Lots of little jobs yesterday, finalising the images and layout of the book. Here's one of the last images I created, taken in the daylight and manipulated:
The final stages seem to take forever and there's often an emotional lull as a project nears completion. What usually fills this vacuum is the excitement of future things and I'm already feeling inspired with new ideas. There's so much music itself I could do, or other book work, or paintings. One of the problems with art can be its freedom.
One other of yesterday's jobs was to modify my website to allow several products on sale per page. For example, each album or painting has an option to buy, but this project might have the normal jewel cased CD for sale, plus a plain CD without any packaging, plus the book with CD included, so that's three things. My paintings sometimes have separate prints, so there's already some functionality for more than one item per thing, but it's a bit clunky. A database that covers paintings, music, and books will always have some degrees of overlap. The key is to make it as neat and flexible as possible without making it too difficult to understand.
I made those changes yesterday, and also listed a few old CD albums for sale on there. I have one or two copies left of these old albums. I can't exactly remember selling any, but I seem to have got through them. I noticed that The End and The Beginning is selling for £25 or so on Discogs. This album was/is a limited print run of 20, like most of my pre-Love-Symphony releases, so these CD-R albums are rarities. The newer, commercially replicated, albums are better in quality. The earliest albums; The Arcangel Soundtrack, Synaesthesia, The Incredible Journey, The Spiral Staircase (2002), Animalia and Flatspace, had a single-sided A4 sheet as insert, so had only one and a half pages to its 'booklet'. After that, I printed the tray and 4-page booklet commercially but used a CD-R for the music: The Spiral Staircase (2008), Stupid Computer Music, The End And The Beginning, The Twelve Seasons, The Infinite Forest. Pi and Flatspace II have never had CD versions (like a few other albums to date, like Tree of Keys). After The Love Symphony, all of the albums are professionally replicated and printed. This year's Music of Poetic Objects is the first with an 8-page booklet and I'll probably use those from now on because, as I've always done, I want the best quality I can, and to include as much artistic content as possible.
I'm also organising the next ArtSwarm Live event, for September 28th. There have already been a few cancellations due to various factors. I hope that I can find the required 20 people to pay for the room, but if not this will be the last such event. So much has been learned from this, and the regular setting up of a big sound system, control of stage lighting, the skills of performing and of putting on a show; these are really useful.
A lot of this month is delivering or collecting art, as the summer exhibition season draws to a close. I really need some sort of regular place to show my paintings, something which, in 15 years of painting, I've rarely had; just 18 months or so with my work in a small Chester gallery called Silver Star. My paintings did well enough there. Today, collecting from the Stockport Open.
I'm eager to finish this book and music. I'm thinking of calling the result a 'folio album'. There needs to be some new name for it I think, rather than just 'book'. I've also made a start on my circus/clown poems.
Onward.
