thoughts on art and creative living

Summer is a busy time for me. Between creating websites, creating art, and doing art shows, I manage to keep myself pretty busy. The summer weather is extending through September, for which I am especially thankful. I recall that last year around this time I was already lamenting summer’s end. Fall is gorgeous in Portland also, but I don’t pretend to absolutely love the amount of rain we get in the winters. I’m hoping to hold onto summer for as long as I can. The only really good thing I can say about foul weather is that it might make it a bit easier to get more painting done, with less distractions.

The painting above, “Summer Parade”, was completed about a month ago. It’s a rather small, sweet painting, which was inspired by a photo I took of a child some months back, snapped during a walk through my neighborhood (the original photo is this earlier post). In the original photo, the child bends down a large flower in order to smell it, so I exaggerated the size of flowers to give it more of a fantasy effect. I never figured out whether the child was a boy or a girl, but I like the ambiguity in the painting. It’s a rather smallish piece (8×10 image size), in a recycled frame that I painted.

It’s been a long haul this summer. After the three month limbo which finally led to the move to my current home and studio, I had a long process of settling in. Such things are difficult for someone of my Canceran temperament. Since my home is central to all aspects of my expression, I felt the need to immediately get everything in order. As soon as my studio was set up, I wanted to hit the ground running. I made a stab at starting some new paintings, but I was too exhausted to feel creative enough to finish them. I wanted to see some progress in my career, so when I was invited to show at a metaphysical fair on the Oregon beach (Pathways to Transformation, in Yachats), I decided that, if nothing else, it would get me rolling and introduce me to a niche I’ve been wanting to discover. So I confined myself to the studio for a while to crank out some affordable art to sell at the coast.
I’m happy to report that the show went pretty well. It met my expectations of what I needed to make to recover my investment, and I got a lot of great feedback. The most amazing moment of the weekend was when two women discovered me and started buying out all my stuff, making nearly half of my sales within 20 minutes. I was so overwhelmed by the fact that people loved my work so much that they wanted to give a little something to everyone they knew. Whenever I have any doubts about my ability to manifest abundance through my art, I’ll remember this as a defining moment.

Above is a pic sent to me by Jackie Brown, a photographer who also had a booth at the fair. Incidentally, the fair was advertised primarily through New Connexions magazine (which featured my art on its cover for its May/June issue in both 2007 and 2008).

ohmygosh… it’s almost 4 am, so why am I starting a new blog entry? I have to laugh at myself because I’ve been on this computer for hours. I’m excited to say that I’ve finally created a new etsy store, so I hope to be up and selling my stuff to a wider public soon! Here’s my etsy address:

eyeconartist.etsy.com

I’ve been burning the night oil a lot lately, mostly getting ready for art shows. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn’t (especially if it rains). At least I am getting a lot of new inventory out for the future months. I hope to take a break from the production mill soon, so that I can start painting again!

I never know if anyone is following this blog or not since the only comments I get are from cheap pharmaceutical companies selling viagra. If anyone IS out there, you may have noticed that I’ve fallen off of my posting habit for a couple of weeks.

So what have I been up to? I’ve been so busy that it’s hard to remember. There’s the continual supply of website updates to be done (my own as well as those of my clients). On top of this, I’ve been crazy mad preparing for artisan markets. It’s hard to know whether such ventures will ever pay off since one has to invest money to even have a chance of re-cooping one’s expenses for the cost of materials and presentation stuff. And then there’s the countless hours of slaving away, reproducing myself in the format of affordable products. Fortunately, I had a really good weekend… sold an original painting and lots of smaller stuff (prints, magnets, and pendants), so now I’m encouraged to do more! The added benefit is that I’m getting out of the house and meeting people. One of the downfalls of doing web design is that I spend a lot of my time in front of a computer. I feel so much more energized by getting my work out of my space. I have a contact high from all of the great compliments on my work.

Here’s my most recent completed painting:

Now that I have a handful of new paintings, I’ve updated them to my gallery, but I think it’s interesting to see the unfolding of imagery. The background of this painting originally belonged to another that I started (a lotus image, in an earlier post), but I felt that the background was in competition with the main image, so I started something new with it. I carved the tree images into the background, then gilded the recessed carvings with gold leaf. The patterned “wind drifts” and foliage are on the same layer as the bird (a paint-altered collage), which floats above the background. I decided to call it “Wind Song”.

Bird imagery has been a recurrent theme for many years. The painting I just sold was the first of such images, based on an actual dream of birds walking around each other in water. My beloved “Aquabird Dream”:

I’ve always found it interesting that though it was one of my first “serious” (i.e. original) paintings, it is the one that probably gets the MOST attention, even when shown with my more recent (more dimensional) artworks. I always wonder if it isn’t because I had a certain quality of naiveite when I created that painting (before I was fully infected by my art education), and was creating out of a truly personal vision. The painting was a steal considering how well-loved it was, but I’ve had it in my possession for 16 years. It was time to let it go. I was also glad that it went to another creative person (an author named Michael Hoeye. He gave me a copy of one of his books, “Time Waits for No Mouse”).

Here’s another thing I’m excited about. Spurred by the desire to make affordable art that people are likely to purchase at the artisan markets, I’ve started my own line of art pendant necklaces. They are reproductions of my artwork, cut in a circle, with a glass gem mounted on top. They are encased in baked polymer clay, and hang on a silver memory wire choker.