Here at the Arts Hole ....I don't believe in board rooms , brunches , bullshit coffee , or the general cacophony that accompanies the urban environment
All my best ' meetings ' happen with a little wander , a little stop and a little fire amid the setting of somewhere beautiful ....
....oh and no you can't bring your fucking phone 😆
When I used to sit in the Tiffany gallery on higher market Street in East Looe Cornwall , day in day out ....when I joined the ' team ' , the gallery was already the longest running independent gallery in South West Cornwall , Tom McCracken was the elusive watercolorist whose tenacity and perseverance in keeping the door open nigh on 364 days a year, a former royal doulton painter he and his wife moved down to Cornwall from one of the shire counties up north somewhere , he'd get up every day walk his beloved sheep dogs over the downs through the town and he would sit there and paint and paint and paint . " You can always paint your way out if the shit " he'd say ....and the man was a machine , in the 30 odd years the gallery was going he must hold sold tens of thousands of his little wet in wet watercolours , all depicting local scenes and things he loved .... jeez I don't even know what year it was but it was just at the end of the credit crunch ....just before the recession began , so what 2005 / 2006....give or take
I don't think smart phones were really a contemporary accessory then 🤔 mad that they have become so interwoven in our lives that I honestly can't recall the point if origin without looking it up 🤔
But I recall being sat there on a sunny summer's day and we had had a typical morning of ice cream scoffing McDonald's seeking degenerates come in and tell us that ' I could do better than that ' or worse ' they're very nice ...but we have already spent all our money up at the other gallery - that whistlefish gallery '
Now the whistle fish really was the bain of an otherwise quite idyllic existence , sitting by the sea painting a few pictures , even amid a recession ....sure not a shoddy way to while away a bit of time , unless of course some property investors suddenly decide to do the same thing just down the road ....just down every road in every town and village in the south west cheap prints in cheap plastic frames that under a perfectly pleasing aesthetic veneer retail by the bucket load and have to date wiped out over half of the little independent studio spaces and pokey little one man galleries that used to be such an interwoven aspect of the culture here and indeed the impression of the place and the lifestyle is what the marketeers kicked out in the mid eighties ....that ironically actually began the slow gentrification and eventual asphyxiation of these places
But on one of these mornings ....as such reflections were charging the conversation for the day ....I catch a glimpse of a guy at the shop window trying to get a picture of an image through the glass on his what must have then been a fairly basic camera phone , I shot up from the easel and out the door ' mate , I'm not sat here painting so you can have something to put on your social media ....' he stood his ground and said ' mate I'm just trying to find a signal for my phone ' ....we both looked at each and laughed
See back then it was bloody hard work ....trying to make a living out of the retailing of luxury items to a largely uncultured demographic amid an international recession .....ha ha ha what am I saying , it hasn't gotten any easier from recession to recession it seems in the past ten years at least
Now it took a hell of a lot for me to do what I did , I certainly don't regret it but I do find it a point if recurring reflection, to say no more corporate contracts in fact no more architectural works at all ( unless I am heavily swayed by its ethical intent ) to just try to make a living out of the art ....and although I do produce the odd landscape or portrait or whatever ....the signature style of the original ' product ' has remained integral ,no prints , only original artworks - in fact there are now over 100 separate product lines in the ' catalogue ' and those that do try to follow this stuff will know the sheer scale of variety between say the signature paintings and a figure study in oils , the 101 reasons to choose a vocation in the creative industries and the scientific installations .....and now yes even bloody rocks ! Yep actual rocks for goodness sake
Now this is where I am going to try to round up my point ...if indeed one can even be reached in this little window of diatribe
So how do I price my work 😆 ....well when I started out down in Toms and my first little pop up initiatives I'd guage a painting at about a week's wage so around two hundred quid with room to manoeuvre .... That gave me a wage and some materials to do an additional painting 🤔 these days I try to factor an affordability ratio 🤔 now there is an inherent value increase because it's a twenty year body of work that has remained consistent throughout all that time ....
Now I look at the people fleeing war torn countries with personal belongings strapped to their backs and can genuinely relate to this state of imposed emergency transience 🤔 yes I've had to do it myself , and have at times such as this taken all pictures out if frames and rolled them up, grabbed some food and made my way out on foot .....so , for example if a painting was in fact rolled under my arm while I was fleeing a country under fire, then yes it's price has gone up a little
All but a single painting in a series ....lost at sea , well then yes the price of the stand alone piece has increased incrementally
I do by all rights consider myself a ' working class ' artisan ....that us I am happy to emulate toms lifestyle and paint for my supper so to speak , to not try to cash in on a single image in the tricky way of mass runs of prints , but to just live humbly from my trade day to day week to week with no plan of retiring or vacationing from it .
So these days I reckon a painting is roughly a sofa in cash value ....for most people it's a thing you stick on the wall because it sort of goes with the sofa and the rug , and makes the room feel more homely ....it's cool I can dig it 😆 I've spent enough time in the gallery floor to know
You want to feel that you have spent enough that you can wrap it in bubble wrap and pop it in the garage , but you don't want to gamble the retirement on something as frivolous and temperamental as the arts .....again I've had this conversation over and over again , I can dig it 😆
So between me and the customer we've basically hammered out an ' accessible ' price that is able to pique the interest of the ' serious ' collector ,..... about the cost of a sofa
Now , well like I said now I am fricking mining 😆 and not great big industrial and commercial ventures ... But just ticking around carrying art about I have come across a silver vein here and a copper vein there ,a ridge of palaeozoic creatures or Jurassic coastal deposit
So that sort of means that my catalogue of roughly sofa priced paintings and product lines are now backed with a fucking silver standard 😆😆😆
So what does that actually mean 🤔
So Artby Valerio is my actual u.k company name the arts hole is my unofficial brand that us still inherently protected by intellectual property rights
The paintings and the books I've written are effectively my stock ( you have seen me wince as I describe my diary pages as ' stock ' and my portfolio as a catalogue ) and you - the consumer base get to ' invest ' in something that isn't whistlefish prints - dodgy pharmaceuticals , bent political leanings , the bombing of a distant civilian population , or a very tired and over bloated property market
.... As I sit here mulling over all the people that have actually supported my ongoing endeavours with fond reflections of friends and even adversaries ,the careful and the careless
I wonder if as you think back on all the phones you have purchased , all the flights you have taken , .....all the revenue that you have willingly handed over to politicians and estate agents alike ,Netflix , sky ,and the national lottery .....and now as you stuff whatever you've got left after taxes into envelopes and send them asap out to a brand new militant front .....
....maybe , just maybe ..... Support the arts and the artists that are doing it , especially those doing it at great risk and great cost to themselves ...or carry in being a bunch of middle class mooks with a sponsorship deal for the end of the frickin world
Just sayin x
Alright .....it's Friday morning , again ...in this farce this international comedy club of high paid mortgage interned imbeciles all locked in to the mantras of.... " keep calm and carry on " and " eat ,pray ,love " ...maintains its very expensive yet all the while utterly futile existence of banality ....
.... It's raining hard outside and if you are even remotely aware of your surroundings you can acknowledge ....that it's raining pretty hard inside too
Sat here considering the last few weeks and how they themselves bled out from the preceding weeks , months and years is a common way for any creative to start the day ,perhaps heightened especially in the wake of my recent 40th birthday. ( by the way big hugs and many thanks to all of you that sent wellwishings , it was a fun weekend followed by a deliberately drunken Monday night and a birthday morning nursing a hangover the likes of which I haven't seen since my early twenties ) I know I am terrible at coming into these digital platforms of shameless self promotion and reciprocating such sentiments , but I do hope that those of you that truly matter to me will take that with a suitable pinch of salt and know that if our paths actually cross in the physical realm whilst sauntering about in this life ... Then I am more than willing to break a seal on a decanter of whatevers your poison and drink to your very good health ( and this I would rather do than hide in a domestic bubble wrap kicking out platitudes for the sake of it )
What was the main point of this little reflection 🤔
Well there were several underpinning ideas that got me to sit here in front of this God awful screen and try to type out at least one partial facet of what was on my mind , constantly infuriated with having to change if to of and vice versa and this for thus u for I ....so convenient all if this garbage that most of you have come to run your whole lives with 😆
Well first I was thinking of popping up a little doodle .... I don't do this much anymore ...because I think it serves to feed the internet ether more than it's ever served feeding me ....but we live in weird and scary times and as much as I am absolutely certain that to some small degree my fringe edge ideas and notions just end up being absorbed into the digital crack and largely ignored , until some upper middle class asshole that has had nothing to do but ' internet research ' from a position if relative comfort has rebranded my concept as their own ,pumped a great big Facebook advertising budget and purchased a suitable amount of followers ....can then try to turn something I do as a passing fancy , just by chance ....into some streamlined ' business model ' prone to the privilege of all the relevent funding models as offered by this basket case crack whore of a country
Jeez where is there a place for the fiercely independent hobby style grassroots cottage industry....are we allowed to just muse over things without having to worry about whether we might be eligible for R&D funding opportunities ....
Everything is funding driven these days ....and the whole thing stinks as far as Whitehall ....what ever happened to the financially secure consumer base that used to support and maintain through that support .. the discerning customers financial democracy 🤔
Well there have been factors of course .... Personally I think there is little validity in an artist's work if they haven't first been exposed to the realities of the subjects in which they concern themselves , so I couldn't paint about pain if I had never experienced it first hand , and not as a single experience .... I would of course have to render an understanding of the complexities and nuances that encompass all facets if that determinable experience , not just catch my hand in a door and assume that I am now versed in the complete complexities of the underlying sensation
So a painter that likes to walk Fido in a light rain and tries to talk about being ' in touch with their surroundings '
Is a bit like a vaccine company that was consistently sued for the cure they offered for limp dick
Or a political party that campaigned to hang Nelson Mandela is interested in humanitarian rights and not arms sales and estate agents
Or a media company telling you who to root for be it a sports team a local initiative or the much debated great reset
A local council suggesting that despite imposing 15 years of ideological austerity on behalf of a gov that is clearly out of control ....that really they stand with their constituents
It's a farce , it's s sham it's such a level of charlatan clad bullshit that quite honestly I don't know how half of you stand it .... Suitably compensated for either your apathy your silence or stupidity I guess 🤔
But there you go ..... I suppose I should go and jump on this flight and make use of the week in lieu of being allowed to be at ' work ' today .....
My goodness little England ( I can't call you a united kingdom ... You are certainly not a Great Britain ) so little England it is adiós until I am offered the opportunity to defend the very idea that an image depicting subtle nudity ...in an art room might not be grounds for disciplinary action !!! My goodness the audacity 😆😆😆
Don't get me wrong , I am all for positive affirmations for setting goals , optimising implementation plans and the good old fashioned pulling up of socks , garnering gumption and trailblazing with tenacity ....so I do get the manifestation process to a degree ...I think that if you are sat in some middle class opulence regurgitating uncomprehending gibberish about karma as the middle East burns for a fourth decade and the fickle idea that Putin or Johnson will get what's coming to them if we just sit and sip tea or soy lattes and bark into the mobile insane asylum that social media has become that everything will work out in the end of whatever ' episode ' formatted concept your reality has been curtailed to ....for precisely this reason
Hmm I just started writing an interesting little post about metal , attached to an article suggesting that the u.k had just sanctioned import from russian refineries ...but then this horrible little toy glitches and both what I had written and the attached content vanished , fuck this digital nonsense , it's all just blunt tools for remedial works ....beggars belief really !
I got a reasonable way into saying that when I first made the public announcement a short while ago that I had in fact stumbled across a few little silver deposits amid my wanderings ....and then about a week later some Canadian shareholders interest calling themselves " the Cornish mining company " made the same announcement from a site down in the south crofty belt in Cornwall , completely by coincidence I'm sure .... of course their share price went up by about a tenner ...
Now I did consider cashing in , floating my humble little hobbyist company and reaping some immediate cash , but let's be frank McDonald's , Amazon , Facebook , Pfizer , .....all if these bullshit companies that are killing the world and suffocating individual liberty are doing it in this model ...so no , I abstained, I'm sure my position on the idea that a passive residual income rendered through commissioned percentages on someone else's labour ....well that's just the middle classes implementing an additional system if taxation in themselves really isn't it ....
I will be completely honest and openly state that I only sought to acquire the necessary mineral rights through permissive allowances and I haven't sought , nor would I the ' right ' to purchase and privatise any of the world's beautiful corners , an aspect if my reasoning was also a conservationist one , I could envisage , that undine mad dash to keep this dead end economy afloat for a little longer that the powers that be could otherwise seek to turn the whole area into an open pit lithium mine and decimate one of the last beautiful little bits of landscape we have left here in Brexit britain
Any way , on Friday just ,it was ascertained that I have enough material within the portfolio by way of artworks and projects , and now suitable access to enough silver to be able to back the artworks in the portfolio with a very basic silver standard , so that's a bit like how those big white Victorian fivers you see were backed by a precious metal ( gold standard )
That means that like those old fivers , these paintings are an effective ' currency ' which as I said on Friday runs at a commodity parallel akin to a sofa or a second hand 30 foot yacht ....
Watch what happens to the price of silver over the next little while in light of international events 🤔
This is nowhere near as elaborate as the last little written attempt that was attached to the original article , but you get the gist x
