I was early into blogging. I joined Facebook when there were only a few users. I embraced Twitter before it became a place for celebrities to gather millions of followers. But then I said: enough! I had my fill of social media and I didn't need any more.
Lots of art and not a handbag in sight.
Recently I have discovered that I was wrong. There is more social media out there that I can benefit from, but unfortunately media reporting can give us bad impressions that are not deserved. Pinterest is an example of that. Mentions of Pinterest in the media tends to fixate on its popularity amongst women with the strong implication that it is a tool for sharing images of clothes and handbags.
So I joined Pinterest with low expectations, and discovered that it is incredibly useful to me. In retrospect that should have been obvious, but media biases are pervasive, and as much as we like to think of ourselves as intelligent reasoning beings able to separate the wheat from the chaff, we get sucked into the maelstrom of misinformation.
I found Pinterest a perfect place to collect art by some favorite artists. I also found that I can direct art class students to Pinterest boards to discover new artists and see variations in style and creative approaches. I also found Pinterest is fun and surprisingly useful for an artist. In addition to my own Pinterest 'boards' there is a large community of people collecting images of every subject imaginable. That includes art. Lots of art.
It is also a place to scrapbook visual resources I am likely to use. As a result I am using Pinterest a little differently to those only interested in the image. I do my research and note down important details such as media and dates. It might save me from the constant delving into my library on the hunt for an image that all too often cannot be found. As much as libraries are great repositories of data, the mountains of paper can be very good at burying the snippet we need. Pinterest, in common with most online data is easier to search making it more likely to find the perfect image.
A really useful feature is what are called secret boards. These are scrapbooks that are not public, just for the scrapbookers eyes only. They are perfect for in-progress projects. Most artists tend to have a few private projects percolating and these boards are perfect for when projects are not ready for prime time yet. Each user is allowed to have up to six of these secret boards going at any one time. There is no limit to the number of public boards possible.
My Pinterest page is here: https://www.pinterest.com/tonyjohansenart/ There are currently 40 'boards' there. Each is like a chapter, but unlike chapters in paper books, I have selected the images myself, and can add to them whenever I find new material, and gradually add new boards for new subjects.
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