporate from the scene. It also designates a strong chemical which abuses the brain into submission, rendering the subject nullified in a self-induced matrix of visions and appeals for a life, vitriolic in substance and permanently damaging in effect if dwelled on.
For the purpose of this blog, i will substitute ether to turpentine, a clearing agent often used for paint jobs, with properties similar, yet more lethal than the former. This analogy because the publication of this site are mainly graphically oriented, starting from pencil and paper.
Someone splashed this foul smelling substance onto a free digital canvas, and called to rip it down because at a corner of this piece, tribute is offered to certain designers from which the styles of the graphics stem. This person also used threatening syntaxes to back an imaginatively holy crusade for the salvation of “true” artists. This person hails from the holy land of California and has obtusely driven herself to splash more turpentine wherever she can to make the place so clean of influence that it would in the end look the way she wants it: blank.
Referencing one’s work from someone more advanced in the art is common practice, whereas the disciple or fan follows similar techniques from the original artist before they can fly on their own. Some also divert from their technique to adopt others they have encountered later in their life. This is true with the works of Toulouse Lautrec and Klimt regarding 18th century Japanese oil paintings. It is true also of the schools of Caravaggio and Da vinci. It is one’s choice to follow one school of art and construct on it to reach a point where one can claim an identity. And when manga art is involved, just as here, there wouldn’t be enough space to list all the referencing taking place, but who complains about that? On the other hand, unilaterally hateful mail with litigious and bad mouthed intent from a third party with an art knowledge that goes just as far as her own buddies, let alone the nature of the posts on this site is like being told to shut our creative drive, our canvas and travel album, our inspirational fountain, and never appear on a free space anymore. And that, to the knowledge of all who have read her diatribe, is purely based on an immature psychological consistence, and probably also uninformed at that. Is this person trying to tell us to leave our own building?
Uninformed because this woman has not realized that the website doesn’t focus on only one aspect of digital art, many styles and techniques adorn it. Uninformed because this woman has never really gone further in the chain of concepts, to find blatant carbon copies or similarities at various levels within other levels of artistic fame. Uninformed because simply put, she hasn’t seen the true scale of the world at large, so confined to a thought alone without seeing the other side of the palm she plunges head first into a water that’s too deep for her.
So far as her actions speak, this woman can sniff around and try to shut the whole creative community, flourishing and in constant search, or does she want to take a piece of the pie and have a medal of honour pinned to her face, siphoning jobs in her stride for having brought an issue long already resolved back on the table? Her discourse isn’t even intelligible, but a mass of f*@k you c”%t and other thugged out letterings that people in our circle will love to counter on, in real life. If such claims were done in the hip-hop industry, she would have to deal with the people behind the mic, and the turntables, and their agents, and their entourage. Does she really intend to start this? No stupidity is large enough when coupled with bad faith. As some people say “don’t you throw my name around, for whatever reason”.
No matter her intentions, this canvas is here to stay, to develop its own style as well as pay tribute to others. No amount of ether or turpentine will disfigure what this site represents, a freedom of expression and a freedom to create. If this person stands against that, she may as well be one who doesn’t respect the choice of others and stands in the critic’s box, always looking for flaws in someone’s free endeavour.
So she has no place here, and is asked to keep her turpentine for the real bad people who make money off of artists and designers of any level of achievement by illegally selling shirts with everyone’s designs in stalls around Bangkok or China for that matter, and not those who just do it as a passion and take no financial reward from it. If she wants to go this venture, then she is more than hailed to take a ticket all the way to these countries and deal with the wrongdoers herself, and speak to them the same way she spat at dgmaki, then come back with an honest account of her experience. Or just eternally keep her twisted, unarticulated verbosity to herself and shut up.
Last option is to open her mind by being objective, a quality only true editors have.
Hey Ma, look! It’s a spaceship! It’s the MTV day 1998 spaceship!
