Mentors are super important! If you don’t have one or several, get thee some right away. And if you have the chance to mentor someone else, it could greatly and positively impact their life in ways that can’t be quantified.
The point is, no one knows what their life is going to be like 10, 20, or 30 years from now. But you’ve got to stick around to find out.
I meet someone at a gathering and they find out I’m an Artist. Before I can get even one word out about what kind of work I do, they start telling me about a painting— a painting! they saw at some gallery or show or arts collective. But they didn’t buy it and now it haunts them. They don’t know how to track down the artist but they snapped a photo of the artwork. Breathlessly, with hope in their eyes, they ask me…
Art collaborations are quite interesting. There’s Warhol & Basquiat, Dali & Buñuel, Björk & Barney, and the list goes on. Artists work together to stretch their abilities and techniques, and to gain important feedback about their work. In a collaborative visual artwork, you’re also “listening” to what the other artist is creating …
Holy heckin’ heck. In one month, my life’s been turned upside down. I’ve never been an early morning person, but since we’ve gotten our chickens, getting out of bed at 530 to greet them at rosy-fingered dawn with musical wakey-wakeys and a tray of their favorite things …
I’ve done only one graphic novel. It was 104 pages long. In the 2 years (nearly) it took me to complete it, I learned that while I had a great deal of fun (and really became proficient at Photoshop), I wouldn’t (probably?) do another one. At least that’s what I say now. Never say never?
There are TONS of resources out there for self-initiating artists, and there are many venues to advertise and sell work. Here is a list of many of the resources I’ve used over the years— there are many more newer ones out there to discover.
If I wasn’t dozing off, I was taking note of the art in this church. Morning light streamed into the floor-to-ceiling stained glass windows bursting with colored fragments, scattering light everywhere. Can we appreciate the aesthetics even though we no longer engage in the religious culture?
Laura Ingalls’ book and series, Little House on the Prairie, about her life as a pioneer, was an incredibly influential bit of literature for me in an important time in my life. Few books had such a lasting effect on me as this one did.
When I had made a batch of these prototypes, I gave one to Elva, my pottery mentor who gifted me my studio and equipment. Her remarks on seeing the ware were that I was making pottery in the tradition of “face jugs.” What was that?
You know those people who sit in the stands and throw trash onto the field. They’re the ones who are verbally beating up the players, flinging invectives and general negativity. They’ve never been on the field. Never players. And yet they feel competent to criticize or judge something they themselves have never done…
I found a great way to stretch canvases starting at the corners! According experts in restoration, it’s an archivally sound method that distributes the canvas’ tension evenly so as to avoid tension cracks in the painting’s corners.
We sometimes hear people referring to their children and family surname as their “legacy” and this is an oft heralded achievement. But when artists use that word, legacy, it’s suspect. Is it because we’re not dead yet? Because we haven’t yet finished the work? Perhaps legacy is…
A post about a commission of a series of 4 paintings tied together thematically by the “seasons”, done in my usual botanical style and content. So that means the images will be overflowing with plants and animals, particularly bugs, flowers, etc. Everything jockeying for a place onstage, tumbling and vying to be seen, interacting with the environment, living in their niches…
Quite by accident, I recently stumbled across a method of pricing artwork that really sits well with me. No soul-crushing sterility of hourly or material rates, and no squishy guesstimations based on the sentimentality of “what feels right”. I’d written an earlier blog post on these other methods…
What is letterlocking? It's the old practice of sewing and sealing your letter with wax to create an “envelope” to ensure that the letter hasn’t been read and that it hasn’t been tampered with. In 2022, unopened letters from Mary Queen of Scots surfaced and were unsealed by historians. The banished rival of Queen Elizabeth I used a “dagger”…
Have you been considering getting a website for your art and you keep putting it off? The learning curve might be a little steep at first with some of the technical aspects of setting it up but it can be really fun once you get the hang of it. One of the most delightful and unexpected benefits of having a dedicated art website…
In 2023, my keyword is commitment. It’s not a very flashy word inspiring a lot of boldness or risk, but one that speaks of quiet grit. It’s a word that really describes what I feel is an appropriate focal point for my current thought.
You see, I know what burn-out is….
I started working on weekends and summers when I turned 14. My very first job was cleaning hotel rooms. The cigarette smoke and weird smells of the aerosol cleaners weren’t a great combination (and people can be really gross), but I could walk to work and…
Sometime in the mid-90s, I had the opportunity to visit Harlan Ellison and his wife Susan at their home in Thousand Oaks, CA, and what I remember most was the gargoyles they had hanging over the garage entrance. When I got home, I just had to try making some of my own….
“Moonpots” are my variation on the 1000-year-old Yixing tradition of making lidded teapots. The Jiangsu region boasts a unique purple sand clay which the artisans use to produce beautifully hued ware, but it’s the method and precision of the construction of the pots which first grabbed my attention when I became aware of this tradition.
Okay, so this blog post is a little off the beaten art path, but I had a conversation with someone today which made me realize that I use a specific strategy…
There was a poster hanging in the hallway at the art college I attended that was a call for artists/ artisans to come to New York City to apprentice as a mason/ sculptor on one of the cathedrals there in the city.
Like most kids in the 70s and 80s, I grew up with the traditional and practically obligatory art influences — Norman Rockwell, John James Audubon, Leonardo daVinci— seen as an old calendar page framed and hung on the wall or as a fancy coffee table book (right under the full-color glossy tome of King Tut’s treasures) but it wasn’t until…
Hoo boy, I get asked this question a lot. I’d quit the small art college I was attending in the 80s to work for an illustrator as his ghost painter. Back then, I’d have said an art degree was a waste of time. After I’d graduated from college with my bachelor’s degree in the early aughts, I was pretty darned sure that a college degree was the best thing anyone could do for their life in general. Later I earned my master’s at MICA and the experience was…
I’ve had some sort of dedicated art website since 2000. The first one was a basic HTML single-page on my college’s campus server and I experimented with the design for a few years until I set up a templated site on Squarespace and bought my first domain. So very fancy. Until very recently…
For the past couple of decades, a late December tradition has been to look back on the past 12 months and give its passing some kind of assessment. I remember all the wonderful people in my year and the “successes” for which I’m grateful, and then there are the things that didn’t go as planned but I’m still happy if I learn something from the experience. This exercise is also accompanied by a list of
You know that fun little new avatar creator, the Lensa app, that’s exploding in popularity right now? It’s made your new favorite avatars on your social media, it’s cheap, and best of all, you can tell it to make up to 50 avatars in a variety of art styles. Is it just harmless fun?
The Monsterpots are what you’d call a staple in my Kest Pottery shop. In marketing parlance, it’s called a “signature item” that I make all the time and it’s a unique thing. One might call it a branded work and in doing so, I betray the fact that I’ve been doing waaaaayyyy too much research about marketing.
While art-making isn’t as high stakes as eating a wild mushroom, sometimes it can feel just as terrifying to “trust the process” when you don’t have a clue where your work is going or how you’ll get it where you want it to be.