The Dino Is Done!

If you happened to read my blog post dated 3 Sep entitled "Playing," you would have seen the black-on-white outline of a dinosaur that I included with the text.

And here's the finished painting!

This is a Utahraptor whose fossils were found in southeastern Utah. It stood 6'-7'/2m high and is more likely what was featured in the Jurassic Park movies (velociraptors were actually 3'-4'/1m). Although this region of Utah is quite desert-y today, during the Cretaceous period when these things lived, the habitat was more tropical.

I've often toyed with the idea of making a few dinosaur paintings, and I don't know that this genre would ever take over the landscapes I do now. But it's fun to do something a little different once in a while. Dinos are also more difficult to do that I first thought; after all, there are no living specimens to study and/or photograph, yet dinosaurs need be anatomically correct nevertheless as far as the fossils are concerned.

But it was fun to do, it's a small-scale painting (8" x 10"/20cm x 25cm) and I even think of it as a bit of a self-portrait. Sometimes I feel like I've been around since the time when dinosaurs ruled the earth!

More Sales?

It's getting close to the time when I'll be heading back out to San Dimas to do the second weekend of the art show (see previous posts for details).

Last Friday, two small paintings sold (not that I was some great salesman -- the customers bought the pieces without, as far as I remember, even talking with me first). Attendance seemed OK to me, but the docents and staff felt there were fewer people than usual. Problem: the Los Angeles County Fair is going on this month, and it's not that far away. Apparently, businesses in San Dimas suffer when the fair is running its course. One local shop I stopped at was closed -- an hour early!

Saturday night, a few people showed up, but things were pretty slow.

So, both this show and the show in Twentynine Palms have produced two sales each. I'll get enough to buy a new set of tires I badly need. Four more sales, and I'll be able to buy a new set of shocks, as well. Even more sales, and maybe we'll be able to pay bills and/or have other repairs made. Let's hope for more sales!

Just this weekend to go, and then the San Dimas show is finished. Then I face a different challenge: I received a jury summons, and if I actually need to appear, it'll be next Monday.

Oh, brother!

Art Shows in San Dimas

I'll be making some valiant efforts at trying to sell paintings the next two weekends in San Dimas, CA at an upstairs gallery space in a historic house. A restaurant operates on the first floor, and in theory, anyway, people eat dinner and then wander upstairs to look at and (hopefully) buy art!

So-o-o-o ... I'm hopeful I'll be able to add to our bank account so we can survive a bit longer, if not a LOT longer.

On Tuesday, I hung the paintings, adjusted the lighting and took care of all those details that go with doing a show like this. Following are some pix of the two rooms I have all to myself:



Wish me luck! I'm still looking forward to taking a painting break and see if I can overcome some of this burnout I've been experiencing. (Some sales might even help that -- but we'll see!)

Today's Artist Reception

Ahhh ... survived today's artist's reception, with ME as the artist. Three hours of standing, schmoozing, nibbling on goodies, and staying inside trying to keep cool. (It's still HOT here in the desert!)

But it was fun, and it got me out of the house -- being a full-time artist has turned me into a hermit who needs to be in the studio and, to a lesser extent, near the computer. So events like this encourage me to keep my social skills polished.

So far, we've sold two small paintings -- one sold on the day I delivered the paintings to the gallery, and the other sold today. Let's hope this trend continues!

The photos show the room containing my paintings and some of the people who came to check out my stuff. Some of these guys are artists themselves. Networking is always a good idea, even for artists.

Playing

I thought I should try painting something a little different.

Other than the fact that, as far as I'm concerned, I'm still on a painting vacation, I've been wanting to take a shot at painting a dinosaur. If this is an area I might want to do more often, I'd probably still paint landscapes, but they'd contain ancient kinds of plants, and I'd have dinos instead of deer or bunnies roaming around.

The big challenge is: I have a certain casual knowledge of dinos as well as plants from the Jurassic amd Cretaceous epochs. But I'm not an expert. Going into this genre would require me to learn a lot more about ancient life forms than I know now.

And on a pragmatic level, I honestly don't know what the market is for dino paintings. Like any other subject, I'm sure I'd do better if I could afford to make inexpensive prints that parents could buy for their kids -- or even for themselves. But who knows -- I've seen a lot of dino art that is intended to show, as accurately as possible, the flora and fauna of distant times past. NO impressionism, NO semi-abstract: just detailed images that are sharp from edge to edge and top to bottom, running afoul of some of the conventions of classical realism.

So, my approach for now is to play around with a few dinosaur paintings, and we'll see where it all leads!

The image above is the painted outline of my first-ever dinosaur: it's a Utahraptor, found in southeastern Utah. They stood about 7'/2m high and thus were the size of the "velociraptors" in Jurassic Park (velociraptors were actually 3'-4'/1m high). The painting size is 8" x 10"/20cm x 25cm.

Jean-Léon Gérôme

Yesterday the Wiffee and I visited the Getty Center in Los Angeles to see the Jean-Léon Gérôme exhibition. He was a 19th century French painter known best for his romanticized images of the Middle East. (You can see many of his works at Jean-Léon Gérôme).

His paintings are stunning. On the one hand, they appear photographic, yet they're better than photos, plus he blurred edges of everything except the important subject. The images still look detailed, yet the subject pops out of the canvas with its sharp edges, brilliant contrast and color.




Above is one of Gérôme's paintings: Pollice Versa! (Thumbs Down!) (If you've ever seen the 2000 movie Gladiator with Russell Crowe, you've seen this artwork brought to life on screen in the opening moments of the film -- the director obviously knew about this piece!) Seeing the painting up close and personal, it's amazing how much detail Gérôme put into it, especially with the numbers of people in the stands of the Circus Maximus. It appeared to be the most popular work in the exhibit.

The description cards along side each work often mentioned comments made by the critics of Gérôme's time. Reading them made me realize how biased and subjective critics were then, as they are today. As an artist, I could see how hard Gérôme worked on his paintngs and how incredibly skilled he was in creating them. One of the bios on the walls mention he sketched eight hours a day, over and above painting and, later, sculpting. No wonder he was so good! I should take the 8h/d habit as advice for my own artistic development.

Seeing paintings of this caliber makes me realize how far I need to go as an artist, but it also demonstrates comments I've seen on artists' forums: artists who paint as Gérôme did would have a hard time surviving today. It takes a long time to work that way, and the painter would have to settle for low production while asking high prices -- a situation galleries don't care for. They want artists who can crank. This may account for all of the modernistic art we see so much of today. They can be made relatively quickly, and with the right kind of promotion, convincing and marketing, might even sell for lots of money.

In short: exhibitions like Gérôme inspire me and discourage me at the same time. Funny how life can be like that, huh?

Thoughts of Days to Come

Here I am, on the computer, feeling just a little guilty because I'm not painting.

Just a LITTLE guilty. I figure I'm on vacation, and working on the computer is the only thing I'm doing right now.

I applied for unemployment a few weeks ago, and I heard this week I'll begin receiving benefits since I was, in a sense, laid-off from my part-time teaching position at the community college.

I'm done painting for the art shows that are coming up next month. A few pieces still need to be framed; however, I've got more paintings than frames these days, and I can't afford to buy more right now. In a few cases, I'll pull paintings from some frames and use those frames on other, newer work. Some artworks were done on edge-wrapped canvases; thus, they don't need frames. And one of the show organizers said I could put small paintings on panels (1/8" thick) into clear plastic envelopes and display them as though they were unframed prints.

So I should be OK. I've been working hard seven days a week for most of the days and almost all of the nights. I'm tired. I need down time.

I'll have to wait until next month to find out if the college will want me to teach again starting in January 2011. We don't have many job openings here in this mostly-rural desert town, so if I don't teach again, I'll have to try and find a way to sell art without depending on expensive shows. The Internet to the rescue?

Finally, I'll want to see if there truly is a market for the style and subject matter I prefer to paint. If not, I'll have to come up with something else -- or quit making art to sell. It would be art for personal enjoyment.

We'll see. Interesting times ahead.