As a pop artist, I have created most of my art for the benefit of a certain facebook site, which has given me somewhat of a reputation as a Quaker pop artist. But basically, for the purposes of advertising a Cloud Quaker meeting once a week, I have taken a number of interesting pictures, let the "kandinsky" function of lunapic make them impressionist, and used them as advertising. Some people are mad at me for basically just stealing pictures I find on the web. To me, nobody really owns a view of a place, and the doctoring of it makes it legal, or so I believe, though I realize I'm walking onthe edge of copyright theft. I'm not making money off of them; that's probably my saving grace. They could sue me, but for what? Me and Andy Warhol, we just are interested in the image and people's reaction to it.

Now I have a new topic and I'm slowly warming up to it. That is, I want to market my books in about 80 sites, and really give Facebook marketing a try. To do this I'm heavily leaning on pop art. And the more I can make every site different, the better I can do. I'm not sure I have eighty separate images for any given book, but with e pluribus haiku I have almost that many, and so I find myself digging into the archives for old pop, bringing it up to the surface, and using it.

For example, in a recent campaign I was doing Do Unto, which has Barbie as a theme. I only had about ten images with Barbie but a few more were similar, and the cover images were good too. I tried to hit all eighty or so sites but in the end probably only got about sixty or seventy. Some people who are on multiple sites were surprised, I think, to find different pictures on different sites. I had one where Barbie was in the sand and it's in general best when someone has "done into" a barbie clearly. I had some Barbie pictures with no clear "do unto" idea and I ended up using them more sparingly. I only have eighty slots, might as well put the best pic possible in each one!

I cruise around the different sites, and if they let me, I drop my version fo the ad with a piece of pop art - no words on it, just a picture. These had a lot of deer bones along with the Barbies as if they'd been thrown in a pile with all the deer carcasses. My version of a twisted Georgia O'Keefe/Andy Warhol collage, and for those it's clear that someone has "done unto" both the dolls and the deer.

I am beginning to fall asleep, as I write this. The whole thing, making pop art, dropping it on FB, taking in the chats from marketers, on top of writing and door-dashing and other marketing, is wearing me out. I need to get more sleep. Warhol I'm sure would agree with me.

Pop resolutions

I'm actually a fairly prolific pop artist, though I don't talk about it much, as evidenced by the fact that this blog is somewhat sleepy asd poorly linked to most of my work. I'm most active on my Cloud Quakers site, but that's not the only place I post. I consider myself an impressionist, and a kandinskyist, since I almost exclusively use the kandinsky function on the lunapic app to create impressionist art for various sites and book covers.

I don't plan on changing any of this any time soon, though you never know when another app will come along that will make ordinary photos into impressionist masterpieces. One thing I like to remember is that it's the book covers that will survive, as most of the stuff I put on these blogs or facebook is really somewhat temporary and in any case not easy to find. What is the cover of the book, though, is in an entirely different arena. Those will still be looked at years from now, and will serve as a kind of record of my ability to get words on a piece of pop art and still have it do its job. Of my thirty books, almost all are pop works of some kind or the other, and three I'm itching to delete, I'm saving now for the pop alone. It's occurred to me to change the covers regularly and have a revolving door of covers such that all the books of a single series (e pluribus haiku) are spread out and quite random in terms of their pop covers. They are, as it is, a kind of record of my pop journey. But that is a kind of abuse of the zon's liberal policy of letting artists change their covers easily, which I don't want to upset really.

I've noticed lately an explosion of good artists, many of them impressionist, who have good Facebook pages and aggressive marketing strategies based on those pages. I don't really have a desire to do that, to move into an independent identity as pop art producer, but I still have this undeveloped side of me that yearns to be known as a pop artist. I no longer make calendars, but would like to do it again. These are all hazy bucket-list resolutions, but resolutions nevertheless.

1. Consider making a calendar again. Specifically, a Quaker Book Charity calendar.
2. A pop artist should have t-shirts.
3. Take a good hard look at all thirty book covers: these will go down as my legacy. Make them as good as possible. Some that need work are: CRTLI,HOTP, and AfB4 (these are acronyms, but you can guess or find them)
4. Explore other impressionist-making apps.

See you in a month or two, to see if I've made any progress!