~ The Beginning Of Something Wonderful ~

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~ Hello to you one and all! If you are reading this, that means that I am already in the future! I have on this very day, decided to put both of my feet firmly on the road that I am travelling on, and catch up with this millenium. As a life-long artist, my weakest point has always been verbal communication and self-representation, I believe.

Truthfully, on my bathroom mirror, written on masking tape strips are "Brush Hair", and "Brush Teeth", and "Pray". I don't think I'm even in my body half the time, even while it's getting me from point A to point B, and that's fine by me. But a few things happened to me last year. My first cell-phone (still amazed by the damnable thing, although I'm 20 years behind the masses and can't text and do ANYTHING at the same time) and my website. Suddenly, truly, as a self-employed artist, I am in business. I have no excuse to cut off my ear or drink myself to death with absinthe... as a modern-day artist, in theory anyway, I have more possibilities than I would have, say, a hundred years ago to make a living (however modest) doing what God put me here to do. I have no pretenses of being the greatest or even being special; I'm just me, this is what I've always done, it's what I'll always do. I have to live with that choice, and either make it work or fail and die. To me, it really is that simple, and I've been through enough in my life that I know what I have to do to in order to survive. Painting has been that for me and on every level of my existence, and I wouldn't have it any other way, truth be told.

I'm going to make a promise to myself (and if anyone else bothers to read this, I'm promising it to you too...) right now: This is not a Blah-blah-blah-blog, it is not a daily self-aggrandising literal masturbation session, it is not a "Oh you need to know this about me, everything, all the time" waste of both your time and mine. Although it is a bit of a journaling excercise for me, and I am an imperfect human being in an imperfect world, I am not about to subject anyone to what I just ate (Ramen noodles, AGAIN, I'm an artist, so that will just naturally come up over and over and over and...) or who I'm kissing (none of your business. Well, okay, I just gave Rico Suave a smooch) beyond what I just did now in jest.

If you want to hear my rantings, you'll have to catch those in person (far more interesting with the hand gestures anyway) and if you want to see my artwork, you can go to my website or any number of free online galleries I have joined; but this blog will be primarily focused on the few things that I do each day that may be of interest to other artists, my successes and failures in that regard, and miscellaneous tid-bits of information about my day-to-day life as an artist who works on art.

We are, all of us, in this day and age, living in the pupil of one thousand eyes so-to-speak. Soon there may never again be such a thing as privacy. There is nothing that we do that someone cannot be privy to, one way or another, and this is my way of acknowledging that fact and understanding that what someone else shares with me could quite possibly either save my life or threaten it. What I hope to share with you, in whatever small measure, I intend in my heart and soul, to dedicate towards the former, and not the latter. As a survivor of both 911 in New York City and Hurricane Katrina down in New Orleans, just to mention a couple of examples out of hundreds that I could possibly fascinate (or bore) you with, I do know one fact: we are all in this thing together...

So there it is! Don't expect too much from me, other than honesty, because like the bumper sticker says: "Don't follow me, I'm lost too!"

~Until we speak again...
~Yours In Honor,
~Hallah John Paul Boltik
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