Some reasons why it is important to subscribe to artist's newsletters!

Hello beautiful readers!

I am going to start by thanking you for your support once again! And in this post I am going to share why I value your support.

When I explained to my wife that I was going to launch a newsletter, she looked at me with googly eyes and said:”I never read any of the newsletter I am receiving!” Yep ok, fair enough, life is busy, there’s plenty of things to read from work, a household to run, the kid’s school communication, kids sport commitments, parties to attend (with lots of moderation I assure you), and so on…LIFE IS BUSY! And so is our mental load.

Social medias

I believe our lives have been getting busier since the introduction of smart phones, social medias, youtube, netflix and their algorithms and addictive mechanisms. I have been pretty good at limiting my own screen time, very little doomscrolling for me.

Although as an artist, we have been told by the industry that we have to have an online presence so as many, I created an art account on instagram and facebook and have been using them for 10 years now. Trying to build on online presence and an audience for my work and the comic books I illustrate with my hand, my brain and my heart. I initially quite enjoyed networking with other artists, sharing my work and building an audience organically.

Online content

I have always made a point to curate my social media feeds, remove unwanted suggested posts and channel and try to get a feed that was limited to trusted sources, friends and known artist’s pages.

It seems like things have changed recently, with plenty of fake news, fake artists, AI produced content, fake accounts and ads popping in everywhere, contaminating my (and all of ours) social media feed and drastically reducing my (our?) enjoyment of using those.

Thousands of AI generated books are flooding amazon with real authors work drowning in a tsunami of meaningless writing. Meaningless and sometimes dangerous, 404 Media reported (old news I know), on the risk presented by AI generated book on mushrooms; “Experts are worried that books produced by ChatGPT for sale on Amazon, which target beginner foragers, could end up killing someone.”. This sounds like pure insanity to me and shows that greed will lead to extremes (not fresh news either…).

Sorry for the doom and gloom but what I am trying to say here is that it is becoming more and more important to choose where you are getting your information from, your books, media, music and artwork from. Except if you don’t mind giving your attention, money and limited energy to a robot and the greedy and lazy human behind it.

As a former engineer, I still believe that AI will allow human to solve complex problems in the future; in the energy, medical or environmental sectors for example. But right now, it is going nowhere. Is that the society we have right now? Do anything possible for a quick profit? Have we completely lost any ethical value?  

I don’t think so, I still believe that most of us are smarter than that. And by subscribing to a newsletter written by a real human, you are demonstrating this and contributing to an AI-free island of creative people and more broadly a healthier internet.

Your impact

By subscribing to this newsletter, you are supporting me, a modest artist who is not living from his art but is dreaming of, one day, earning a minimum wage from it. I am not doing what I am doing for money. But if one day, my kids are telling me that they would like to become an artist, I would love to tell them that it is possible, that humans will always value and support real art and other creative endeavours!

To finish off with a more positive note, here is a little comic project I am currently working on. I absolutely love tall panels, there is something that I really enjoy from extreme ratios, it gives me a whacky constraint to play with!

Take care, don’t hesitate to let me know that you are enjoying (or not) what you are reading.

Peace to all!

Cesar

p.s: I came across this article about the different earnings an artist would get when they sell their book on Amazon VS in a bookshop - eye opening!