Beginning

Times are changing in my little world. Nothing too big or terribly easy to describe, but it feels - mostly - like a mental shift and I have decided to express it by changing my name to.... my name.

Let me explain...

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In 2009 and I was contemplating doing art full-time. This prompted going through old portfolios left over from art-related jobs, art school, and spare time comics and animations to see if I had a good beginning point. I quickly realized that I didn’t have anything I would call “cohesive.” My interests were disparate, but not what I would consider complimentarily eclectic. Instead, I read a schizophrenic attention span employed in whatever I had done. This wasn’t just in my art, either. My bookshelf said the same (subjects abounding in art, science, pseudo-science, comics, religious texts, poetry .... all uncoordinated and all half-read). More importantly, the way I thought about things felt completely disorganized.

I didn’t just want a career. I wanted a new state of mind. Some people go out and find religion. I needed to find out what this thing, called “Art”, was. But not out of a text book and not out of the memory of an education I bitterly overpaid (paying) for. Art making was much deeper than that for me. And I wanted to have a conversation (a true give and take) with the primacy of that urge, one that always seemed fundamentally human.

But here was a mess of half-assed shit before me, trying to bring me down, reminders of how difficult it actually is to put yourself into your material.

Did I really want to go through with this?

I decided to have a little faith in myself and applied for a business license to actually start selling work I actually hadn’t made yet. Probably not the “right” way to do it, but I needed to kick my own butt to put something in my mind that actually felt like I couldn’t turn back, or around, or to the left, or the right, or wherever it is that I like to go when the flashing lights of interest sparkle all around me. And in our world everything needs a name. The time had come to give my budding business one too. I set myself to the task of finding or making one,  of course not forgetting to consider the one I already shared with my friends and family... but I’m an intensely private person and what if this whole art-thing didn’t work out? What if I flaked (happened before), or worse, just outright embarrassed myself (Inevitable!)? What if all of the coming work turns out to be crap, yet again, and this urge to become an artist just morphs into another stepping stone that I run right past (Terror!)?

These concerns cornered my choice to maintain some skepticism about my fortitude in the entire project. The decision to cover my tracks (just a bit) to protect something that I hold most dear - my birth name - from the vulnerable arena of the public domain where reputations are so fragile, was easy to make. The development of the moniker, “Lumi 9,” grew organically and arose out of the little information I knew about where I was in that moment: it needed to be capable of absorbing new information into its meaning, as I experienced it. I didn’t know what the upcoming work was going to be about, or look like, so I glued a few concrete associations together to form the word (painters deal with “luminance”, I liked the number “9”, etc.). This seemingly cold action actually felt the most honest about who I was at that time. I wasn’t building a definition around a memory of the past, but of the future; and what was coming - the work I eventually would “put out there” - needed to be easily absorbed into the title’s meaning as the art developed. It was intended to be a name that I kept and eventually became, in as powerful a way as I could conceive it.

But the recent acquisition of new confidence, observable habit married to problems of practical application (coinciding with some personal events, undivulged) have made this an appropriate moment in my life to move forward as I am, who I’ve always been. I feel it is time to let the name, at the very least, rest on the sideline as I, Darick Ritter, continue to engage the future and build on what Lumi 9 has graciously done for me, up to this point.

So, now that I’ve appropriately reached my most narcissistic moment in this post (I nearly just thanked myself.... who in hell does that?), it’s time for describing the effects to my web presence of the name change:

1) www.lumi9news.blogspot.com is retiring. I will be blogging from this site from now on.

2. 2)My Lumi 9 Painting Page on Facebook is going to be torn down soon and all of my updates, will reside on my “personal” page, Darick Ritter.
3. 3) www.darickritter.com is my new domain (though lumi9painting.com still works fine).