A life online

This leads on for my previous post about Instagram. Now, I can do only one operation per day before I am blocked for another 24 hours. I can't even join an artist who has "liked" me before getting the dreaded message about protecting the community. So today, I put up my 5 new pictures of Cadaqués and Port Lligat which I painted at the request of Josep at Ad Mundi, the gift shop in Girona Train Station. Of course, the shop is closed and I will have little opportunity to sell my cards for quite some time. And, being my first action today, the pictures have "stuck". One artist commented on my profile that the same thing happened to her when she joined and she said just to be patient. I can see that what I did was slightly different from the majority of people who join Instagram.

Well I am in no great hurry. I wanted to put some of my existing photos on Instagram, which I have now done, but my main objective was to paint with the theme of the coronavirus, so I will let the annoying algorithm at Instagram calm down a bit. It obviously thinks I am a robot of some kind. Obviously it is not a very smart algorithm because it is obvious that I am a genuine artist. But I guess they get thousands of bogus entries every day on account of it being so huge. I did write a note to them but what hope of a human actually reading it?

So where are my ideas going? As I said before, I want to paint positive images, to show the coronavirus being defeated. I have lots of ideas but one idea came to mind as I was doodling with images of weird machines producing an antidote. I have two books of pictures by two famous artists of the 20th Century, Rowland Emett and Heath Robinson. I actually joined the Rowland Emett Society in the UK a couple of years ago. I have, "The Early Morning Milk Train" by Emett and "Wonderful Contraptions and Extraordinary Inventions" by Heath Robinson, both of which I bought on Amazon. Of course, Emett went on to build many of his machines, and the trains which carried people around The Festival of Britain in 1951 were his designs.

So, one of my ideas is to paint wonderful machines to defeat the virus. But I have many other ideas. I joined Pinterst too.

My life is online now! I actually feel calmer these days. Maybe social interaction is stressful for me, I often thought so. Staying for an extra beer at the bar, and then not sleeping well. Meeting people and talking is actually an effort for me. It is enjoyable most of the the time but it doesn't come naturally. To create words, even in my own language, requires an effort of concentration and I am sure it is not like that for everyone.


As a reminder, my account at Instagram is http://www.instagram.com/steve.meza.es
 
My online name normally is steve.meza but that was already taken on Instagram, so I added the .es!