What I Want To Be When I Grow Up

It has happened much sooner than expected. I'm getting a cheap-ass room in my beloved, most beautiful, inspiring and craic-filled Galway city and I AM MOVING BACK.

YES.

Beautiful, beautiful Galway. Graveyard of ambition and spiritual birthplace of the craic.

Well, I'm unofficially a Galwegian again. That is to say, I will still be working for Dr Gomez MRCPsych. That means that I'll be doing a Magellanic commute every week. Why am I moving somewhere where I not only do I not have a job, but that's four hours away from actual and current job, you ask? Am I completely insane? Galway is awesome. It has awesome people and awesome places and awesome activities. And, well, despite all my intentions to solidly be there and help out the familia in their time of need, unfortunately my continual presence in the house has added somewhat to the mania. Mammy Gomez has counteracted the “mammy guilt”. It's a common stress disorder that is caused by children going home after college and living there for over 6 months, whilst appearing to be doing nothing with their lives. Reading the Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole will give a good insight into the typical mammy figure versus the typical child instigator of said disorder. Although I do like to think that I'm slightly more helpful than Ignatius Reilly. And yes of course it was reported upon in The Psychiatrist only last month.

Being a psychiatrict journal, it has imaginative covers only rivaled by those of the NewScientist magazine.

The only known cure for this disorder is to move out and report back to mother with tales of promotions and financial stability. This cure doesn't seem to include the successes of blogging, working on my novel/screenplay and building myself up to make digital art that she cannot see. Alas. So I will quasi-move out but keep coming back up to Donegal to work every week, because Dr Gomez's appointment book and filing system would miss me terribly. And I have built up the most charming rapport with the solictors.

Solicitors to psychiatrists has the same effect of wooden crosses to vampires

With this dramatic change in geography and reemerging with civilization, I finally can get into the meat of this blog's purpose: alongside tracking my own personal journey in Returning to Art, I get to begin the research and the reporting of Art Careers in Ireland.

So, yeh, this is the stuff I love. I live it, I breathe it, I can't get enough of it. I love seeing artists get work. "Artists" ranges from plain old art-artists who do twee Irish landscapes to hip young graphic designers to actors and comedians to singer-songwriters to conceptual designers to lighting designers...ooh I love them all. I just fucking love all of them. I love to see artists just be able to do what they love whenever they want, whether they can make a job out of their vocation (not always possible, not always suitable for some personality types) or by getting some kind of part-time job arrangement to make their private art-studio escapes after work possible (and this can be detrimental to others). And when all this happens to an artist in a recession...in a PIIGS country like Ireland...well, I could just die and go to heaven.

And the latter category is what I want to eventually achieve in Galway. Or anywhere, really. But it would be so incredible to have it happen in this city.

This is what I wanna do for The Rest Of My Life:

1. be a jack-of-all-trades artist, specialising in comicbooks, illustrations, cartoons, and graphic design.

I want to be that person who sees my friend's novel or comicbook dialogue sheets or hears about their general artsy idea and goes “YES YES that is fucking incredible, let me do the illustrations/web design. OR let me hook you up with someone who can do your idea total justice. This idea MUST SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY.” Which leads me to my next inter-linking passion...

2. be an Art Consultant/Art Agent

I want to link artists with the people who want them and need them. I find this to be super fascinating because art agency and art consultation as industries in Ireland seem terribly hidden, clandestine, “who you know” and practically invisible to an outsider. This observation is of course based on a lot of google-searching. And VAI newsletter combing. Ireland as an economy isn't nearly as populous or teritary-in-nature enough to allow for such a profession to exist autonomously, like it can in the likes of London, Paris, New York or Berlin. We're just too small and...poor. And there aren't enough players in the art market to connect. Well, actually no, there aren't enough artists and art-demanders who are connect-able, if you catch my drift. They're there...somewhere. I truly believe that there are definitely enough good artists and enough demand for their skills to just about achieve an equilibrium for the art/design market in Ireland. I know it and I can feel it. They just need more ways of finding each other. And then they can make beautiful business together (yes this is a collosally big subject and I will expand on it later).

I couldn't find a cheesy picture of lots of artists shaking hands with businessmen, but I found this book and it looks really cool.

I'm looking forward to figuring out how to eventually do both of these jobs in my favourite city in the world. I'm looking forward to the research I'll have to do to get a firm grasp on the art market in Galway and in Ireland (in whatever strange form it exists in). Time to whip out those economics class notes, those management notes might be actually useful too...accounting notes will definitely useful.

My plate continues to pile up here, but I'm also looking forward to starting a super-comprehensive minimum-wage, part-time job search in Galway to keep me just above the bread-line (Dr Gomez's salary isn't near enough to cover our expenses). That in itself will be super important when it comes to getting a good on-the-floor feel for the Galwegian micro-economy and the permeabiltiy of it's levels of industry (from foundation(?) service industry to elitist culture industry, oh ho).

Oi. It's going to be a busy few months.