Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Current Exhibit and Upcoming Onlie Auction

I currently have a few of my Sinkside Compost Series paintings in Animal, Mineral,Vegetable on exhibit at Wargo Nature Center in Lino Lakes, Minnesota. The show also includes Kat Corrigan and Bronwyn White. The show is in the display cases in the middle of the center and will be up until September 2018.

Later this summer will be an online auction with artist Gregory Graham. It will be a whirly-twirly event with all pieces painted with gouache on paper and they will be in 5" x 7" frames and ready for hanging. The auction will take place during the Minnesota State Fair, thus the Spaghetti Eddie's painting that I created for this event. I haven't painted people since The Book of Bartholomew project. It has been fun to tackle people again - that just sounds wrong. You get what I mean. Anyway, it will be a lot of fun. More info to come.

Saturday, May 26, 2018

Winter Morning - Oil Paint on Canvas



Winter Morning
Oil paint and charcoal on canvas
60" x 36"
$3,800

My landscapes are moving to a looser style with a greater variety of paint applications. The canvas in part of this painting is simply primed canvas with charcoal. Other areas are very thin drip washes, while yet other areas are thick strokes of paint. It is a very vibrant and active painting to look at. The image comes from Rainy Lake in Northern Minnesota. In the summer, I often stay in a cabin wherein the bed has a north facing window next to it. The sun comes up right in a spot where it angles in the window and shines right on the pillow. I can't tell you how many times I have woken up between 4 - 5am with that sunrise hitting me right in the eye. Often I will get up and take a photo and then go back to sleep. This painting is a winter version of this sunrise with active horizontal wintery clouds and the sunlight reflecting off the snow covered lake.
 

Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Making versus Marketing

There have always been more artists than galleries and avenues for exhibiting art. But the internet is now changing this. Artists can find and foster an audience that galleries never even knew existed.

In light of this new freedom of outreach, there are many businesses marketing to artists to help them market and sell their work online. I have been using one such business, Art Storefronts, and I am enjoying many of the features and benefits of such a program. I see some of my other artist friends using other programs, but they all focus on building your audience and marketing to that audience. The platform I joined has a lot of marketing and social-media advice that is good and I have been following through on some of these suggestions while testing the water on others.

I find this type of work to be a curse, anathema, an abomination. Alright, the fact that I like writing this newsletter and having y’all read it tells you that I don’t think marketing is a complete abomination. But it is not natural to me nor convenient. These platforms suggest that an artist’s time should be divided between art making (80%) and marketing (20%). For the course of 2018, until I took the last two weeks off of social-media and updating my website, I have been consistently promoting my work and doing many of the things I “should” be doing.  But I needed a break.

Artists like to make things. I think that is pretty obvious. In general, artists prefer that the objects they make are out front in the public eye and their personal life stays behind the scenes. It is hard for artists to remember that they are not marketing themselves. They want to stay in the background while marketing seems about placing yourself out there in the rough currents of society. Yet, my work has a commentary aspect to it. It talks about who we are as a society and I would love to have people respond to it, value it and take it home. That is part of the thinking behind the work. Unfortunately, to engage an audience I can’t sit in the shadows and throw out wry observations.

So, I am getting back on that horse and will continue with the marketing, and even ramping it up some, over the course of the year. But I don’t want to have my marketing activities diminish my studio experience. My work doesn’t fit neatly in the online scene of art marketing. I don’t make images. Much of the art online is just an image to be placed on a piece of paper, a piece of canvas, a coffee cup, a keychain. It is not art meant to be its own object and have its own presence in someone’s life. Often the final product someone receives from an online artist’s website was not made by an artist’s hand but by a printer. I’m only willing to go down that path so far. So, I struggle with the contemporary art marketing world that I have to live in.  It is at odds with the ultimate purpose and value of my work which is forging a worldview into an object - developing a language of material that expresses thought.