This interview was conducted by John Nemerovski in the spring and appeared in issue 51 of MyMac.

John: Hello, Eolake. Thanks for your interesting letters to My Mac. I enjoy reading them.

Eolake: I'm glad someone does, John! Actually, I know people do, but it's not always very many who take the time to write and tell you, even with the ease of email. Of course it is way better than before the advent of the Net, where meeting the audience was a daunting task.

John: Are you creating your artistic domains yourself, doing HTML and the whole works?

Eolake: Yes. Apart from having an ISP running the server and taking care of credit card payments for me on my commercial site, I'm doing everything myself. Like many artists I am fascinated with what technology can do for me, while at the same time being rather intimidated by all the complexity. Learning Photoshop, for instance, was really scary at times.

John: Shall we consider you a web entrepreneur, then?

Eolake: If I had any start-up capital, I would probably have gotten some help. But I had none, and also it turns out that getting others to see your vision is close to impossible. Even clever people with the best of intentions can be so far off from what you had in mind that it would have been easier to just learn how to do it yourself. In other words, as it often turns out, what you have to be forced to do can be healthy for you. For instance, I always tried to squirm out of brushing my teeth as a child. I'd hate to see my teeth today if I had always succeeded at that.

John: Were you an early-bird using art on the Internet?

Eolake: Hardly. When I first heard of the web in 1994, I had not even used a computer before. But hearing about web pages, I said "I want one!" It was so obviously what I and the world needed. To imagine that even now there are people who can't see it! The great visionary "Gill Bates" saw the light only in late '95.

John: What sort of server is carrying the traffic?

Eolake: I think it is running Apache on a UNIX box. I found a host that has fast servers and connections, close to a backbone, which is important when people are paying to use a site. Before I went commercial and still had a Danish ISP (I am Danish), the nice people at the local ISP shocked me and themselves by discovering that apart from an oil company, I was the one customer who had the most traffic!

John: Were they charging you extra for so much bandwidth?

Eolake: It turned out that in Scandinavia, this volume of traffic resulted in fees that were higher than my rent at home! So I had to find an American server, where phone line traffic is more reasonable and I had a chance of paying it. We are talking ten or fifteen times the price in Scandinavia, compared to normal U.S. fees! This goes for private traffic, too. Even local calls cost money in Europe, which is the reason Europe is slightly behind the U.S. in Net coverage, although some strong forces are lobbying to change that. I hope they succeed soon.

John: Is your work on the web a job or labor of love?

Eolake: Yes and yes. Everything I do on the Net is labor of love, and I have great difficulty fixing my attention on anything that is not. So I have been very fortunate that my commercial site could be turned into my livelihood too, with a mixture of hard work and good luck.

John: Can you give us a little background on your new website, WhatMeArtist.com?

Eolake: It is based on a philosophy which is an effort to understand what is this thing we call art, and how the creative process helps people. I have been researching it for decades.

John: In what way?

Eolake: A combination of studying all I could get my hands on about the subject, then direct observation by myself, working with different media, and studying the effect of art on people.

John: Sounds ambitious.

Eolake: A few years ago, I wrote the basics down as a long article. I was planning on writing the whole thing as a book and getting it published early in the next decade. But it often appeared like the project would be a major hurdle and would practically kill me. So when I heard that information was one of the things that was good to sell on the Net, it occurred to me to write it as a course instead. That way I was also forced to face the biggest problem, which is how to make it understandable to most readers, especially newcomers learning how to be artists. Because otherwise it would not have a firefly's chance in a blizzard of surviving as a course.

John: What are your goals for your free art-instruction site?

Eolake: The philosophy behind this course is truly a labor of love, or maybe even Labor of Obsession, and I am very happy with the result. I honestly think I have a unique and valuable thing here. We'll see if WhatMeArtist.com will produce any revenue. If it does, I will be very grateful, for I did not really imagine making any money on these materials.

EOLAKE AND THE MACINTOSH

John: What is your background with computers, Eolake? Which Macs do you use most of the time?

Eolake: I started with Windoze on my day job in the mid-1990s. But everything I heard indicated that the Mac was for creative people, and was easier to use, so when I had the means, I got a PowerMac 7200/90, which was a low-to-mid-range machine in 1995. Now it's a snail compared to the little cute iMac.

John: Were you glad to make the switch?

Eolake: Macs are just what they say they are, and even when things were the worst for Apple, I never regretted the choice. These days, with both software and hardware improving faster than the eye follows, it is just heaven, and excitement. There were people who tried to convince me that I should go with Wintel machines. And honestly, the differences are mostly in the details, and emotional. But I just LIKE the Mac, and I think it has huge potential in speed and ease of use for the future.

John: Where did you go from there?

Eolake: In early 1999, having lived off the web for about a year, I could afford to have two machines for redundancy. I have the old PowerMac, which is networked with a tangerine iMac. The network is easy to set up. I'd hate to try it on another platform. I am looking forward to getting my first portable. The new thin professional Powerbooks would be perfect, but I may wait and see what the "consumer portables" have to offer before deciding. Basically, it is a matter of my wanting the lightest possible machine for simply writing anywhere, but also wanting a real computer to do image and web editing anywhere on the planet.

John: Are you thinking ahead to additional creative media?

Eolake: What I am looking forward to is digital video, but probably not until next year, and OS X, hopefully early next year. The Mac OS is better and more stable than it was when I started on system 7.5, but I will not be satisfied until freezes and crashes are mythical things only happening in fairy tales. I think this level of stability is possible, because that is often the state of affairs on UNIX systems, I hear, which is what OS X will be based on, although any operating system with many millions of lines of code will take years to stabilize totally, according to experts.

CONTENT AND NEW MEDIA

John: Which other URLs or sites are your personal favorites, as far as quality, design, and content?

Eolake: That is hard, but I'll have to say that with the Net being so young, there is nothing yet that is absolutely great, unless you only consider content. For instance, I am a great fan of Doonesbury and Peanuts cartoons, so I can recommend those sites.

John: I'm not sure I understand what you mean about content, Eolake.

Eolake: Apart from the pre-existing content, which is adapted from non-web media, there is very little that really shows the potential of the web. Amazon.com is one of those sites that does. There are lots of services Amazon has that totally leave street-bookstores in the dust. Amazon is simply a wonderful concept.

John: So you can sense the potential, correct?

Eolake: Definitely. I think we have not yet even seen the beginning of what will be possible on the Net creatively, when we all LEARN how to think without spatial restraints. It takes a long time to learn how to really use a brand new medium. Look at film, because for the first few decades people were amazed simply to see locomotives rushing by on the silver screen. It took a while to start doing serious art in that medium.

John: Do you follow the Macintosh sites?

Eolake: Just a few. Apple Today on Applelinks, MacOSRumors, and Mackido are indispensable. I check them very often.

John: What are your goals and plans for WhatMeArtist.com?

Eolake: As big as possible. Do you know, John, I just recently fully realized that there are lots of people who are not ambitious??!! Quite a shock to me. Very unreal. How this can be, living your life without big goals? Weird.

John: Can you be a bit more specific?

Eolake: Sure. WhatMeArtist is designed to help artists. We've yet to see if it can earn any money. But even if it can't, I will run it. I have already had several people say to me that they have had their desire for creating rekindled! This is very important to me, and very central to what I wish to accomplish in this lifetime.

EOLAKE THE VISUAL ARTIST

John: Are you a working visual artist?

Eolake: During the late 90s my own artistic production has been on cruising speed, sometimes going months without important production. I used the bulk of my energy on learning to use a computer, understanding how to use the Net, getting to a point of earning money on my own site, and additional research on the art philosophy contained in WhatMeArtist.

John: Are you ready to get back to the drawing board?

Eolake: Definitely. I can now concentrate on getting back into serious production of my own art. At this point I have 99 major and 999 minor ideas swirling around in my head, being tested one by one. Some of my older projects are linked from my personal site which is <http://www.stobblehouse.dk>.

John: Where will you present the results?

Eolake: What I do know is that I want it to work on the Net. That is mainly a matter of resolution and accessibility. It is probably going to be a combination of written and pictorial art. This is not currently being done to my personal creative standard, except for a handful of comic book artists. But also there is the amazing new possibilities in Net-based publishing, even on paper. If you don't get what I mean by that, check out <http://www.pubspace.com>.

John: Are you thinking of traditional or digital tools and techniques?

Eolake: Well, I will certainly return to using large canvasses at some point, but mainly it will be produced on the Mac. I have recently bought more professional software for graphics. And I would be dissatisfied if the site did not pay for itself, too. Now there's a challenge for an art site.

John: Is visual art something you have done for many years?

Eolake: I have drawn all my life, and painted a lot, too, plus photography very intensely in periods. Photography is a very healthy art form, because it is extroverting compared to other media.

John: What about the written work you mentioned?

Eolake: I had not been writing all that much when I was very young, but I entered a contest for beginning writers, called Writers of the Future, which made me try writing for real in the last half of the 80s. I found out that it was tons of fun, and not quite so hard on me as picture making has tended to be for some reason. So I have continued doing that as well.

John: In which genre?

Eolake: I've written a couple of novels, not yet published, and have a few short stories published, mostly science fiction and fantasy. Now I have all the stuff on my own sites and several different places on the web.

LOOKING AHEAD

John: What else should we be looking for in the future from Eolake?

Eolake: I have dabbled briefly in music, and I will not leave this mortal coil until I have done both music and films professionally, too. Some people advise others to specialize. I imagine they said that to Leonardo da Vinci also. Not to compare myself to him, he was an excellent sportsman too, for instance, which nobody ever accused me of being.

John: Thanks for the thorough discussion. I hope our readers spend time at WhatMeArtist.com, and benefit from the experience.