people please...
Out of context: Reply #651
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Its just that my work is shit and I have lived on self-delusion. I had come to understand that my work is shit via the work I do under the name studiospooky, but I had a little pang of hope that by pulling together all the pencil-based stuff I might actually have a decent portfolio in a new direction. I had high hopes. It felt it might be my way out, my future.
First off, I posted it to about 20 agents. You need to understand that if you have anything of any value at all an illustration agent will absolutely take your arm off in their haste to sign you up Their income relies on good portfolios, they don't waste their time on shit ones.
So I contacted 20 agents and I got nothing back. "Oh that's just those twenty agents, it doesn't mean your work is no good".
I sent announcement emails to about 200 UK newspaper, publishing and magazine contacts. A large number visited the site. Not one person responded. "Oh, thats just those 200, there'll be others".
My friend is far from being an unreliable point of reference. He and I have often worked together in the past and I know and respect him greatly for his blunt honesty and his eye for quality design, illustration, photography, typography etc. His opinion counts for a lot. His opinion was worse than bad, he felt unable to say anything. "Oh, that's just him, ignore him"
Finally, in aesthetic terms I seem to be suffering from a fluttering Myopia. I cannot see the wheat for the chaff. In compiling the Orbit Lesser web portfolio work I started to get a creeping suspicion that my idea about collating into a tight portfolio might not be as great as it seemed to be in my imagination but I couldn't see it through independent eyes. I had a good few days away from looking at it and gave my eyes a rest, and then when I returned to look at it with fresh eyes, I really saw for myself that it was weak.
So I tried the agents, in case I was wrong, I tried working art buyers, and I tried my friend Andre, and with the feedback (or lack of feedback which in itself spoke adequately) I was able to see that beyond the encouragement of friends on QBN who would want to be saying positive things more than absolutely honest things, and I saw that the work I had gathered together was just a bunch of scribbles. No real skill, no finesse, no purpose, no tension, no narrative, no style, no interest, no application, no use... just pictures drawn by someone who really wants to be good at drawing but isn't.