Posted on 6 Comments on Protoblogging: banking on art*

Protoblogging: banking on art*

(From an email dispatch sent to some friends during my first trip to San Francisco, in early 2000.)

Union Square is only two blocks away, so I scouted that area out, with its high-end Armani-type shops and all. The middle of the square was an art market, with artists displaying their wares and selling them. Refreshingly, it was "real" art, and not just kitschy portraits and caricatures.

I met a woman selling metal sculptures and she told me her story. She started off as a technical writer for an aircraft company (McDonnell-Douglas I think) and eventually moved to a bank. Her rational mind and strong work ethic allowed her to climb the corporate ladder, eventually becoming a vice president. She lived in a $4000/month apartment in central San Francisco, and everything was rosy.

At one point she realized that she had lost her sense of enthusiasm. Banking was sickeningly profit-driven, which she felt was corrupting her spiritual side. One day she saw someone welding, and felt draw to the way he was able to make things out of steel and iron.

So she quit her job and enrolled in a welding school. (Needless to say, she also ditched the apartment and scaled back all around.) She had never been artistic (her father once told her she couldn't draw stick figures even if she used a ruler), but she began making things with her welding equipment.

Now she lives in Santa Cruz and is a successful metal artist. Her sculptures are small scale (you could put them on a coffee table) and are usually quite "rational" and geometric, although they are rich in metaphor and have spiritual-sounding names (usually not too flaky).

This sounds like something out of some kind of motivational infomercial, but there she was, happy as a clam, right in front of me. Nice way to kick off my visit. It might be a good foil against the heavy dose of dot-comness I'll be immersed in over the coming days.

*Protoblogging

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6 thoughts on “Protoblogging: banking on art*”

  1. Howdy!

    Does the artist have a name?

    Play Ball!

  2. Indeed she does, but that was four years ago, and I don’t remember it!

  3. Great Blog. I see you’re in Montreal like me. Are you apartment-hunting like me too? I’m trying to hunt down something in the Plateau. Email me if you or someone you know is offering something! (chercheplateauappartement@hotmail.com)
    Also, I am an artist who offers art camps to children in Montreal; if you’re interested you can check out my site (needs fixing up!) showing what we do (it is presently showing art camp projects done in Newfoundland, but hey, our Montreal art camps are similar). Finally, I have a Montreal Blog you might like… http://montreal-montreal-montreal-montreal.blogspot.com

  4. Regarding children’s art camps in the Montreal area, I am having a weird Google experience. I am trying to get the word out about my Montreal-area art camps for children, but am no great web-expert. Yet, whenever I put “art camp Montreal” into Google to see if I can find my own site, the above post (which I posted as “Blogroamer”) comes up on the first page of Google! I don’t know if this is because clicking on my name “Blogroamer” takes people to the website I put up for the art camps for Montreal, and so the Google spider threads through that, or what. Anyway, many thanks, Blork, it might help me, however inadvertently! In the meantime, the link to my art-camp site is now connected by clicking on my new “name”, Art Camp Montrealer…

  6. Thanks for your vote of support. In fact marketing here is quite sticky compared to Eastern Canada, where we did art workshops for children before. There schools assumed you mean well and happily distribute any flyers as take-homes. Here it very much depends on the school. Anyway, we are going to have our two-day children’s art workshops throughout English/Anglo Montreal this spring and summer, in the West Island (Beaconsfield and Dorval) and Montreal West (Westmount, NDG, Hampstead). We have set up a website which is a bit rickety (as per usual on blog comments, reachable by clicking on my name), but still tells people what we do…

    As regards an apt, yes thank you we found something in the Plateau for a good price. Thank God that’s over!!!! Geez what a headache.

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