The Challenge

  My biggest problem with getting something done lately -- uh, well, always --has just been commitment and time management.  A few weeks ago, I dug out that pen & ink drawing I'd put aside a couple of years ago, as well as a couple of others, and decided I was going to at least give it a try to get it done by the shows coming up in May.  I got out all my tools, cleaned my pens, and got it all ready to go... and then did other stuff. 
    I mentioned this to a co-worker, Chris, one morning as I was getting ready to leave, and he issued me a challenge:  to work on the drawing for at least an hour, maybe two, between the time I get home from work and the time I go to bed.

It's actually working.  I took these pics to show him my progress:

Now, I don't know if I'll get it done in time for the shows.  It's a complicated and labor intensive piece, and fairly large, but at least I'm making progress.

Missed Opportunity

This weekend was the Pride celebration in Oklahoma City, and once again they had an "art" show.  This was only the second time, and they're still trying to get their act together.  I expected that, since I had done the show last year, I might have gotten some notification, but apparently that's not a thing.  I didn't actuall find out they were doing it for sure until I saw it on the schedule in the Gazzette two days before the show.  So if I am to do this show next year, I'm going to have to be a lot more proactive about my participation.

Last year, I was in the unique position of being the ONLY artist in the art show.  Everyone else was selling t-shirts, trinkets, and advertising services.  This year, with my absence, there were no artists at all.

My entry last year was the result of some effort on the part of the committee to attract artists to the show.  A fellow came out to the Paseo show and was passing out coupons for half off the entry fee.  The going rate for art show entries is about $100 per day, slightly over that if it's a large established show.  They were charging $200 for a day and a half, and it was necessary to tear down just as the crowds were arriving because the tents are set up on the parade route.  There are spaces available at the side, for an additional cost, tho.

I did moderately well at last year's show, but I think I might have done better this year.  I think that the new pics I have would appeal to that particular audience.  But money is a problem right now for everyone, and the new pics are more expensive than my old p&i prints.  But I still would have liked to have tried.

Self Satisfaction

I'm feeling very pleased with myself.  I finished a painting.

This is the painting that I was working on when my friend Loggan convinced me that I needed to start printing some of my photos instead of just hiding them on my computer with the idea that someday I'd get around to painting or drawing them.  And now it's done.  And apparently sold.

If you've been to my shows and asked me about the photos that I showed this year, then you already know much of this story.  I take lots of pictures. Lots.  Tons.  And now that everything is digital, whether on my camera or my phone, all of them get loaded up on my computer.  I then play around with the ones I like best...  Well, actually, I play around with most of them regardless, finding the best composition, changing it to black and white if it should be a pen & ink,  tweaking the colors if it should be a painting, sometimes changing the color scheme entirely, and running them through some other filters to add some cool visual effects.  Sometimes I forget to go to bed when I'm doing this.  And then, after all that work, it goes on a memory stick in a file called "potential" where it mostly sits unseen except by me and, perhaps, the man-spouse if he happens to notice. 

I like morning light a lot, so frequently my picture taking expeditions happen on a Sunday morning when I'm getting off work, and the parking downtown is free and abundant.  The photo for the painting above was taken one October morning when the sun had moved to the south and was lighting up the north side of the Bricktown Canal.  There is a bar on that side (I thought it was a restaurant, but it's a bar) where all the seating is brightly painted wooden chairs.  The morning light on the chairs was incredibly beautiful, and I took several pictures with my little Kodak.  Six of those pictures turned out pretty good, five I liked well enough to paint, four I intend to paint (though I haven't decided which one to skip,) and two I love.

Frankly, painting a series is pretty ambitious for me.  I already have five canvases sitting in the studio that I haven't been working on, some of them years old.  And there is a large pen & ink that I started a year and a half ago that hasn't seen the light of day in... uh...

 I know.  I'm ashamed. 

So one night, Loggan and his partner, Steve, come over for dinner, and we all wander out to the studio because Loggan wants to see what I'm working on.  I showed him this partially completed painting, and explain that it's going to be one of four, and then I fire up the computer to show him the other three.  As I'm scrolling through the source file, he says, "What's all this?"  I explained that this is my source file for all my future works.  He said, "Doc, you're never going to get around to that.  These are wonderful the way they are.  Why don't you just find someone who can print them for you, and put them in your show, and see if anyone likes them."  The man-spouse concurred, because, well, he knows me.

Within a couple of weeks afterwards, I found out that Tim, the guy who cuts my frames for me, had a giclée machine.  I asked some questions about how it worked, and how I should provide him with my images, and then brought him my memory stick with all my pictures.  I had him print my favorite.  O Em Gee, it was gorgeous.  Ultimately, I had him print eleven different pictures, which I had in my shows this year.

But...
I discovered that some of the picture I had were small.  The large ones worked very well printed in a large format, but others, either through cropping or reducing, could not be printed large without becoming pixelated.  The chair pics happened to be thus, which is okay, because they would still be painted anyway, but there were others that I would have liked to have had ready for upcoming shows.  Yeah, I could print them small, but there's just something about the image that says it needs to be bigger, y'know?

So, in spite of having a new medium to show, it seems I still have a lot of work to do.  I guess I better get crackin'.

Paseo 2016, Day Three: Pondering The Future

Boy.  I am tum pluckered.

It was raining a bit this morning, and I guess overnight as well.  It made things cooler for a while, until later when it was just more humid.  I had taken everything down last night because of the possibility storms, so this morning I completely rearranged it all.

The picture of the First National Center, "Skyline Signature," continues to be the most popular of my photos, though no one liked it enough to take one home with them.  The pictures that someone did take home were "No Time Left For You" (the parking meter) and "That None May Penetrate" (the combination lock.)  Other than that, I only sold one of the letters, and finished the show just short of making back the entry fee.


Late in the afternoon, another artist came around, and she was very complimentary of my work.  But she told me something I had already been thinking about: I'm surrounded by crafts and resale items, and it's hampering my sales.  Not that the show was good this year anyway, she said, but she thinks that I should be in the "real" Paseo show, and not Kathy's.
    I decided to check on the possibility of that, so during a restroom break, I headed north and spoke to a randomly selected artist about how does one get into the "real" Paseo show?  My question confused him at first, because, as it turned out, he was part of Kathy's show as well.  In fact, there were two more booths in Kathy's show north of him, the last being #120.  (I was in #29.)  I had no idea that the show was that big.  He also told me that the "real" Paseo show uses Zapplication  for their entries, which is why he's doing Kathy's.  I understood, because Zapplication is the reason I hadn't been doing the Stillwater show, nor the OCCC show for the last several years.  So, considering all this, I've decided that the thing to do, to try, is to just note on next year's application a placement preference.

I met a couple of interesting people late in the day.  One was the lady who owns the Empire Pizza building, which once was the Friendly Laundry, the subject of my pen & ink drawing "Almost Friendly."  She said that she once had all of those letters, but she doesn't know where they are now.
    The other was a lady whose father was the man who built the wall that is the subject of my pen & ink drawing "Freshly Fallen Silent Shroud," as well as the walls at the entrances to Fink Park, Woodlawn Cemetery, and other places in Edmond.  It seems he was the go to man for those kinds of rock structures, and the city of Edmond relied on him to get the job done.

It was also nice to see friends Michael and Josh, who I haven't seen in a while.

As far as I know, this is the last show for a while.  I always refer to the day after the last art show as New Year's Day, because it's the day I get to start working on the stuff that I want to do instead of what I have to do.  Not that I won't jump at the chance to show my work if the opportunity arises, of course.