This Brave New World, pt.1

Hello Steemit!

I woke up today with a fire that I haven't felt kindled in quite some time. Weary from the heels off of the recent Art Basel week here in Miami, I'm all but worn-out. It comes with the season that I'm cleaning house for new beginnings. It's the end of another year, another chapter in my life and I look towards the next on the promises of the last. 2018 will be a great year of change and upheaval. It is every year we recall our experiences that lead us along our path, 2017 itself a winding journey past pitfalls, now conquered, having survived utter oblivion from all sides. I couldn't be more excited. I feel that I am approaching now the end of a great cycle and peering into the sphere ahead of a revolution. The time has come to innovate, elevate, and evolve for what seems like everything all around me. I'm finding that there's more ways to make money online than ever before, especially on the internet. This year, I struck out to forge my own path as an independent contractor of my craft, managing my website to market and sell my artwork to the masses. As a living artist, the overall aim with my vision is to connect with others through the art I create. I believe in that way, art is What better way to connect, to reach as many people as possible, online where the entire world is a click or swipe away? In finding answers, I look to the years since that I can recall my story, now as I spill my thoughts onto this page.

In 2014, I made a promise to myself. That promise came of the fallout years after the Global Recession, coming off of nearly 6 years of a wanderer's fever dream; Constantly moving for three years of failed college hopes in Detroit, back and forth to Miami, then in 2013, to off to Chicago for almost a year, and finally crash-landing back to Miami. My feet and fortunes were worn out. My life felt like some kind of statistic, another failure to launch, a leftover returning home to little or nothing of how I left it. Though I spent many years as an art student, accelerated to excel in the design industry, selectively preferring retail leaves little skills to market and less inspiring a shrinking landscape to make my own path.

After almost 10 months, I finally landed a paying job pushing paper and office supplies to small businesses, walking door-to-door with heavy catalogs and heavier hands full of bills. Those bills were growing, not of money, but debt instead. I would spend the hottest months of that year wearing out dress shoes and profusely sweating out button down shirts in the blazing Floridan sun, all the while pitching someone else's products, building someone else's pyramid. At the end of the day, completely tired and worn out, after dozens of doors seen and fewer sales on my roster, my feet were burning. I knew that I wasn't afraid of going the distance, but walking in circles others were making wasn't going to get me far. Staring up at the ceiling of my parent's house back then, after hours marching around town and with a hefty satchel weighing me down, I felt my mind plunging into the darkness of depression. It didn't take long for all the life lessons to start stress me to learning quickly a way past this period. Whenever I could, between hounding client sales and those silly morning office motivations, I kept a pad of paper and my hands furiously feeding a ballpoint pen's bleed out on a scrap sheet. Realizing I never lost my creative drive after so many years, my artistic talent became like my child; I had to commit myself to cultivate it that it too could save me from this despair. I decided to quit immediately, staging an interview with my office manager on my last day disguised as a quarterly sales review, I left with closing my own sale for a case of computer paper and a few file folders, at the current promo price, to begin my journey of 10,000 pages.

Before I left to college in Detroit, I studied as a design student throughout high school and for long had big dreams becoming an automotive designer. In college did I discover truth, that away from home, of the realities of working within the industry. In 2008, the financial crisis erased an entire graduating class dispatched from College for Creative Studies. Then a sophomore in line for the likes of General Motors, European transplants, and Japanese incubators from overseas, living through the crisis future was yet to be determined. Though I wasn't sure if I would ever fit in such environments, I knew even then I wanted to create a business around my talent and own my financial destiny. I felt that for too long my education preached self-reliance but seldom a reasonable guide to finding success.

My mother is a beautician of almost 40 years, since she was a young teenager growing up in 1970s Jamaica, she has always been self-employed. There in Jamaica, life is notably rough and requires tact as well tenacity. One has to hustle as well as muscle their way on through life. She immigrated to the United States on her own in the early 1980s and used her skills to save up attendance at Miami's Lindsey Hopkins Technical Trade school, then became a licensed professional. Now that we're living in Miami, whenever we would drive downtown via Northwest 7th avenue, she would recall those years and tell stories about how far she came; a few dollars in her pocket and fewer people to trust for a night's sleep. As I was born in NYC, where she finally "made it" an opportunity to work as her own boss at a salon, and now owns her own shop. We moved to Miami back in 1995, she has always continued to pursue her own dreams and encouraged me to do the same. Her life is a huge source of inspiration to me and continues to remind me what I have at stake pursuing my own dreams. For her presence throughout my life, I am eternally grateful.

Goodbye, sales. Hello, future.

Coming off my final sales job, I was determined to make my talents work for me. Scrummaging around Miami for steady employment is a job in itself, only to be denied or asked to downgrade yourself for at best a slim chance to meaningful labor. Though over the past few years there's increasingly plentiful jobs, but with low wages, patience is just as low.

It became clear that true gains were to be made investing in myself, not continue the institution of being a good employee. Every job I managed to find became an challenge either to save enough to commute or even survive off of or life would spin the wheel of its many setbacks and another job I have to leave over labor dispute.

The state of my reality apparently became that if you wanted success, means either endlessly working for someone else who owned most of the profits of the business system or to become a drone in some enormous corporate machine, I was completely turned off from the idea of working a just another j.o.b (just over broke).

Months passed working various bad odd jobs, eventually, I landed a spot in a fulfillment factory near downtown Miami and learned the process of giclee printing. I found solid labor, as well a face-paced enviornment, as the physical labor made my hands tough and my back tougher, my mind never stopped.

I was promoted in a short time to shipping and handling duties, responsible for loading trailer bodies full of print orders to be sent all over the continent. The factory had dozens of employees engaged, on a assembly line of sorts, in a seamless process of transforming photo files that uploaded from customers on the internet into real photos our machines print on fabric canvas stretched over real wood.

Large spools of 1000s of family photos, graduations, weddings, and lifetime memories would stream out daily from the gigantic Scitex imagers. Combined with the humidity of a Miami summer, the floor space around the massive printer would reach over 100 degrees during many of the peak shifts. Slaving away on the line, everyone working there became fully aware of simple to follow, but madding mindset of repetition.

After two years, I left my day job with BestCanvas. It's was a tiring, cruel, and punishing time on the line, working days in a row on my feet for 11+ hours manufacturing custom canvases. I couldn't focus on the most important things in life, most important, my health, that since my motorcycle broke down a few months before, I've had to longboard combined 3 miles each way and a train to make it to work. I woke up that one Tuesday morning unable to move, my thighs swollen and to a new realization: I AM NOT A MACHINE.

Throughout my time at the factory, I filled a metal file cabinet in my small, stuffy storage unit I rented and crashed on an tiny air mattress underneath my drawing table there at my bedside. I kept this sentiment in the forefront of my thoughts, like in some mania, as I would sketch for days anywhere quiet or a table to sit at. As a young student, I would draw for hours, building a narrative for every class project. Now as an adult, it was similar to conditioning to become a professional athlete, training muscle memory over circles and filling binders with crinkled looseleaf pages of timed quick sketches. Each batch of paper from rabid daydreaming began to tower over my nightstand, foreshadowing my sleep, in each stack an investment to my future self.

My first show in Miami c. 2014, with RawArtistsMiami, "Revolution" where I presented my infamous "Detroit The Series: The Present" for the first time to the public.

January 2016, my exhibition in Little Haiti Miami with some of my newfound friends...

The Waking Hearts, local arts non-profit in Miami, was created to network artists, creatives, writers, designers, and performers. Together, we unite for a one night showcase of our talents and open our artforms to the public. The showcase, called HeartCore, we feature visual artists alongside musicians to connect and create from within the community.

Here I showcase original artwork to the public during one of the Heartcore events.

Here, unveiling an print of original cover art done for one of Heartcore events. My artwork, each illustration, creates 100s of items for your walls and wares.

For the past 3 years, I have worked with many local artists, non-profits, and diverse educational mentorship groups, as a intermediate and entrepreneur of my craft. Now, I continue to deliver my talents to people all around the world through my website.

Read Part Two here
Read Part Three here

Craig A. Hamilton
Artist - Imagemaker
www.artistcraigahamilton.com

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Agency - FLOATINGMARS
Creative Consultant - Intellectual Property Holdings and Asset Management
[email protected]

Art wizard Craig A. Hamilton, Imagemaker - Artist, founder of Floatingmars, FUTURE REPUBLIK! AUDIO WEAPONARY GROUP, and The Imagemakers' Guild. Based in Miami, FL, I am a maker of original graphic illustrations, sold as print, product, or for publication. Currently, I'm managing my entire art business through daily curation of my website, www.artistcraigahamilton.com, using a handful of websites and their respective networks to harness my own market niche.

Thank you Society6, Patreon, and Steemit for empowering this self-employed artist-illustrator to profit from my own labor and turn this talent into a real world business.

I belong to a select group of content creators here on Steemit. My Artist's Circle here on Steemit I proudly support (and recommend you to check out!):
@earthnation
@qurator
@qustodian
@originalworks