Back on the Trail

 

 

I’m back on Deer Woods Trail. Each season I have a lot of clean up. I pick up debris one trail at a time. After the trails are cleaned up, I start trimming the tree limbs that reach too low and far onto the trail. I leave the limbs and debris on each side of the trail to gradually rot away. Since it is a private trail, I don’t have to groom it, as public land trails do. Someday I would love to have a controlled burn, but I would have to have professionals do that.

 

The mornings on the trail are gorgeous now. As soon as I am through with the hard work I will get my paint box ready to set up for the painting season.  I have already picked out my first scene. I set up my box on the trail and tie a large heavy black garbage bag over it. My tripod is metal. Then I move it up and down the trail through the season. It works great.

 

Country painters love the trail……

Time to Get Out

 It’s almost time to get back out on the trail for my fall-spring studies of trees and nature. I’ll set up my paint box and move it up and down the trail. I put a big heavy trash bag over the box, so it can stay out for months at a time, safe and dry. 

 My October series will be done with my favorite winter palette. I use cadmium red light, yellow ochre, ultramarine blue, Payne’s gray and titanium white. It is a modification of the Anders Zorn palette. I have loved this palette for years. I’ve always loved single primary palettes. Few choices and endless variations thereof.

 This palette gives a lot of subtle neutrals, but the cad red offers an intense choice if desired. The purples are subtle like the winter atmospheric quality of distant trees. My paintings are gradually becoming more neutral. I rely more on value structure than color saturation. I have a long way to go toward being a fine painter. I’m taking the slow and steady journey.

 Experimenting is swell for country painters.... 

Design

  

 

There are lots of important parts of painting, but the most important to me is design. I always call design, values, and color mixing the BIG THREE of painting. Without good design, the other two have little value.  Many artists use over saturated color as a crutch because they don’t understand good design and value relationships. The vibrancy gives them a feeling of shock and awe! I have seen many wonderful paintings with minimal color. 

 

I had a marvelous design teacher in my BFA program. He had the marvelous skill of using minimalistic subjects and limited palettes to teach design. His pieces were wonderful. Over the years I have studied design extensively as well as values, and Notan.

 

I would love to teach design again if we ever rid ourselves of Covid.  

 

Country painters love design…

Best of Friends

  

 

Now and then I have the privilege of spending a morning with a dear friend who is a professional full time artist. We have very different styles, different genres and different approaches to painting. This is a celebration for us. We have never allowed ourselves to be competitors, just friends. We have done many residencies and projects together along the way in our careers. 

 We get together and talk shop about our interests, our work schedules, and directions of discovery as painters. She is very sophisticated and a world traveler. I am a country painter. None of our differences matter a bit. We are in sync with our quest for discovery, painting, and love for the natural world. We have watched each other change and grow over the years. We share being a painter in the best way. 

 The thing I like the most about aging as an artist is that I no longer have to be good, or compete as a painter. Painting is so much fun. I never think about bad or good paintings. I just love doing paintings. I’ll never be as good as she or some other painters I know. I no longer see that as a disadvantage. Painting is truly the great equalizer. Someone will be more gifted, or not as gifted. No one will really care, because I don’t. I consider painting to be the great privilege of my life. How could I not like any part of it? Stepping into my studio each time is like going out for a hot fudge sundae! All of the angst of art school, the years of competitive art, galleries and openings, have faded out of my career. Only the joy remains of putting brush to canvas! I vow to keep it that way onward.

Commissions

  

 

I have a perfect commission collector. Those are hard to find. He brings me lovely vintage frames, and I do paintings to fit them for him.

He sometimes gives me vague subjects of interest and sometimes just tells me to do what I like. He never gives me a specific timeline and he never butts in,asking me to change the painting. When I show it to him, he says it is exactly right. What a dream collector! I’ve never had another like him.

 Most of my commissions go fairly smoothly, with minor changes along the way. Some are from corporations, some from interior designers, some from individuals. 

 I have been lucky to have only two commissions that were disasters. One lasted 18 months before the collector was satisfied. She expected many changes over the time line. It was finally finished. What a relief. The other went through three large canvases with no satisfaction to be found. I finally sent the client her deposit just to end the pain. She never thanked me or responded again. 

 Commissions take patience and understanding. It is always about the collector, never about the Artist. Leave your artist ego at home if you do commissions. 

 Country painters love their collectors…

Value of Art and Culture

 Sometimes people ask me why art is important? They think it is just decoration. Why invest in original art? 

Art affects every part of our lives. Our cars, furniture, kitchen tools, gardens, and almost all products are the result of art design. 
Without original art we have no culture, no refinement in our society. We have more civility with art, and that is sorely needed. Art and culture are the barriers against chaos and meanness of society. We must teach our children that all the arts are vital to their society in every generation. 
Art is not just for the wealthy or highly educated. It is for all of us. I still am stunned by the portraits of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and others. Artists are the historians of our own time on this earth. 
My collectors like to think of my paintings as vacations. They can go to that place and leave the stress of their day instantly, even if just for a moment. I have never believed in reproductions. I think they cheapen our art and encourage a throw away attitude about art. 
When a collector buys my work, they have exclusivity. No one else will ever have that painting if they wish to keep it and pass on to the next generation. Original art is special, and should be treasured. I have a large variety of prices for that reason. 
We should be teaching our children that art is vital to our society for every generation.
Life is wonderful for country painters.....

Clear Up

 It’s been awhile since I went through my older paintings in storage. I think it is time to clear up my inventory. Some of the paintings in storage are some of my favorites, so they are rotated into the studio inventory again in future. Others were part of my experimentation of palettes, brush work, and other elements of painting. There is nothing wrong with them but I have advanced beyond them and improved. 

 

I am thinking of filling my browse boxes and saving the frames for new work. I’ve not had a painting sale since 2018. Some if the smallest paintings will go into my free art gallery. It will be a fair amount of effort to sort through the work and put it in the sale bins, but it’s nice to give people a chance to own original art at a good discount.  It’s good for me to move them out too.  I’ll have them ready by September 1.

 

Country painters always need studio space….

Influencers

 I study marketing a lot, to enhance my career. Artists have to sell paintings to live.  There seems to be a thing now called influencer marketing.  It is all the rage.

I know several artists who depend on this scheme to make a living. The idea is that they must have thousands of social media followers to sell art. The necessary number is a hundred thousand +. They must post a certain number of times a day, follow celebrities, and other “influencers”, have the right hash tags, and many other requirements. They must use sales funnels and landing pages. These formulas will make them successful.

This idea is appalling to me. These are artists who will say that I just don’t understand. In my view, this is like going to a get rich quick convention. Whatever happened to being a real person who actually works hard in the studio every day, who actually cares about the people who follow and share their own lives with their favorite artists? If this is a turn off for me, you can bet it will be for art collectors. No one wants to be constantly sold to and manipulated with formulas.

I am admittedly old school. Most of my collectors are my friends. I actually care about their ups and downs, good and bad days. My collectors are real people with real lives, not numbers on social media. I’d rather have a hundred friends than 100,000 strangers following me because they think I might be cool or know someone cool. 

Life is real for country painters....

Painting Fun

 I’ve been practicing my acrylic skills this summer, first with small paintings on watercolor paper, and lately the 8x10, 11x14 and 12x16 sizes. I have slowed down a bit and pay attention to the stages of the painting. I think carefully about decisions. Hopefully I will be ready for the fall season of tea parties and my front porch show at The Artisan’s Guild on October 29th. It is all good fun!

 

Country painters have a wonderful life…

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