I signed up for this (next) year’s The Sketchbook Project. The concept is quite cool – you pay $25 to participate and they send you a skinny moleskine; you send it back and it goes on tour to galleries and museums across the US. After the tour, it ends up catalogued in the Brooklyn Art Library.
Exciting, huh? No idea which theme to pick; asked for a random choice so I wouldn’t think about it too much.
As a kid, I loved to draw. In uni, I got into anime art and doodled eyes in my school notebooks. Even started making my own manga, “Minako”, about a young girl who is expelled from her conservative deity-fearing village because she was caught playing with forest troll children, so she goes to visit this deity to ask wtf. She got as far as the stone forest at the base of the deity’s mountain home, before I decided to write Dragonball Z fanfiction instead – mm, sweet sweet megalomania and end of the world. Oh, my darling Minako, I’ll finish your story one day.
I have a love/hate relationship with the arts. I really enjoy ‘creative stuff’, then really not-enjoy it after just a few months of a particular hobby. I start to feel boxed in – like I’m in a comfortable hole, where I’ll peter out the rest of my days.
No. Even if it’s fun – no.
I’m getting that same feeling at work lately. Anecdotes about whoever’s grandad or uncle who’s been in whatever business all their life – romantic, but it’s not for me.
My last couple of years have been interesting. I started at iiNet as a web developer, then moved on as a web designer after a year. A year later, I assumed the role of web producer, which didn’t exist in the company at the time. Web producers pull usability, webdev, web design, marketing and communications together – then help translate the hybrid into something meaningful to the user at the other end. It’s the modern equivalent of a webmaster from the early 90s – jack of all trades (master of none).
It’s a grown up version of where I started in web in 1995. I’m not sure if I like the idea of doing this for another 15 years.
This has been on my mind a lot lately. Don’t really know where to go from here. My role comes with a huge variety of work, so I’m getting to do a lot of different things, while imagining what it would be like to specialise in one of those things.
Actually, I’m tempted to just pick a random new career path and be done with it. Might see how it goes with the sketchbook first.
Permalink. Posted 3 October, 2010. Tagged: drawing, sharing, web stuff, work, writing.
