Rants and Raves - My Career
A casual blog reporting on the life and times of Caroline C. Blaker
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New website design is live!
Hola everyone! I'm pleased to finally be showing you the design I've been working on for months for this brand-new look and feel for carolinecblaker.com. In the spirit of "The cobbler's children never have new shoes," often does self-serving work of professional web designers and developers go un-delivered. We are not always our own best clients. Suffice to say that some upcoming events, including the shedding of an old web server and a baby due date fast-forwarded this project on my list. It's now live, at least in a skeletal, many-features-coming form. I know, I know, "Yeah Right!" Actually - many features that you cannot access are already installed - but there are reasons why they're not live yet: like they're not flushed out visually, or they need a tiny bit more development time, or going live to avoid a complete shut-down of the site was more important in the interim than their addition to a dev to live environment site. For those who don't speak geek - I've set myself up to be...
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New carolinecblaker.com is in development
This website is my first website. As someone who builds websites every day in a high-demand environment, I have a fondness for this one that supercedes my love for my work (which I LOVE a LOT.) In the past, it has been the canvas for my development skills. If you have been visiting for more than a few years, undoubtedly you remember it being riddled with bugs, impossible to use, or just having one of those "what was she thinking?" moments. As it turns out this problem is systemic for artists, but I'm not just an artist. I'm a professional web developer AND artist. I have the time, the know-how, and the motivation to produce a superlative website to showcase and sell my art work. And that's exactly what I'm going to do. Aside from personal vanity, I do have motivation for the work I'm doing for this website. Lately, I've noticed that despite my fondenss for this website, I hate updating it. Yep, you heard me - it's a pain. When the last iteration of the design was built, it was the eas...
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What? This is a Twitterscape?
Yesterday I sent 9 of the preliminary "Twitterscapes" off for printing for the upcoming exhibit. My printer called me three times out of what he called "confusion," though I read in it disbelief. My art printer (one of the best fine art printers in New Mexico,) who spends days at a time immersed in fine art, could not fathom why I wanted to print these, nor could he tell if I had sent him the correct images, or if I had just gone crazy. He may have thought he got a set of images that were corrupted. Of course, the images I sent him don't look like Twitterscapes, or fine art. They look like mistakes. Explaining to him that these were the visual clues I had for developing Twitterscapes in-process seemed to clarify a bit, though he still appeared to think they were not worth printing, or at least not well suited for it. Hm. I guess he doesn't see a lot of conceptual art. They are a bit strange, but conceptually they are some of the richest images I have ever made. Moreover, the strong...
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Marketing, newsletters, projects. Oh, my!
And suddenly, as Eric Meyer eloquently put it on New Years Eve, we have passed yet another arbitrary gregorian boundary condition. Out with 2010, in with 2011. While Im glad its over, 2010 was a revolutionary year; marriage, career independence, all in the span of two months and continuing now and into the future. God Almighty, Im free at last. And since 2011 is here, I shall declare that this year will not be about improvement, yearning, or gaining freedom as last year and years past have been. This year is about engagement. Its about full-throttling on connecting with people, an audience, and introducing the world to my bodies of work on its terms. What do I do? How is it contributing anything to anyones life? There is very specific language being used for artwork and web development; I have learned it for web development but not yet for art. Its a new palate of research- one that has to be approached by appropriating the use of descriptions from several existing worki...