What's Your Deal?

Our advice for aspiring musicians and artists: 1) Trust your instincts and find a project where you can put some of that trust in the people you play with. It’s like magic. 2) Hold yourself and your collaborators to the “Don’t be a Dick” Golden Rule. 3) Surround yourself with kind people who inspire you.

Sean: “I really love ambient and post-classical music, and I listen to a ton of A Winged Victory for the Sullen, Stars of the Lid and things like that. I was able to see synth pioneer Suzanne Ciani a few months ago and it was mindblowing.”

Trial and error is important. Re-contextualizing pieces of pictures into alternate realities can be a struggle. Scraps are, on some level, always scraps. I integrate them into the painting, yet something remains of their past lives. They speak of other pictures than mine.

Let yourself be weird. In the beginning I would censor my work that I thought other people might not get. They might not appreciate the humor of it or whatever. Now, those are my best-sellers.

Try to find something real and honest within yourself and share that. Don’t be what you think people want you to be. Be prepared and rehearsed but don’t use the pre-packaged obvious stage antics. That shit is tired.

Wildewood has a show coming up this Saturday at the Outpost Performance Space with Merlettes, so we wanted to ask them: What’s your deal?

Mark Beck is an American painter whose work draws from the landscapes of this country and echoes in the tradition established by the great nineteenth century Hudson River School. I sat down with Mark to talk about painting and the changing economics of being a painter in America.

“I took it seriously and went to study film production. Now I am here, doing what I went to school for, and trying to get our films out there.”

“We’ve all been in bands that have failed, and this one might fail, but we all just kept playing.”

I guess you’d call my “act” a one-man-band type of deal but I hate that description. I’m just using all I’ve got. Why not use my legs while playing guitar?

The inimitable Simon Joyner is set to serenade Albuquerque on May 11 at the Downtown Contemporary Gallery.

Berlin-based headshot photographer Chris Marxen recalls the educational awfulness of being the official amusement park photographer.

Painter Laila Cola Weeks recalls the first time she used a marker (it was blue). Her show opens Dec. 12 at the Kimo Art Gallery in Albuquerque.

“Cartooning is a much better fit for my nature; I never liked having static work in one place where hardly anybody saw it.”

YOU met while working as seamen on a Transcontinental Shipping Company liner and learned how to play instruments by watching MTV News.

Vík Prjónsdóttir is an Iceland-based group of knitting designers and creative brand that designs and makes products from Icelandic sheep wool.