idgonemad.net/about/vanity
_about/vanity
define : the quality of being vain; the state of being vain; conceited; pride in appearance or accomplishments
describe : a page about me to offer visitors information to help them get a better idea of who I am, what I'm doing, some of what I've done, and a few pictures
I am : George Arthur Dodge IV
Favorite Audio : KMFDM, The Afghan Whigs, Dead Kennedys, Grandaddy, Mindless Self Indulgence, Misfits, Spahn Ranch, Gary Numan, Interpol, Black Flag, Kidney Thieves, Voltaire, My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, Yo La Tengo, Christian Death, TV on the Radio, Elvis Costello, X-Ray Spex, Nine Inch Nails, Tom Waits, Prince, Soft Cell, Apocalyptica, PIG, Pixies, World/Inferno Friendship Society, Rammstein, David Bowie,Ministry, Bella Morte, Bauhaus, Fugazi, Lords of Acid, Crass, the Clash, Sex Pistols, New Pornographers, Quincy Punx, Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Favorite Diversions : Ultima: Quest of the Avatar (NES), TimeSplitters 2 (PS2), Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour (GC), Metroid (NES), The Legend of Zelda (NES), Sonic the Hedgehog [various] (Genesis), Chess, R-Type Final (PS2), Castlevania [various], Persona 3 FES (PS2), Shadow of the Colossus (PS2), Minesweeper (PC), World of Goo (PC), et cetera
Art Direction : Abstract, Abstraction, Multimedia, Experimental, Assemblage, Sculpture, Painting, Fauvism, Expressionism, Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, Photography, Photomanipulation, etc
Tools of the Trade : brushes, pastels, pencils, charcoal, screwdrivers, drills, other brushes, Dremel rotary tool, fire, saws, cameras, lenses, razors, chisels, more brushes, hammers, twine, sculpting tools, and rudimentary fabrications as needed.
I try not to force-feed symbolism into my works because I find art to be psychologically revealing in itself. To this end, I try not to taint that revelation by restraining my work from layers of convoluted symbolism; while I am confident I can (and have) supplied symbolism in my work, I find such insertions to often be jarringly obvious and thus uninteresting. It is the difference between inference and implication that largely interests me.
On the other hand, I am wary of art and artists that supply an audience with a piece, and then tepidly (or even vacuously) allow the audience to provide the piece meaning as if the work was not actually meaningful itself, as it was a projection screen for the audience to define. What is a projection screen? Blank. It is without content. I therefore try to have an actual thrust of motive and meaning in my pieces, and, when I do not have those things, I freely admit it. It is, to me, alright to produce meaningful and meaningless pieces, it is alright to keep secrets, but it is a flaccid cop-out to plop a piece into the audience's lap for them to make sense of it and give it meaning. Art that is simply produced and abandoned like an orphan for the audience to sort out is a hollow thing.
I am Also : George to those who have known me; Arthur to those who know me on-line; gadiv in my art; Black Arthur, Dr. Static, and Black Static to those who have known me since Prodigy; Nevrek, Arynis, Ysri, and Zhiirab to those who know me from GemStoneIV; Mutate on newsgroups and e-mail; mechanized on several hobby and interest forums; Apocalypse Throb in the Kingdom of Loathing; MrPasserby on eatpoopucat.com
Age : 30
Location : Chester, Virginia
Occupation : Student, Artist, Writer, Zombie
Schooling :
Tussing Elementary School (K-5th)
Colonial Heights Middle School (6-8)
Colonial Heights High School (9-11th - dropped out due to health problems, got GED)
Richard Bland College of the College of William and Mary; Associate of Science
John Tyler Community College; Associate of Arts and Sciences (Magna Cum Laude), Associate of Applied Studio Arts (Magna Cum Laude), Fine Arts Certificate
Notable Interests : Art (assemblage, sculpture, painting, drawing, etc), Visiting Galleries and Museums, Writing (short stories, poetry, plot treatments), Psychology, Publishing, Religion, Death and Dying (but not in that ridiculously romanticized black gloomy dark Gothic Emo sort of way)
Other Interests : Science Fiction, Machines of All Kinds, Engineering, Astronomy, Mecha/Robots, Picnics, Feeding Ducks, Horror Films (especially those involving Zombies), Old Video Games (Atari, NES, SMS, Genesis, SNES, etc), Transformers, Peppers, and entirely too much more
Favorite Video : Paper Moon, House of 1,000 Corpses, Donnie Darko, Night/Dawn/Day of the (Living) Dead, Kung POW, Evil Dead films, Return of the Blind Dead, Star Wars films, Matrix films, Ravenous, Kill Bill, Brotherhood of the Wolf, Nightmare on Elm Street films, Dead Alive, Mars Attacks!, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, A.I., Alien Quadrilogy, The Life Aquatic, Planet Terror, Sin City, Robocop, et cetera
Tolerable Television : Deadwood, Wonder Showzen, Robot Chicken, Carnivale, LOST, Sanford & Son, Thundercats, Transformers, The Big Bang Theory, Pushing Daisies, Boston Legal, Star Trek (excepting Voyager and Enterprise), and very little else.
Currently Reading or Referencing : Night's Daughter: Tales from the Flat Earth (Tanith Lee); On Death and Dying (E. Kubler-Ross); Art of War (Sun Tzu); Memories, Dreams, Reflections (C.G. Jung); The Soft Machine (Burroughs); Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens (Patricia Lynne Duffy); 1984 (George Orwell); Guns, Germs, and Steel (Jared Diamond); Tales by Japanese Soldiers (Kazuo Tamayama and John Munnelly); Gray's Anatomy; The Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri); Edgar Allan Poe [various]; Mark Twain [various]
Current Projects : Shiv365, My Little Possessions dollhaus assemblages, experimenting with polyurethane, learning parametric solid modeling, painting, perpetual work on several plots and characters for comics and web comics, preliminary work on a book, writing vaguely schizophrenic, phoneme-obsessed melancholy poetry, updating past writings, work on idgonemad.net in general, and going to school.
Material World : acrylic, steel, rubber, canvas, nails, wire, tubes, ink, nuts, bolts, wood, aluminum, film, polyurethane, paper mache, plastic, leather, cloth, machinery, paper, latex, and whatever else I can get my hands on.
_motivations?
Much of my motivation in art rises primarily from a desire to simply create something, and in many ways I am ruled by this elemental impetus. I have a deeply-seated need to engage myself intellectually with a project and see it to fruition, often finding meaning in the product after having a dialog with it as an audience. I find I like to work in various media and see how well they interact with one another, both because I want to be well-rounded as an artist and because I am interested in virtually everything. I see potential in nearly everything, and as a result I have a lot of junk laying around and stuffed into drawers and bins, awaiting use.
_visage^
A few pictures of me, to illustrate, somewhat, how I became the person I am.
Seventeen or eighteen, here.
Roughly nineteen.
SEE MY SKULL.
Roughly age 21.
July 2003.
November 2007
More to come...
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