Hugh MacLeod
Cartoons drawn on the back of business cards
I'm a cartoonist.
I sell limited-edition prints.
I wrote a book.
I'm CEO of Stormhoek USA, which markets South African wine in the States.
I also draw private commissions.
Prints |
Opening | Current |
|---|---|---|
Bluetrain |
$900 | |
We Need to Talk |
$650 | |
Portfolio #2 |
$300 | |
NY NY |
$275 |
April 23, 2009
[“Fred 44″. Click on image to enlarge etc.]
Last year I worked on a large, 18“x24” pencil & ink drawing called, “Fred 44″.
It was a study for what went on to become my largest painting to date, “DesertManhattan”.
My friend, Laura owns a really nice camera, so we decided to take another picture of it.
Voila! Hope you like…
March 23, 2009
[Click on images to enlarge etc.]
[YouTube video page is here.]
I started on DesertManahttan last September. I finally finished it earlier this evening, around midnight.
Yeah, it took a a long time to finish. Well, I was a busy fellow, after all, doing lots of other stuff.
I could have worked on it forever, however like the old art school adage goes, paintings are never finished; they are ended. It was time.
Thanks to everybody who followed me along on this project, encouraging me all the way. It’s been quite a journey. Rock on.
[Sign up to gapingvoid’s “Crazy, Deranged Fools” Newsletter…]
October 13, 2008
[Click on images to enlarge. Click to watch the video here.]
I started adding the acrylic last week. If you click on the top picture, you’ll see I’ve just start applying the India Ink, towards the top. That was yesterday. If you click on the link above, I made a little 2-minute phonecam video explaining everything in greater detail.
This thing is going to take forever to finish. I’m not worried, there’s no rush etc.
October 5, 2008
[Applying the pencil to DesertManhattan. Photos courtesy of Debora Smail, who was in town last week. Click on images to enlarge etc.]
Last week the photographer, Debora Smail was in town, working on a travel assignment for a magazine. We hung out a bit; first we cracked open a few beers at Harry’s Tinaja, then I took her her over to my studio and showed her DesertManhattan. Besides it being a lovely afternoon, full of interesting conversation, she took a lot of pictures. Here are some of them. Hope you like etc. Thanks, Debora!
September 29, 2008
[A rough idea of how I’m hoping “Desertmanhattan” will turn out, cannibalized from “Fred 44″. 4x8 feet, pencil, acrylic and ink on canvas. Click on image to enlarge etc.]
Over the last week, I’ve been dividing my time between finishing the book manuscript and getting started on Desertmanhattan.
My head is all over the place at the moment; I thought I should write down some of my thoughts, just to gain some clarity for myself:
1. I’ll be damn glad to have the book out of the way. It’s been a long, four-year road. I feel a combination of gloriously happy and elated, and utterly burned out from the whole thing.
2. While I was working on Desertmanhattan, the feeling that “This is what I ought to be doing; this what I was born to be doing,” kept swelling up inside me. And you know what? This totally terrified me. What if I gave up everything to do this, and suddenly nobody cared? Suddenly nobody wanted to buy my work, and I ended up penniless and ruined?
3. Paintings don’t scale. Even if I could sell the paintings for huge amounts of money [It seems a distinct possibility, after some of the back-channel conversations I’ve had with potential patrons of the enterprise], it would still mean working my butt off and making no more than an average, second-tier attorney. It doesn’t always seem to add up.
4. The artist doesn’t determine the price of the work. The re-sale value of a price determines the price of the work. If the perception exists that the work will be significantly more valuable in five or ten years, paintings are easy to sell. Without this perception, it’s damned hard to sell a painting, even if the potential customer falls in love with it.
5. An artist is about as good example of a “Global Microbrand” as you can get. I have a few artist friends out here in West Texas. On one hand, they totally get the idea. On the other hand, it’s an idea that seems to totally terrify them. It always struck me as funny how people want to be artists, yet they don’t want to be marketers. To me that’s like wanting to be a pro football player, yet not wanting to keep in shape. Nice work if you can get it.
6. “I don’t need a gallery; I have a blog.” I’ve been approached by a few gallery owners over the last couple of months about doing a show. So far the conversations have gone nowhere. So far I’ve yet to meet a gallery who can sell a painting better than my blog can. Gallerists talk a lot; they’re not quite so fond of putting down financial guarantees in writing.
7. The artist I admire the most, in terms of taking the internet-enabled “global microbrand” idea and running with it, is my good friend, John T. Unger. Four years of blogging later, and he can’t make his “Great Bowls of Fire” fast enough. Though a lot of the ideas he uses he first got from reading my blog, unlike me, he actually applied them and took them to the frickin’ sky. Well done, John.
We’ve been talking a lot over the last couple of months about this new art phase of mine. His advice has been invaluable.
8. Just as I was thinking about all this selling-art-online stuff, one of my Twitter followers, @corkymc turns me onto the blog of a very talented, young Australian artist, Hazel Dooney. Though she was already considered very successful for an artist under the age of 30, two years ago she decided to pack in the gallery system and just do her “dialogue” with her audience directly online. She’s got some strong views on the subject, which I approve of:
Inevitably, this leads to another question, also always the same: what’s the role of the gallery in this environment? And, as always, I argue that it doesn’t have one. Or as I put it in Art Is Moving: “It deserves to die. It’s an anachronism that’s outlived it’s usefulness. I think there is still a role for individual curators or even ‘show producers’ but they need to work in a more individualised, specialist way within a networked ‘virtual’ paradigm …”
To be more precise, I still see value in public exhibitions and installations but not produced, promoted or managed in the way they are today – the same way they have been for a hundred and fifty years – by dithering, technologically inept, socially aspirational and unadventurous commercial ‘bricks and mortar’ gallerists.
I’ll be watching what she has to say in the future with great interest, to be sure.
9. It took me a few years of blogging my cartoons, before I finally accepted the idea that my audience would always come mainly from reading my blog, and not from being published in the newspapers, magazines, books etc. Even though I have a book coming out in June, I still believe this is the case– just because I’m now an “author”, doesn’t mean the day-to-day reality has changed very much.
10. And now I’m realizing that if I want to sell paintings, I don’t need a gallery, I can just do it all online. Nor do I need critical approval from the art establishment– the media, the curators and the critics. I can just do it all myself, if that’s what I indeed do want. It’s a great feeling, sure, but it’s a new one. Taking its time to really sink in.
11. My paternal grandfather was a Scottish Highland “crofter”. He lived on a “croft” i.e. a very small holding of land, where he raised sheep and grew potatoes. I used to spend my summers there as a boy. We were very close.
Crofting is a good life, but not a very financially rewarding one. It’s very self-sufficient, though. The interesting thing for me looking back, is that crofters never did “just one thing”. Every day they had something else going on. One day it might be sheep. The next it might be a job working on the roads for the local council. I knew one crofter who drove the mail van. Another who ran the local post office. They would do their jobs, but after work they’d still have their sheep, cows and potatoes to attend to.
As my dad is fond of reminding me, I seem to have inherited the crofting mentality. I DON’T like waking up in the morning and doing the same thing every day. I LIKE having all these different balls in the air– cartooning, painting, consulting, writing, marketing, blogging etc. Sure, part of me would like nothing better than just “retiring to the desert and making paintings”, but another part of me likes all the running around in different directions. And all this running around DOES get tiring, I can tell you that. Sometimes I LOVE the feeling of being constantly overwhelmed. Other times I utterly despise it.
12. Something in me is changing. I came out to live in the West Texas desert for a reason. I’m just beginning to find out what that reason may be. Sometimes I can clearly see what the reason is; other times it proves more elusive.
13. It’s a good life. It really is.
September 27, 2008
[Click on image to enlarge etc.]
For the last couple of months, I’ve been talking about a return to large-format paintings.
Originally I was planning 6-by-6-foot canvases; I decided instead to opt for 4’x8’.
I finally have my studio set up, as pictured above. It’s an outdoor studio, with cement floor, tin roof, and as shown here, canvas walls to keep the rain and dust out.
That’s a 4x8’ wooden board you see there, with two-by-fours framing it on the backside. I’m going to cover it with canvas and get painting on it, hopefully in the next couple of days, before I take off out of town on business at the end of the week.
In the foreground you see my acrylic painting materials– plus a ten-foot roll of canvas in the orange plastic bag.
[A rough idea of how I’m hoping it’ll turn out, cannibalized from a photo of “Fred 44″. Click on image to enlarge etc.]
It’s going to be called “Desertmanhattan”. “Fred 44″ was a ink-on-paper study for it, so go here if you want to get an idea of what the final work will end up looking like.
It’s called “Desertmanhattan”, simply because I’m trying to create a piece that captures the vibe I get from both living out in the middle of nowhere, here in the West Texas desert, and the big-city vibe I get when I’m on my business travels. The desert is an extreme place; so is Manhattan; they both inform the work I’m doing now. My drawing style was formalized whilst I was living in Manhattan, so the title makes compete sense to me.
Yes, I intend to sell it when it’s done. Yes, it’ll be really expensive [I’m putting out feelers to potential buyers. If you’re possibly thinking about becoming one of them, please feel free to drop me an email at desertmanhattan@gmail.com, and we’ll start a conversation, Thanks.] .
If it goes well, I’m not going to suddenly quit everything else and start cranking out Desertmanhattan’s like an assembly line. I don’t foresee ever doing more than 4 – 6 of these pieces a year. I don’t foresee spending more than one week per month on them, either. I’ve got plenty other projects keeping me busy; plus it looks like the amount of traveling I’ll be doing in the next year is going to increase quite a bit.
As for the marketing, well, of course I’ll be using this blog and my Twitter feed to do the heavy lifting. Though my target market is not set in stone, I have a feeling the buyers for the large pieces will come out the prosperous end of the tech/VC/Silicon Valley/Web 2.0 community. They know me, they know my work, they know my value. Besides, the New York financial guys [a favorite target of the traditional art galleries] all seem to be losing their jobs at the moment.
And of course, “The Tao of Undersupply” will be seriously informing the marketing:
The biggest problem in the Western world is oversupply.
For every mid-level managing job opening up, there’s scores of people willing and able. For every company needing to hire an ad agency or design firm, there’s dozens out there, willing and able. For every person wanting to buy a new car, there’s tons of car makers and dealers out there. I could go on and on.
I could also go on about how many good people I know are caught in oversupplied markets, and how every day they wake up, feeling chilled to the bone with dread and unease. Advertising and media folk are classic examples.
So maybe the thing is to is get into “The Tao of Undersupply”.
If only 100 people want to buy your widgets, then just make 90 widgets. If only 1000, make 900. If only 10 million, make 9 million. It isn’t rocket science, but it takes discipline.
It also requires you to stop making the same stuff as other people. Doing that requires originality and invention.
Like it said in “How To Be Creative”, don’t try to stand out from the crowd, avoid crowds altogether. Again, it isn’t rocket science.
In other words, it’s better to under-supply the market, than to over-supply it.
“Desert” represents one side of me. “Manhattan” represents the other. We’ll see where this goes. Rock on.
[UPDATE] 24 hours later:
[Me applying to undercoat onto the stretched canvas. Click on image to enlarge etc.]
[UPDATE] 36 hours later:
[Four undercoats of gesso and acrylic applied, then I get busy with the pencil on the canvas. Easy. Click on image to enlarge etc.]
[Close-up. Note how the pencil shows up the texture of the canvas. Click on image to enlarge etc.]
July 10, 2008
[“Birth And Death”. 2008. Pencil on paper. Approx 22x30 inches. Click on image to enlarge etc.]
I just whipped out this drawing earlier this evening. It took me about as long as it takes me to draw one of my typical “back of business cards” format. Just this time I’m using [A] a much larger piece of paper and [B] a very large carpenter’s pencil. Living out in the desert has made want to loosen up a bit. We’ll see where this goes etc.
It’s artistic merit [or lack thereof] notwithstanding, I really like the sentiment, “Birth and Death will save the world”. Rock on.
June 15, 2008
[Close-up on Fed 45. Approx 1.5x1.5 inches square. Click on image to enlarge etc.]
[UPDATE: You can follow my goings on at Supernova over on my Twitter page. Also, they have their own Twitter page here.]
Blogging this from a neat cafe here in San Francisco. Heading over to Supernova in a little while, where I’ll be speaking on a panel Wednesday morning.
It’s great being back in town; it’s amazing how many friends I have in San Francisco, even if I’ve spent less than a total two weeks in my entire life here.
But I feel the same way here as I did in New York last week– the Big City doesn’t do much for me any more. It did once, then one day the feeling vanished. I can’t wait to get back to Alpine and crank out some more big drawings.
That being said, this regular traveling stuff is important for me. I think I’d go nuts if all I did was hang out in West Texas. Variety is the spice of life etc.
Besides the cartooning, I’ve got a couple of interesting project stewing in the background. Waiting for a few more planets to line up before going public with them. It’s all good. I’ll let you know how I get on. Cheers.
June 14, 2008
“The Puck”. Pencil on paper, approx. 16 x 21 inches.
“Aim for where the puck is headed, not for where it is”, is a line that my friend, Fred Wilson once quoted to me. It’s his personal mantra for the Venture Capital business. Not hard to see why; it’s a superb thought.
[UPDATE:] Some commenters below kindly tell me that this is a paraphrase of something originally said by the hockey great, Wayne Gretzky. Rock on.
June 13, 2008
[Click on image to enlarge etc.]
Well, “Fred 45″ is coming along, slowly. Approx 15 x 21 inches, ink & pencil on paper. Last time I blogged it, it was just a pencil grid.
All this traveling I’ve been doing recently has KILLED my productivity, at least in this department… I’m looking forward to a long, quiet winter, to say the least.
June 1, 2008
[Click on image to enlarge etc.]
Started on “Fred 45″ this afternoon. So far it’s just a pencil grid on paper, approx 15 x 21 inches.
I have a pretty neat idea where this is headed. Watch this space.
[Fred 44. 18 x 24 inches. Ink & pencil on paper. Click on image to enlarge etc.]
Got in early this morning and put the final touches onto Fred 44.
OK. So now it’s done. Over. Basta. Finito.
I feel good about it. Rock on.
May 31, 2008
[Click on image to enlarge etc.]
I’m generally happy with how “Fred 44″ is coming along. It feels like it’s about 75% done, though one never knows. Like an artist friend once told me, “A painting is never finished; it is ended.”
Right now I seem to be drawing a lot. Kinda feeling guilty because there’s a lot of other stuff going on, all to do with Social Objects and The Blue Monster.
People ask me a lot if I ever get bored/lonely/crazy out here in West Texas. To me it’s a funny question– I simply don’t have time to feel any of that. There’s far too much going on…
[Just so you know etc. Click on image to enlarge etc etc.]
[“Moleskine 42″ in a nice wooden frame. Click on image to enlarge etc.]
On May 4th I blogged about “Moleskine 42″:
[Overview: Click on image to enlarge etc.]
[Close-up view]
“Moleskine 42″. A wee sketch I did over the weekend in my Moleskine notebook. Approx 5x7 inches.
It was a single drawing in a brand new Moleskine notebook. Which as you will see from the photo above, I went out and got mounted and framed.
This will look good on somebody’s wall. Yes, it is for sale. We’re talking in the $700 range.
[UPDATE:] Somebody made me an offer for the piece, and I accepted it. Rock on.
May 4, 2008
[Overview: Click on image to enlarge etc.]
[Close-up view]
“Moleskine 42″. A wee sketch I did over the weekend in my Moleskine notebook. Approx 5x7 inches.