dayton is not in ohio

I put together a proposal this April for a sculpture to be installed at MidAmerica Nazarene University. It was gonna be a great summer job, taking about a month and a half to fabricate and paying almost ten grand, minus materials and other expenses.

I didn’t get it.

I know that this may come as a shock to those of you who have me in your Fantasy Artist League and were riding the wave of my three-for-three streak of proposals. It probably wasn’t a good pick for me, and I expect that they selected something more ‘Christian.’ My proposal was well conceived, but it was pretty abstract, and I eventually got the idea that they wanted something pretty direct and easy to read (and presumably boring). That’s not fair to say. I’m a competitive person and it’s easy to want to think these things to take the sting out of it. So much for the grand slam…

I haven’t had to get a summer job in nearly a decade, so the prospect of getting one this year made me nervous. I also haven’t held a regular 9 - 5 job in five years, so the prospect of that has been a little nerve-wracking. I almost got to be an artist. DANG!

So, for these two weeks until my job starts I’m working for some friends down the street putting up drywall and painting before the arrival of their second kid. It’s nice to have instant work that’s pretty flexible and pays cash. I don’t mind the busyness either, because I have no idea what I’m doing in my art right now, and wouldn’t know what to do with myself in the studio.

My ‘real’ job starts in a week, where I’ll be a summer teaching assistant in the Sullivan Fabrication Studio at the Art Institute. The pros of this job are that this is one amazing shop, with incredible tools that go way beyond your standard shop tools, including CNC routers (carves digitally programmed objects out of solid blocks of material), rapid prototyping machines (like an ink jet printer that ‘prints’ things out in three dimensions using plastic), and all sorts of other tools that I have yet to learn how to use. Another pro is that I’ll be able to do a bit of working with students and helping folks realize ideas, which I enjoy.

The cons are that it pays $11.80 an hour (12 years ago I may have been excited about that…), and that the hours are 10 - 4. Subtracting a lunch break, that works out to 5 hours a day, and totals 25 hours a week. This basically makes it a part-time job, BUT, by making the hours 10 - 4, it eats up a day just like a full time job. I’d really rather that the hours were 7 - noon, or noon - 6, because I don’t work well in small bookend chunks, and that’s all I’ll have if I do want to get into the studio.