Work in Progress
Oil
Summer 2011

I've been working on this for about a month now.

Yesterday, Scott Leisk, the director of "Mahogany Sunrise" asked me to take pictures of the crew in action.  A task I would find daunting to achieve while attending to various other Production Assistant duties.  But I seized my opportunity and used the video in my pocket camera to photograph the action.

Now, if only I can get YouTube's AudioSwap to work so I can pump in some music.  I keep trying but it's still quiet.

I painted "Rapture in Blue" at the end of 2010.  I was feeling rather good about myself having learned a great deal in my tv/film classes.  I was also feeling rather strongly spiritual and connected to God.  I wasn't really "thinking" when I painted it.  I was "feeling".

"I Am Ninja" was an exercise in simplicity.  Sky, earth, action.  I was in very good spirits when I painted that blood sky with hints of sunset.  The addition of the ninja rushing over the land was inspired and I made the weapon questionably a gun in one hand or a blade in the other.  A ninja plays tricks on the eyes.

I was just about to start classes in January and had time on my hands to paint on one of the other large pieces of canvas I had remaining.  I decided to try my hand at a scene from space.  Space may be black, but a black painting is not something anyone wants on a wall.  I can't tell you how many different ways I tried to paint stars.  Too many and you ended up with a speckled nightmare.  Paint them too big and it became gaudy and unattractive.  Eventually, I just let it become as colorful as possible until somehow the StarShip Enterprise showed up and I was like, "

What we achieve in this world may be ephemeral.
It may gleam like gold or blow like dust in the wind.
It matters only that we work towards something.
It only matters that our sparks illuminate the dark.
Let there be light!  ~  Will Spears

I've spent my day writing descriptions of my art work and it's fascinating to see in retrospect how much emotion went into each piece.

I guess art is for me what Prozac is for others.  I just don't like the idea of taking a bunch of chemicals to deal with emotions.  Emotions are a by-product of circumstances, and circumstances cannot change without evaluation and art allows for such evaluation.

Perhaps I'm too much of an Aquarius to live inside a non-changing construct that requires emotional suppressants.  Yay for ART!!

I still have many more pieces to describe, but I think it's time to take a break, lest I break my drive.  Not my hard drive, but my impulse drive, and not a federation starship impulse drive either, but the drive to do.  I think you g

About a month after I painted "The Blue Hand of Creation" I was surfing the Internet reading Mayan Astrology.   I found a site http://www.astrodreamadvisor.com/free_mayan_readings.html that described my conscious self as follows:

"Blue Hand is a gateway, an opening, a portal from one understanding to another. A clue to the meaning of Blue Hand is found in the meditation, "I am, by thinly veiled design, the threshold to other dimensions. In my ending is my beginning. The initatory gateway awaits." 

I remember sitting there reading this thinking to myself, "Where have I seen this blue hand?"  And then I walked into the living room and looked on the wall.  Needless to say, I was shocked that I had somehow painted what the Mayans considered to be my conscious self.

Nonetheless, I understood that my place in this world was to express that creativity from within.  That to suppress it was to kill myself slowly.  I understood that my mind is a vortex of worlds from which I can express art and wisdom and tell stories and that I just have to reach out my hand to grasp this creative power.

In 2005, I was going through some extraordinarily difficult times in Connecticut.  I will not delve into the complexity of those issues, but suffice it to say, I was filled with a deep abiding rage and sadness following the dissolution of a great romance and doing everything I could to buffer myself against those feelings.

Art was part of how I coped with that world.  I worked on graphic designs and paintings and writing almost everyday.  I am ashamed to say that I lost almost two years of graphic art and writing in a cataclysmic computer virus accident that destroyed my computer shortly after Christmas 2004.  Needless to say, I was quite distraught after that accident

"Cloak of Serenity" was a self-portrait representing my coping mechanism.  Everyday I would get up and meditate myself into a state of appearing calm and serene.  I believed that if I could not allow the pain to touch me that I would get over it, that time would allow me to heal all wounds.  I believed the world was full of people that wanted nothing but to cause other people misery and I refused to be their victim.  No matter what anyone did, I would stand tall and allow it to wash over me without a flicker of emotion.

I would wear serenity like a cloak though a dagger stabbed me in the heart with every step and my soul bled on the inside.

Competing with the world to have ones voice heard is difficult enough without having to compete for the title of one's blog.

First, I discover that there are umpteen gazillion other guys in the world named Will Spears.  So, I didn't really have a choice in that.  Thanks to my parents, I am a William Spears.  I don't prefer to be called William.  I despise the name Bill.  My ears cringe at the sound of Billy or Willy and I'm not even going to touch Liam.  And since I like the definition of Will, of the William variants available to me, I have for many years gone by that selection.

Enter the world wide web.  Ah, a host of Will Spearses clog the webwaves with their not-me-ness.  What's a guy to do.  Come up with a clever title for his blog like Musings of a Maverick, until we do a search and discover that lots of people use that phrase and there's even a band called Maverick Muse.  Honestly!

So, I could consider going with my XBox Gamer tag PrinceSkyGod, but the ego name we choose for destroying aliens does not work so well when trying to portray oneself as a professional in any industry.

So, what's a guy to do?  Give in to mediocrity?  Well, I refuse to give up the "Musings" portion of the title because that outlines what it is that I do.  And I refuse to give up the Will Spears aspect of my name because that's my name.

So, I am renaming the title of my website to "Musings of the Artist Mage ~ Will Spears."  I have searched google and there are a few people who use the phrase "Musings of an artist" and some who use "musings of a mage" or "musings of a mad mage" but none who use "Musings of an Artist Mage" and that is what I truly am.

Therefore, let it be known and proclaimed that I, Will Spears nee William Joseph Howard Spears am THE ARTIST MAGE.  I even took the precaution of creating a yahoo email account and a twitter account with that name.

Twitter:  theartistmage
Yahoo:  [email protected]

I still plan to continue using my RocksCatness twitter account.
But I've been meaning to get a new email address anyway to cut down on the noise that I have to weed through in my other email account.

Yay!!!  It has been done.