THE YEAR END Q&A

What is your most read post?
Unfortunately, it would be titles from the 2012 blog, which was a rather racy drunken bender of stories, based on the life I was living at the time. Even to this day, “The Space Between The Notes” and “Tally Ho, Tommy” are still requested by visitors who clearly have those links bookmarked and/or have been shared in some sort of back linking site and never updated, as they have been down since 2015 or so. It seems that a more serious Brian is less interesting to casual readers.

How does an artist know how to price their work?
Other than the obvious “what the market will bear” the truth is, your pricing fluctuates between desire/demand, supply and where you are in your career. It is not uncommon to go backwards in the short term to go forward in the long term.

How much do you charge for your paintings?
$8-20k. The price varies based on size and if it’s part of a collection or a single commission.

You used to have a large social media presence. Why did that all go away?
I never saw one single sale from such a massive effort. On Twitter more than 10 years ago I had 60,000+ followers… No one bought anything… I’ve had as many as 20,000+ followers on Instagram… No one bought anything. That’s a lot of free cultural programming on social media for casual viewers that required a tremendous amount of output on my part for absolutely no return. Plus, it’s become difficult to say anything meaningful in such a limited character count, other than snark, gossip and trash. And of course I still have accounts for the NFT’s, and for broken banknote, but barely any followers, and I barely interact with them.

What art school did you go to?
I didn’t go to a visual arts school. I went to Berkeley College of music and studied performance and film composition.

Who or what is your greatest influence?
That’s tough to answer with just one word. If you mean influence in terms of execution that I like to use as a springboard for emulation in my own work, look no further than the Push Pin graphic and of course Seymour Chawst and Milton Glaser. That would be the most basic elements that I draw from, in terms of placement, space, and typography. I could go on name dropping… I certainly got a lot of my motion graphics from people like Hillman Curtis and what was happening on the web in the 90s and 2000s.

Web 1.0, Web 2.0, or Web 3.0?
First GEN web for the love of experimentation and the wide open environment for ideas… Again, Hillman Curtis… all the people at 247DE along with an endless list of trailblazers. Fuck Web 2.0. It was an absolute disaster for creativity. I like Web3.0 for finally having new possibilities in experimentation and all things blockchain. Decentralize!!!

Oil or Acrylic?
Acrylic for vivid colors, speed and saturation. Oil for time, depth, transparency, layering, and longevity.

How doyou define art?
Anything that makes me learn some thing about myself or the world around me, evokes an emotional response, and is singular of nature.

What’s the one thing you would tell a new artist?
Create. At all costs, create. Have a point of view and create from that point of view. And keep creating no matter what.

Vinyl or CD?
CD unless you have money. Then, vinyl all day.

Streaming or CD for digital music?
Assuming you have uncompressed streaming like TIDAL, or Qobuz, or Hi-Rez digital files on your own hard drive, streaming beats CD every time. Even with a really good DAC, you still have jitter and transport issues that are gone, when not relying on disk based media.

Best business advice for Artists.
Create a solid body of work and foster an audience of people who will pay you for that work. Form a corporation, understand the nuances of taxes and get a real clue about what “wright off” really means. Learn to migrate yourself away from being a W-2 employee as fast as possible.