EdwinNewbetter

It's been a very long time since I've been around. Part of it was trying to balance between I life I know I needed to live (nobody will create your art, tell your story, if you DON'T), and one where I try to mainline, mainstream (can I be a monogamous partner in a more traditional relationship, as opposed to the fringes of a more poly lifestyle I've slowly walked towards my whole life?)

I compromised further and further away from creating, from working on cultivating the value in the work I do, literally getting brain synapses to build pathways to better understanding how to leave behind something useful and meaningful behind before I die. After the hiatus, a rearranging of my life and lifestyle, I have chosen the scary path of trying to make this sustainable, not simply as a kind of entertainer, but as one who is (again) trying to leave behind something that people who will outlive me, and will be born after I am gone, will find useful.

I am in the process of setting up a Patreon account, which I will post live, but as of know, I can point you out to the developing spaces that are currently active.

I am part of an Art Collective known as The Goodbye Society. We can be found here:

Store front with Prints for my collective  -  Prints (currently only my work is here to start, with more, and the rest of my collective to be added as the days roll on)

Threadless site (this is a place for more activist-related content)  -  Love & Resist

Website for my collective  -  The Goodbye Society . ORG

Facebook page for my collective  - The Goodbye Society (on Facebook)

Personal site  -  abrescy - newbetter . com

I am available for commissions. However, because there is much to work on throughout the course of the day, and based on how long I have been honing my craft, I must ask for a base hourly of rate of $50 per hour, with specifics, estimate, and down payment to be discussed per individual basis.

I will be adding a couple posts as well, that will effectively be something of a rallying cry, a humble solicitation to supporters of art, and something of a dissertation on the voice I am bringing to the table, as I move forward as a professional.  Please take the time to read over them.

Art is not a zero-sum game. I believe that one of us succeeding means trying to get the rest of us elevated to a status of success. Meaning bringing ALL OF US together, to assert to the world the importance and value of the work that we do.

After all, if we are not paid as artists -in a world where we must be paid so that we we can exchange that pay for the privilege not to die, then pay us for a service that humanity needs (but may not realize), as opposed to because there is a job that we can do, but where we are replaceable.

If you quit your job, they will find someone else to do it.

If you quit doing art, NO ONE will tell the story that you, with your life, and the way you filter the world through your brain, leave a record of that life through what you create.

It is every artist’s privilege and duty to carve a story on the wall of our collective memory and say “I was here.  When I was, life was like this.”

Just as it is the privilege and duty of every human being to leave this world in a better state than they found it.
Show the world that our work IS valuable, and we should be paid for our time, effort, and what we work to achieve before our chapter is done, and we slip back into the void from whence we came.

For some of you, some of the works you see may be new, and for some, you may recognize some old favorites. I'd like to explain what we're looking at here.

For artists, there is no roadmap to success, and many start the journey with no idea what success is supposed to mean for them.

Many artists find their craft early in life; they learn to create something that others give applause to, and so long as they continue to wow their crowds, they continue to hone what I have come to call their hand-craft. The old iterations of myself have been an excessive in developing my hand-craft, learning how to sing, but not knowing what songs I need to write.

Perhaps I'm being a bit unfair to myself. As I lived and grew, I took in the world around me. I opened myself up to beauty. Understanding the difference between beauty and art was an eye opening experience. Beauty is the thing that drives art, it is the spirituality to the religion that is art. Along this path, I railed against the idea of sleepwalking through life. My hands took to pens upon pages in notebooks, then later, to the keyboard. From this mountain, I shouted the holy names of experience, of appreciating each breath starting with the first we draw when pulled screaming from wombs, to the last that will transition us somewhere beyond this world.

And while I had no roadmap, and the life I was living was the explorer's cartography of my own passage, I knew this was not the voice that my art was to take.

But I hammered on. Because I knew what the work was. Professor Mahina Embers, on the funerary day of a friend of mine who took her own life, told me:

We have to fight death. We have to fight death every day.

In those days, I latched on to the idea that fighting death every day meant being as alive as we could possibly be. We were born into a garden of senses, the capacity to experience emotion, the ability to retain memory, all this in a garden that we could move through, interact with.

I rallied all those around me, shouting of hope, shouting of experience, insisting that appreciation of the fleeting condition that is being human, that is being alive -THIS was the most sacred thing...

...but there was something I wasn't seeing, and I knew it, and when I called into the abyss that was the whole of my art, still, I did not hear back the echo of it's voice; the songs I was to write.

I had no roadmap, but I knew there was more than applause. As noble as it is for any artist to create something that moves another, I knew that my voice would have something with more intent.

The last art show I held was in New York, nine years ago.

In the basement of C-Squat. I nailed my art to the wall, I spoke poetry into the crowd -I had a fucking show in New York. I felt like I was filling out the map, and if nothing else, I could leave that behind. Even if the map led to ruin, I could leave it behind as a warning: Don't follow this road.  Or mabye "If you see where I went wrong along the path, do what I did differently."

You know...that saying: Something like "You don't appreciate something until it's gone?"

I used to say I was too busy, I had no time. Oh, I learned what busy meant. What lack of time REALLY meant. I got older, somehow. I mean, I'm bad at math, so believe me, getting older was a shock I didn't account for -my scratchpaper said I was still young and invincible...

...I've realized again that I am still young and invincible, but through the lesson of letting go of my art inch by inch. I compromised, I tried to balance a life that I held envy of, over these cartographer's tools. Until one day I realized I was so busy, I hadn't done art, translated beauty, in years. Art, that I swore I would never turn my back on ever again, the connection to beauty that I would cling tenaciously to, hissing at death, teeth bared, suddenly I had no time for it.

But in that silence I heard the notes that would become the voice, that would carry my songs to the end of my days.

Some of you watched that, through this last nine year stretch. Less art appeared. That voice, that brick over the head, filled with righteous indignation, grew louder. I began standing on broken things, insisting that people stop, and look -I'm pointing at something... just like I used to stand at the hole in the fence between our everyday lives and that which I recognized as beauty:

"Look through the hole, just for a second. Please, stop walking, just look. There's beauty beyond there, if only you could see it."

Andrew, Emily, Nola, we who would become The Goodbye Society -they returned to my life a tornado of hope and inspiration. They blew down these stick houses I was building, in trying to live as something that I wasn't. They tore about my landscape and reminded me of the earth that stood beneath my feet, reminded me that there is a job I must do...

...and as I took this to heart, I ...GOT... it:

I am the unflinching culmination of every decision I have made in my life. This is my roadmap. The journey to get here, to get to self-actualization, to KNOW what I am supposed to do, this is my life's work, and that work has just begun.

William Burroughs once told me that artists must dream for those who have forgotten to dream. But we, who create, are more than just dreamers. We are part historian, part beacon, part architect.

It is the privilege and the profession of every artist -meaning EVERY ONE who creates- to leave a mark on the wall of our collective memory, and say "I was here. And when I was, THIS is what life looked like." We must leave behind something meaningful before we die. This is my job as the historian.

It is our duty to become the best versions of ourselves that we can be, the most human of humans, but to reach beyond the heavens and say "I am powerful beyond all measure ...and you. All of you. All of us. Are powerful beyond measure." We must remind our fellow humans, in this life, and beyond this life, how magnificent we can be, if only we can shed the cages that have trained us to think otherwise. So This is my job as the beacon.

And finally, once we have shaped ourselves, and understand the process, it is our iron-clad responsibility to place our hands to this world and pour every once of blood, sweat, pain, joy, humanity, reverence, experience into that which we create, into these lives that we live, so that before our time on this earth is done, before our final chapter is written, before our final breath expires, that we have done EVERYTHING we can to leave this world in a better place than the one we inherited. THAT is our job, as architects.  We must throw the bones of memory into a pile, and pour everything we've got on it, and hope that the conflagrations we light are bright enough to catch fire in hearts of everyone we can touch. We must, with every breath we take, nail together the foundations of something bigger than ourselves, leaving behind not works to be applauded over our graves, but rather to leave behind something useful to people who will be born long after I am dead, and gone, and a memory.

Because if we are not doing what we can, during our day and age, during our time in history, during these fleeting lifetimes that we love and cherish, and snatch back from the hands of death, over and over, until they slip through our fingers -If we are not doing everything we can to bring future generations to a better world, then we blaspheme in face of the gift of life itself, and we dishonor the memory of every human who came before us, trying to get us further to a better place.

And I will not dishonor them. I will die with a hammer in my fucking hand.

THIS IS MY VOICE, THIS IS MY WORK, and I will march bravely, and with PRIDE into the daily work of building something that will outlast my flesh...and the things that I will leave behind, the life I have lived, and continue to live, will be but one voice adding to the choir that sings the generation song of who we, as human beings were, and are, and will one day be.

And one strange day, I will turn my back on this luggage;  I will curl up my fist, and stare death in the face laughing, knowing I cheated those cold fingers every second of the way by loving every moment of being alive, as if I would never see another sunrise.

It began when I when I was younger, and from time to time, I still try to imagine a world without art. A world where art stopped decades, even centuries ago, and it is both cold and horrifying to me. This is because I see the effects of it in everything, I see the ripples that must have once been a pebble that I would probably never meet. Literally, I behold everything in the world around me, I see all the things that either trickle in grains, or flood in a deluge of inspiration, of soul feeding. I see it in the shape and line of things that someone had to create, or even design, I see it in everything that we place our hands to, I see it in the eyes of people who carry embers of love and hope within themselves, people who refuse to stop dreaming -and then I imagine a world where someone wasn't inspired to bring a thing into the world.

And that terrifies me. I don't want to live in a world where people have given up on art, on the translation of beauty, on the concrete realization of inspiration, on the dreams that are taken from one person's mind, heart, spirit, and woven into the world that I behold.

As we engage in a kind of mini-game where the objective is to gain enough survival tokens to not die due to the neglect of human needs, I urge everyone to find value in the work done by Beautifiers, Inspirationalists. We will not affect such mundane things within this mini-game as lessening of your student loan debts, we will not get you from one place to another like a car that you paid for, we will make you more physically attractive to potential partners, but if we, as Artists, as Beautifiers, as Inspirationalists, as Imagineers continue to get the message that the time we spend on our work is not worth paying survival tokens for, so that we can continue to breathe works into this life we all share, this world we all share, then we, like so many others who fight through the daily and the desperate struggle of ensuring food, housing, basic human needs (I'm not even going as far as to call out to transcendence, growth, progress of humanity as a species), then we too, are at the mercy of gaining our survival tokens based on what those who control those tokens say has value, and what doesn't.

Artists, true artists, not just "entertainers" seek to free us all, seek to turn this world into a better place than the one we found when we were born into it. We seek to run as far as we can in this life, and we seek to hand over torches that will be placed in the palms of those who will outlive us, who will be born after we are dead -and with each passing day, we become more humble beggars, asking for a bit of coin, so that we may continue to live, so that we may continue to spend our time, our days, our work on shaping a better world for the benefit of generations to come.

Please don't make us give up our work, our tools, in exchange for the means to survive one more day without performing meaningful service to you, to the world. Please don't make us chose between serving you, and the generations that will come after you, and serving those who wish only to keep us (all of us, you included) farming coins in the money fields.

For if we are forced to choose between the two, we are literally facing the choice between a thankless death for what we believe in, or the death of art itself, as we reluctantly hang our heads and say to world "Maybe you're right. Maybe inspiring people and trying to shape a better world is not valued enough for us to continue this work."

I have spent my entire life running back and forth between both sides of servitude, and I have finally decided that there is no going back.

I will choose to either die for my principles, if the work I do is not valued by those I share this living world with, or I will be valued for the work I do, and have the means to further help make the world a better place, not by increments, or unseen ways, but by measurable leaps and bounds.

A single pebble can make ripples that turn into waves, if that pebble enters with enough impact to affect things greater than the sum of its seeming parts.

I will die with a hammer in my hand.

Please show me, show all Artists who believe that we can make this world better, that our work is valuable to you.

Thank you.

I hope that you become the most brilliant and powerful versions of yourselves that you can be.

The world needs you right now, more than ever.

Don't keep the light of your brilliance hidden from it, from us.

Often, in artist's bios, or from the mouths of artists themselves, I have heard something along the lines of "Art is a way that I can truly express how I feel inside."  I have never identified with this statement.  With writing, this rings true, but not with my art.

When I write, I am free.  Words obey me like unquestioning soldiers, mounted on serifed clydesdales; I am their king, their general.  Go forth, Words, I tell them.  Go forth, and do not question, for once I am done speaking, the abstracts will have become clear, my orders are issued, articulate my plans to the letter.

I see things in the world, things that only the eye can behold, that only a human alive in this day and age can come across, take in, and process with the history of who I have become, and the dreams that pump blood through my veins.  Sometimes, in those moments, I am told "You should draw that" or "you should paint that."  Every time, I shake my head.  Anything I would attempt would be a poor simulacrum of something that was painted more beautiful, and with so much more subtlety than I could ever, as a human being, hope to accomplish.

The world is beautiful, and fleeting, and the moments that stir my heart to the point of breaking are something so elusive that one does not catch them on a whim.

For me art is a magic trick, with all the world watching, and it's something that requires ME believing it will work, in order for it to work.  When it works, it truly is magic, and when it doesn't, there is none, only the motions of something reminiscent of.  To this, I find only half-hearted applause, and read the faces of people who hope that this isn't the last act, who hope that I've got something else up my sleeve, who hope the next thing I do suspends their reality, or sparks something inside of them that makes them believe or at least makes them want to believe.  When this is achieved, I bring down the house, the limelight spills over me and washes away the grime and the hardship, the stress and lies, and all of the very bad things that I say in private.  In turn, it makes ME want to believe.  It makes me believe.  It rejuvenates me, encourages me, and makes me hungry for more.

People look upon my works in progress, and nod, or speculate, or comment on how I "could call this finished, and leave it as it is."  For me, it is not done.  I am setting something up, checking all the hinges, the secret safety release switches.  I am making sure no wires, no trapdoors, no part of the trick can be seen from the audience.  When it is complete I emerge, soaking wet, chains clattered about my feet, arms spread out to their very fingertips, top hat blazing next to the feat I have just performed, my face an iron mask of composure upon delivery, waiting one million fractions of a hummingbird's heartbeat for that golden sound of applause.  

And when I hear it, I am less like the painters of old, the painters who taught me and frowned and said "you've got a long way to go, boy."  In that moment, I am Harry Houdini, and I bow and appreciate that someone was there witness my act.