Wine and Sewage

I had to leave an online artists forum recently. I couldn't take it any more.

This particular forum offers quite a wide range of topics dealing with art. But the one I visited the most was the "Art Business" section because, like so many other artists, I'm trying to get answers about surviving financially as an artist, especially in this economy.

One of the "contributors" is a guy who makes little stained-glass sailboats and dragons. Frankly, he seems to be rather full of himself as he over-generalizes, provokes others to anger and can't really respond to disagreement; rather, he ignores it and continues to repeat the same tired comments he's become known for on that forum, or even accuses the disagreer of making personal attacks against him.

Others have already disappeared from the forum, and I'm just the latest. Some of what this guy says may be valid, but when so much of his approach seems counterintuitive or at least unrelated to other artists' experiences, it's hard to know what can be believed.

It reminded me of a pearl I picked up years ago:

If you add a spoonful of wine to a barrel of sewage, you have ... sewage.
If you add a spoonful of sewage to a barrel of wine, you have ... sewage.

Three Paintings at Once

Maybe I'm crazy, but I'm going to try to have three paintings going on at once!

Oil painters have been known to do this because of the drying times involved with oils. In my case, I'm in somewhat of a hurry to get these three particular paintings finished ASAP -- and I can't prioritize them, so I'll just HAVE to work on all three at the same time!

They are:

1. A Joshua tree scene just before sunset, with a sky similar to the Yosemite National Park scene shown above;


2. A second scene with Joshua trees, only it'll be done without all the transparent glazes. This piece will be offered on eBay or possibly some other online site other than my Website;


3. A Christmas image, of all things: not that I'm thinking about Christmas these days, but this painting is intended for a Southwest-flavored Christmas card. I know of several companies that might pick this up, or I may self-publish the design and sell boxes of cards locally later this year.

In the meantime, I've got a lot of chores to do around the house. I've been letting things go because I've been trying to paint so much. But with the economy slowed down, the need to produce-produce-produce isn't as acute right now.

Of course, that doesn't mean I won't be going insane trying to do all this stuff. Wish me luck!

ANOTHER Website Revision!

I spent most of the day revising my Website again. I decided the nine paintings I featured, three under each of the three categories, weren't enough.

So I lengthed the pages so I could show more paintings. Also, on the "Desert Paintings" page, I included some of my works the galleries have on hand right now, along with links to the galleries.

So if you haven't seen the site lately (or especially since Wednesday, 6 May), stop by and pay it a visit:

http://www.southwestspaces.com or http://www.desert-paintings.com.

If you have any comments or questions, comment me here or send an e-mail via the Website.

Painting of Another Favorite Mountain Range

In my previous post, I showed a recent painting of one of my favorite mountain ranges: the Sneffels Range in Colorado. (I wish I would have spent a LOT more time in that area while we actually lived in Colorado!)

The piece I've shown now is the Sonoyta Range which is in Mexico. I'm actually in the USA, viewing this scene from within Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in southern Arizona.

Besides the rugged appearance, the range features a peak (Punto Sonoyta -- Sonoyta Peak) in the middle and then drops away on either side of that peak. This makes it easy to make the Sonoyta Peak a center of interest, which I normally do whenever I paint these mountains. All of the other elements -- cactus, flowers, shadows -- function to set off the distant symbol of a rugged place.

Mount Sneffels in Colorado

Ah! I FINALLY finished updating my Website. I hope everything is working OK. Do me a favor: go there and buy about five paintings so I can make sure everything's working OK. =)

In the meantime, I posted some new paintings on the site besides revamping its look. One of the paintings appears here -- it's a scene of the Sneffels Range near Telluride, Colorado. Mount Sneffels is the tall peak right of center and is one of Colorado's "14'ers," meaning it's over 14,000 feet high (that's about 4.3km for you metric folks).

(That reminds me -- I meant to show both English and metric units for the sizes of the paintings on my Website. I'll have to fix that soon!)

The link in the first paragraph should work, but just in case, the site URLs are:

http://www.southwestspaces.com/ and http://www.desert-paintings.com/.

Changes Comin'

No, no, not the weather (although that changes a lot, too!)

I mean my Website (which, in case you forgot, is http://www.southwestspaces.com). Right now, I feature mostly paintings of the desert. While that area will always be my primary focus, I know not everybody wants to hang desert paintings on their walls.

So I plan to re-design things a little. Now, when you go to my site, you see a single picture of a painting and click on "Enter Site" to access the thumbnail page with all of the paintings I'm showing at the present time.

The comin' changes: the home page will have three pictures and captions -- "Desert Paintings," "Western Landscape Paintings (including Missions)" and "Wildlife Paintings." Click on one of those, and you'll be directed to a page with those types of paintings. No thumbnails: just the images, info and "Buy Now" buttons. The visitor will be able to navigate between the categories easily.

I hope to make these changes within another week or so. Let me know wotcha think!

Western Art and/or Fine Art

Last Saturday, I visited a Western art show that I've participated in a few times but, for the most part, I just visit to see what's new, talk with the artists I know (especially those I don't see any other time) and to try to get a feeling of what's selling and what isn't.

My own art has been evolving over the years, especially when it comes to my slowly increasing knowledge of how the Old Masters worked. One thing I've learned is the concept of selective focus. This idea first came to me by way of artist Virgil Elliot who pointed out how the Old Masters tended to paint a small area with sharp edges while softening or blurring the rest of the edges. This partly makes the viewer want to look at the sharper area (which is often the center of interest) and also actually makes the image look more realistic. After all, whatever we look at directly appears the sharpest to us while the rest of the view falls into our peripheral vision, where edges are -- guess what? -- less sharp. Next time you're in an art museum, look at some Old Master paintings and see what I mean.

Selective focus popped into my head a lot while I was looking at the paintings at the show. Except for watercolor paintings where everything was a little blurry, most paintings had lots of details which were uniformly sharp from side to side and top to bottom. Even distant features in the paintings seemed sharp. In short, the artworks seems to possess a sort of hyper-realism: realism that somehow wasn't. The paintings were sharper than photographs.

Another related thing I've learned over the years: it isn't necessarily hard to develop the technical skill to render objects realistically. But it IS harder to put some thought into one's art that raises it above the commonplace.