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…
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"Should I get a degree in art?"
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…
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Kest Pottery “Eyeball” mugs. Thank you for a wonderful year!
Mastery in 2022
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
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This Steve Buscemi meme is like the Giving Tree.
Wading in on AI
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?
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Randy is a colorful little guy who likes to sing show tunes at the top of his lungs (usually while in the car).
The Monsterpot Story
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.
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Gruber Goofypot and his monsterpot cousins will be changing their address in 2023.
Falling down the rabbit hole
Say “SEO” and my stomach churns a bit and I feel a low grade anxiety, but I can’t place its source. It’s just a phrase that describes the rules that govern how other people search stuff online. According to web wizards like Neil Patel, how your product/ offering/ service is searched by the majority of us humans is the guide by which you should choose your keywords— and not how you would maybe categorize it or describe it yourself.
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Leap, 8.5” x 11”. Oil on board. 2016.
Leap
In a recent interview, I was asked to detail an experience in my life that shaped and empowered me. There were many that formed my early thinking but one really stood out as an “empowering” situation, and really gets at how I move about in the world— then and now, still. I was learning to…
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Ass-in-the-seat Time
Students, artists in particular, get frustrated with the seeming lack of speed on their journey to “success” (whatever that might mean). And I get it. I quit art school (the first time in the 80s) with one semester to go because I was offered a job “ghost” painting with a professional illustrator. I mean, the choice of go to school or make money and art….
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Animal Skeletons interior spread of exoskeletons.
Early Book Commissions: Animal Skeletons
In 1995, Franklin Watts published the Animal Skeletons book which I had immense joy in illustrating. I mean, who wouldn’t luuuurrv painting and drawing skeletons and bugs and hardshelled animals, etc?! When I started looking at the art direction and started thinking about what reference I’d need for the illustrations…
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Just Doing My Job, 18” x 24”, oil on gessoed paper. 2013.
What's your superpower?
What is your wonderful art nerd superpower and gives you great joy in the doing? Do you have a lot of "shoulds" chattering away in your brain, telling you that you need to make one kind of art over another? Is it motivated by the glittery prospect of surface rewards that have nothing to do with the deeper satisfaction of actually creating the work?
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Morels, 22” x 19”. Oils on Olio paper, 2022.
How to think about pricing your work
Are you an artist thinking about how to price your work? Are you a potential buyer looking for art that you like but with "affordable" prices? Here are some questions for you to consider:
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Good Artist statements
Writing a great artist statement can be frustrating and difficult. Being asked to synthesize a body of work into a 2-3 paragraph “statement” is hard because what we’re being asked to do is not a mission statement (ie what we’re going do to change the world) but a statement of our process and why. The point of an artist statement is…
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Secret Forest. Graphite, 17 x 13”, 2022.
Saying the quiet part out loud
Hmmm. What am I afraid to tell you about myself that might make some of you self-select out and say "nope, that's not for me" right from the jump? I thought about it and after a bit of mild cheek-gnawing, thought-- ok, I’ll tell you: I believe in magic ….yes, I do.
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Pressures, 2009. 15ft x 51". Charcoal, graphite with vellum overlays.
The Great Resistance
I've written on this topic before and it's still one of my favorite perennial questions. I ask myself this question a lot when I find myself feeling that little sour churn of "no, I don't want to do that [insert certain thing] in my work.
Then I get to ask myself, "why not?"
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Trolls, terra cotta. 2020
When you have everything you need....
We artists beat ourselves up for not being able to make a living at our art. We get depressed when we're not making as much money as we need to live solely on our art. But I'm telling you that's okay. That you're doing *any* artistic endeavor at all is success--- the success is in the doing. And in an ever-increasingly capitalist industrial world, making art from one's own hands is a radical and subversive act.
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Klaus’ Greenman, 2020. Red stoneware, 15” x 15”.
How do you measure success?
Why do we try to measure success by looking at what we don't yet have?
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Ephemerata, oil 28” x 28”.
The Mystery of Style
Style is where our ability bumps up against our ambition, so technically, we *always* have a style. That means too, that as our abilities grow and ambitions change, our style is always evolving…
Read MoreHow to critique artwork objectively: A Guide
Whether you're looking at art in a gallery/ museum space or your own artwork, you want to be able to discern what the art is *doing* not just by the way a piece feels to you, but by some very objective and concrete observations that can be applied universally. Here are the components of objective critique of a work of art that I always used when I was teaching and assessing student work.
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I repeat myself when under stress. I repeat myself when......
Have you thought about the way we artists use repetition? If you identify your motifs, you will have acquired more keys to unlock the “why” of the work you do.
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Dragons are just a slightly different idea of dinosaurs …. This piece marks a turning point in my thinking. Oil on paper, 24” x 36”, 2018. The bright colors come from having a long career doing children’s books.
Be yourself, you lovely weirdo.
Trying to be something I really wasn’t meant that I hadn’t been paying enough attention to what my work was always saying to me. I lost my way because I got caught up in other artists’ journeys and what was successful for them, lured away by this idea that if I…
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