Chris Simonite's Cubo-Weirdism Blog! A Blog about Chris Simonite's Art by Chris Simonite. Who the Hell else?

Today is the second anniversary of this here Cubo-Weirdist blog here. As I wrote on the first anniversary back in the Covid days (which are over, right? one can dream!), I'm pretty proud of myself for keeping it going. I know I'm re-hashing here, but it often does seem kinda narcissistic to be doing this, let alone spending most of my time creating my own art and screaming into the social media void: "look at my art! You can even buy my art!". I do often think I could be doing something useful for society like–I dunno–helping people? Or animals? Something not so "me" centered?

I know a lot of people start blogs and abandon them after a few weeks or months, so I think it is a bit of an achievement to have kept it going this long. I have to admit that I've had ideas for blogs that never happened, such as the Stupidist Blog that would have been musings related to the Stupidist Manifesto. I even had the idea of doing the Stupidist Podcast, but I've never followed through because everyone has a podcast. Including tonnes of celebrities who I suspect are taking audiences away from non-celeb podcasters. Plus I suppose doing one would take time away from painting. But then again, I make a lot of paintings, so maybe I need to spend more time doing something else?

This goes back to marketing which I talked about last week. I've been talking to friends about it and one of them has suggested I start doing something regularly on YouTube. YouTube is interesting, because it seems to be one of the few established formats whose algorithm allows start-up channels to do fairly well. So I have to admit if I had the right idea I might go head first into it. Last week I watched a video on YouTube of an artist commenting on a Vox video about white paintings in contemporary art, and I kinda wanted to chime in on it. That made me think maybe I should do my own videos talking about the weird and (sometimes) wonderful world of Contemporary Art.

It's interesting to speculate on what I could possibly do, but I feel like I would need a solid plan. I mean, I do have some ideas. For example I could talk about my views on Mark Rothko. I won't get into too much detail here, but back when I was in art school, one of my profs was talking about how Rothko is universally considered a great painter and wondered if anyone disagreed. Now I have to say I'm agnostic about whether Rothko was great or not, but I regretted not raising my hand to bring up the possibility that his greatness might be exaggerated. I often think about what I would have said and I suppose that could make an interesting video. And I have lots of opinions related to contemporary art, so maybe should try it? Or would it make more sense to do that on TikTok? I'm thinking YouTube, but if you have an opinion on that, let me know!

Pablo Picasso, 9" x 12", oil on canvas, 2022.

Another artist I could talk about if I were to go ahead with this idea, is good ol' Picasso! I could talk about the controversy, including Hannah Gadsby's take on Picasso and it would be an excuse to bring my own work into the conversation. Like this painting of Pablo I did last week. And you could watch as I struggle to defend myself for being influenced so heavily by the great misogynist himself. And I could also ask this question: why are there so many photos and so much film of Picasso in his underwear with no shirt on? That's why I painted him this way. See you next week!