Fake Friends

Some of us (myself included) aren't doing our homework.

I've been on Facebook for seven years now, and in that time I've managed to get connected to 370 friends.  Call me old fashioned, but I figure I should at least know someone - or know of them - if I'm going to let them into my Face World. Up until recently that's been my standard, and though it's left me with a rather humble friend count, (given the time frame), I don't have to worry about any of them violating my trust or causing me any sort of cyber-grief.

Lately, however, I've let my guard down a couple of times. Maybe it's because I am, after all, somewhat prone to Friend-Count Anxiety Disorder, or maybe like most of us, I love it when someone young and attractive wants to be my friend.  Either way, my recent lower standard for friend acceptance was based on whether or not the request came from someone who was already friends with the people in my existing network. I was making an assumption that these folks had already done the vetting.  But I was mistaken.


Meet "Millie"

According to Facebook, 55 of my close associates are already friends with Millie. A quick scan of these friends revealed that most of them are middle aged Denver artists, like me. Maybe as a group we are just more accepting, or less attentive to privacy concerns, or maybe it's the titillation of a request from a "hottie." Regardless, 55 of you said yes to Millie, though I highly doubt a single one of you knows her in real life.

Something about Millie never seemed quite right to me, so I didn't accept her overture of friendship when I received it six months ago. But I didn't reject it either. Instead I left her request unanswered in my Facebook inbox, where it sits to this day. Maybe I left it unanswered because I was waiting for Millie to prove she was "real" by showing up in my friend's news feeds. Or maybe It's because I wanted to write this blog and needed it for reference, either way Millie remains unconvincing to me. A glance at her Facebook Timeline reveals no narrative whatsoever, just a handful of boudoir "selfies," each of them with the heads cropped out of the photos, so that we are to assume they're all of the same person. I don't believe it's too grave a violation of good taste for me to categorize Millie as a fraudulent, composite Skank. Call me judgmental.

 

 If you do a reverse image search on Millie, what you'll find is that this stolen picture appears on a whopping 428 separate websites, all of them NSFW (that's Not Safe For Work, for those of you over 50, or who don't work in a cube farm). The origin of this picture is lost in the hall of mirrors of internet image piracy. It's impossible to know anything at all about the girl in this photo. We can't know whether she's a Millie or a Cassidy or a Tiffany. We don't know if she was a paid model or a kid whose picture was hijacked while sexting to her boyfriend. All indications of authorship, origin and intent have been stripped from the photo. All that is left is an artifact of desire. One that keeps on giving, apparently.

 
Meet "Jennifer"

According to Facebook, many of you are friends with Jennifer. Anyone care to vouch for her? I said yes to her request, assuming that she was someone I had recently met at a big art opening. She looked kind of familiar. I figured she would drop to the bottom of my active friends list along with all the other ex-coworkers, friends from high school and distant relatives who never really interact with me on Facebook, but all of whom are technically still my friends. Unfortunately, "Jennifer" had other ideas. One was to message me at 1:30 in the morning recently with four separate messages:

I added you because I liked ur photo.

Have u met any cool people on here?

I have to log off right now

Whats your cell number? I can jus text you right now

I couldn't unfriend Jennifer fast enough, but having awoken from a deep sleep, this normally simple procedure required immense mental effort. The next day I took to Google for a reverse image search, and learned that there are dozens of "Jennifers," "Jessicas," and "Ashleys" all using this same profile picture on Facebook.

This morning it occurred to me that I should check and see if any of my profile pics were being used falsely on the web. So I did a search on the following two images, which have both been used as my profile picture.

Not surprisingly, the one on the left didn't return any results other than the original post on Facebook. It seems the one thing no one is pretending to be on the web is an average looking middle aged white guy. We're more likely the ones doing the pretending.  But the other shot of me below the summit of Mount Yale returned 23 instances of misuse. So as long as you're doing something sporty, exotic or ballsy, people are going to want to steal it. I felt flattered and incensed at the same time.

The moral of the story

Okay, there isn't really a moral. Maybe we should just agree that these are sure some weird times, and there's a whole lot of info we need to collaborate on to help each other stay safe and sane. I suspect we could all use a little Amish-ization every now and then. The Amish aren't against technology per se. They are resistant to adopt any technology that doesn't directly support the strengthening of their communities, or that causes one to be selfish or prideful, or that distracts from the fundamental business of being faithful to God. For them, pretty much everything new and shiny falls into that category. In our world, we've tacitly agreed that participating in social media is critical to our communal well-being. Social media is the new "watering hole" and we can't possibly pull ourselves away from its influence in our culture. The real objective then, is to help each other become as smart as we can possibly be in this big out-of-control social experiment. To that end, I have a few recommendations to help ferret out the Millies.

First, don't assume your friends are any more on-the-ball with vetting friend requests than you are. Make a little effort to figure out if a person seems to be real and trustworthy. An empty timeline is a bad sign. So is a request from a user who just joined Facebook. Consider limiting access for people you don't know well. Facebook allows you control over which friends see what info. Get familiar with your privacy settings. If there's any doubt, don't accept a friendship request from someone unknown. There is no obligation to say yes to a total stranger.  Here is a link to seven critical things you can do to control Facebook privacy settings.
http://www.abine.com/blog/2012/do-your-privacy-a-favor-control-the-7-most-critical-facebook-settings-post-timeline/

Second, consider building a separate Facebook "Page" for your business. Broadly speaking, your Facebook profile is for your friends and family. Pages are for businesses and public personalities. A lot of my friends are artists or folks who operate small businesses. To us, the line between friends, supporters and customers is a fuzzy one. A few folks I know operate their Facebook profiles like Friend Farms, actively requesting and accepting pretty much any friend request, because they are trying to grow a business or increase exposure for their creative careers. Problem is, by design, a Facebook profile is set up to share personal info. If you want a tighter grip on who sees what, you'll have to get pretty granular with your privacy settings. Pages, on the other hand, are set up to provide more filtering and protection of personal info. Most folks find managing both a profile and a page to be a pain in the ass, but if you want to keep your customers out of your living room, and your clients out of your vacation photo albums, then you'll give it some consideration. Also worth mentioning, you're never going to track interaction with a Facebook profile, but pages have built in analytics for every post – something potentially useful if you're actively using Facebook to reach customers.

Third, get in the habit of doing some research. Reverse image searches can help you discover if something is amiss with someone's image usage (or one of your own!). There are several search engines offering reverse image searching, but Google is by far the most powerful. Bookmark this link, or better yet, keep it open in a browser tab.
http://images.google.com.
To understand how Google image search works, click here.

While you're at it, bookmark Snopes.com, a go-to site for hoax busting. There are other sites useful for putting the kibosh on internet hoaxes, but Snopes is the granddaddy of them all, and since many hoaxes circulate for years and years, it's good to have a "granddaddy" to reference. Also, Snopes is useful to keep open while you're on Facebook, particularly during election time. It can help defuse needless hostility caused by images with bogus facts and figures like this much-shared classic:

Read the Snopes debunking of the info in this graphic

Lastly, don't forget how easy it is to unfriend someone on Facebook. Go to your Friends list in Facebook. For each person on the list there is a "Friends" button to the right of their picture. Hover over it and you'll get a pop-up menu. Scroll to the bottom and select Unfriend. That's it. They won't get a notification, you will simply not show up in their friend list anymore. Welcome to passive/aggressive friends management at its finest!

Certainly there's more you can do, short of swearing off Facebook entirely, to protect your personal information.  I'm not overly paranoid with this stuff so I've just mentioned a few things that are top of mind. You may have additional strategies. I've gone back to playing it safe with the friend requests for starters.

Be safe. And say hi to Millie, if you see her.

No card says it

Mom and Dad, 1957

High up on my list of troublesome irks is the occasional need to buy a greeting card. Mother's Day cards are especially problematic. From a distance, most of them look exactly like sympathy cards. Clusters of embossed flowers with loopy, Sorry-For-Your-Loss typography. I always feel a little self-conscious when I reach for one. Opening them seems like stealing a peek at someone's diary. Not a diary that contains unguarded truth or salacious revelations. The other kind. The kind that is emotionally tidy and desperate to be read.

Being a writer of greeting cards has to be a thankless undertaking. You'd have to churn out messages with appealing moods and textures that seem at least partially truthful, while keeping the messages general enough to be somewhat attractive to large numbers of people. The cards you wrote would need to be wistful, but not melancholy, nuanced, but not emotionally complex. And above all, they would need to accommodate the various elephants in the room without even a hint of their presence. An impossible task. One designed to fail. No wonder then that selecting the right card is an exercise in finding the one that fails the least to say what you mean.

When I was a kid my parents socialized a lot in our home, but my brother and I never got to stay up late and hang out with the grownups. We'd be tucked in bed at the appointed hour no matter what. I used to love drifting off to sleep to the sounds of adults laughing and telling stories down the hall.  The stories probably weren't meant for young ears, but I wasn't much interested in their content anyway. It was enough to know the people in charge of my world were happy, and to hear them cut loose with their friends was reassuring. My mother's voice was musical and floated above the others in a pleasing way. To this day I equate the sound of her laughter with a sense of well-being, but to my knowledge there is no card that says Dear Mom, Thanks For Laughing.

One afternoon when I was about ten my cousin and I made a fort out of a refrigerator box. We cut tiny holes for windows and decorated the inside walls with magic markers. Our mural quickly degenerated into scatological hieroglyphics. My cousin spelled out every dirty word we could think of, while I drew anatomically incorrect naked ladies. We giggled ourselves silly. Later, my aunt discovered our debauchery and called my mother to accuse me of being a bad influence. I listened from the next room as I heard my mother say, "My son doesn't even know those words." Up until this moment my mom had convinced herself that she was successfully raising the only child in history that not only did not use cuss words, he didn't even know them. Never mind I could conjugate them backwards and forwards. My mother has always given me the benefit of the doubt, whether I deserved it or not. I'd be thrilled to find a card thanking her for that.

I may have been off the hook for the swear words, but not so the drawings. No one even had to ask who did them. I got grounded, but not long after that my mom got me private art lessons. Partly it was to keep me out of trouble, but also she had been paying attention to my constant art making and thought it might be something worth formally encouraging. When I look back at those drawings they seem completely unremarkable, with the possible exception of my dinosaurs. They were tight. Regardless of what my mom's motivation was, knowingly or not, she set me on the path I'm still on today. But try as I may, I can't find a card that thanks her for taking my dinosaur drawings seriously.

At a certain point I stopped letting my mother kiss me in public. After that I began dodging her good-night kisses. The moisture on her lips would make a little cold spot on my cheek that I'd instantly wipe off. That was probably hurtful to her, but I wouldn't have known. She persisted for a while, trying to win me back from my own impending adolescence, but I was pulling away, growing up - and apart. There were times when I would have gone back and reclaimed a few of those unwanted kisses, but the road to adulthood allows no u-turns. If I chose to be sentimental about it, I'd look for a card that let my mom know her affection wasn't lost on me. Not even in those surly teen years.

 Mom, actual size.

These days I only see my parents two or three times a year. With 2000 miles between us, that's the best we can manage. My mom always wears her orthopedic hiking shoes when she comes out here to Colorado. I fix her and dad up with some trekking poles, and they oblige me as I take them on the mildest trails I can find. We've been hiking together for years. It's what we do. On a recent trip I drove them up a remote jeep trail to have a picnic on a mountain pass high above Crested Butte, Colorado. It was a blustery summer day and the sun beat down on us through the thin atmosphere at 11,000' elevation. We spread our picnic on the hood of the car and washed down turkey sandwiches with Gatorade. Far below us the valley sloped into a glacial bowl filled with summer's fading wildflowers. The first hint of storm clouds were lazily assembling on the horizon. Above us towered Cinnamon Mountain. I knew my folks would never have chosen that place for a picnic, and that my mother was way outside her comfort zone, what with the 4-wheeling, lack of guard rails, and no restrooms. They indulged me, because as mid-westerners, my family is easily smitten with the severe beauty of Colorado, but also because they are learning to trust me to deliver them safely to and fro in the wilderness – which is something.  If I could find a card that said Dear Mom, Thanks For 4-Wheeling With Me, I'd feel like I was getting somewhere.

It's foolish to think something from a card rack could tell my stories for me, or could be grateful in ways that really mattered. No card does that. Flowers don't do it either, though they are an excellent place to start. There are many other ways to be thankful, and I'm just beginning to explore them.

Happy Mother's Day.

For Jeanine Howell

Lifting the Lid

 Double Rainbow Plans Acrylic and ink on canvas, 46" x 46", 2013

This is a different sort of blog post for me. I've never really been interested in talking about "process" where it concerns my own artwork, mostly because I'm just a painter, and there's no real mystery to what I do. I'm not interacting with mold cultures or programming micro-controllers in the name of art. There's nothing "performative" or interactive about what I do. I sit in front of an easel and slowly render things.

But like most folks, I'm fascinated with the details of other artist's creative practices. There are some artists I'd love to hang out with and watch while they work. It would probably be pretty boring, not to mention totally creepy and distracting for the artist, but I would jump at the chance to see how they get from A to B. In the big picture, an artist's sources of inspiration, his or her work-flow habits, whether or not they're a drinker, and who they sleep with aren't supposed to matter. Art is supposed to be able to "stand on its own" without leaning on a bunch of stories. But I can't help suspect that art never, ever does stand on its own. Not entirely. Social context and the artist's personal history always inform the work. It's one thing to know Mark Rothko intended his paintings to be "spiritual," it's another to know he was a depressed suicidal alcoholic who sought transcendence through his creative practice. Each painting he completed was a milestone on a desperate journey of self-redemption. We might look back now and decide he was tragic, but at the height of his fame, Rothko painted like his life depended on it - like each painting would keep him in the world a little longer.

These sorts of stories aren't just told to keep kids awake in art survey classes. They help give us access to an artist's psyche, and to place them in a meaningful historic context. It is impossible to know these tales and not be influenced by them. We are, after all, story-telling creatures.

So without further delay, I've decided to lift the lid on my own process. Not because I think there is anything novel about it, but because its ordinariness allows uncomplicated access to the ideas behind the work. 

 

Double Rainbow

Recently, I ran across this double rainbow diagram while perusing images in an old science textbook. I am drawn to these kinds of diagrams because they are attempts to describe complex principles in highly abstract manner meant for ease of instruction. But I also like them for their metaphorical potential when the viewing context is deliberately shifted. I kept returning to this image from time to time to see if I could build a painting around it. Rather than looking like a description of how double rainbows actually work, it began to look like a plan for how to make one, if such a thing were possible. The title Double Rainbow Plans popped into my mind, and almost immediately I wondered what sort of person would be making plans for a double rainbow. A child, probably. Someone beginning to imagine the life ahead. Someone maybe on the doorstep of puberty. Someone with a lot of belief, and more than a little uncertainty.

Around this same time I began exploring the idea of doing "double-portraits." These show two views of the same person interacting with him/herself. It was a rather literal way of picturing the self split along the lines of belief/doubt, action/inaction, confidence/fear, and so on. I began looking at my friend's children as possible models. Preferably the parents would be creative types, so there wouldn't need to be a whole lot of cajoling and explaining. When you're asking to photograph someone's children, there's a whole Pandora's box of concerns that could spring open. Fore sure it needed to be done by a professional photographer in a real studio, not in my basement studio; and with a parent present and involved. It was going to cost money.

Pretty quickly I thought of an artist friend I have, Jennifer Jeannelle, and remembered that her kids were not only the right age, and the right sort of "look" I was going for, but having an artist for a mom, they were used to being roped into wacky creative endeavors. I had even seen them doing performance art. I didn't know Jennifer that well, so when I reached out to her it was with great faith that this would make sense to her. I described the double rainbow and the double portrait over the phone without showing her anything. Immediately she began offering great suggestions on wardrobe. She also sold the idea to her kids, Sophie and Eric, so I knew this was going to work. The photographer Anthony Camera was available to do the shoot, and the kids had the following week off for spring break. Perfect.

For the main image, I wanted Sophie to be holding hands with herself. This would involve some Photoshopping, but with Eric's "stand-in" hand to hold, I knew I could get what I wanted. What I hadn't counted on was the sibling's lack of enthusiasm for holding hands with each other. After some coaxing, they settled into their roles, with instructions to keep their hands in exactly the same spot so each of the shots would more or less line up when they switched chairs. The images above show Eric leaning comically away from his sister. Though he wasn't thrilled about holding her hand, he is leaning because we needed him to keep his shadow off of her.

Sophie was directed to have two distinct attitudes in the shot. On the left, she stares straight ahead into the camera, with a look of confidence and the tiniest hint of a smile. This version of herself was to be capable and in-charge. Her other "self" was to lean slightly away, with a look of uncertainty. Both kids took this assignment seriously and gave me exactly what I was looking for, with almost no effort.

After staring at these shots for a couple of days, I decided I liked the effect of the gray sweep we shot the kids against. I had intended to replace it with something else, but the gray began to grow on me.  It just needed some sort of graphic element in the background to activate the space.  I also decided that I didn't like the theater seats in the shot and began looking on Google for something more dramatic. I found a French settee that was shot at a workable angle and had an interesting look. By changing the color from burnt orange to lime green it achieved a pleasant ridiculousness that contrasted nicely with the seriousness of French furniture. The scroll fragments in the background were "stock" illustrations left over from a graphic design job that I licensed them for, but never used.   They went well with the settee, and helped frame the central figures in a way I liked.

At this point I should say that most artists pursue a certain "look" that strikes the right balance between what is expected of them, and what allows for a satisfying deviation from that same expectation. Call it a "style," or if that's too crass, think of it as artistic parameters. Either way, an artist often does a given thing simply because it is the kind of thing they've decided they do. This is part of what gives a body of work coherence. I chose the graphic scrolls in the background because I've been using flat graphics like that for quite some time, and because lately I've shifted toward combining imagery that is contradictory in terms of historical period, allowing me no fixed reference point in time.

After a week of planning, shooting and Photoshopping, it was finally time to make a painting. Along the way I'd decided that this painting needed real presence. I wanted to make it life-size, but it would have been about 6' square. I settled on 46" square, which corresponds to the largest size I can fit in my car.

I've always been up-front about my use of a video projector to rough-in the outlines of my imagery on a blank canvas. I want the proportions to be right, especially with the human figure, and I simply don't have the time, skill, or interest to render everything freehand. I adore the people who can do that, but I'm not one of them. That said, I only trace the outside shape of things. There's simply no point in getting too granular with the tracing lines, because as soon as you begin applying paint you cover them up. One way or another, a painter has to know how to render something using paint. Hence, all the photos taped to my canvas for reference.

Usually, when I get near the completion of a painting I find need to put it away for a few days and go do something else, because by then it has completely taken over my brain and I can't even see it anymore. The hope is that when I return to it again I might actually be able to apprehend it with some degree of clarity. It's usually then when some detail pops out at me and I realized I've gotten a shadow wrong or made a leg too big. After a few rounds like this the work settles into its final form. If all goes well the work may begin to make me smile. Sometimes I really dig it and rush it onto Facebook. Days later I may decide it's not done.

Sometimes I can labor over a painting for weeks without knowing whether it's any good. When it isn't, I have no trouble marching it out to the garage. I've got literally dozens of canvases languishing out there, waiting to be reborn as entirely different paintings. But when it is good, and you move it out to your gallery, it's surprising how big a hole it can leave in your psyche. I'm usually lost for a few days when a painting I love leaves the studio. It stands to reason, given the dozens (sometimes hundreds) of hours I've spent conjuring the thing into being. I miss the people in my paintings. Sometimes I just miss the presence of the thing. Still it takes me by surprise when it's gone, and the only workable remedy is to get started on another one.