Good Saturday Morning! Rize Mushroom coffee at the ready, LOL. It feels so good to have my studio up and running again! Truly is like being a fish out of water to not have it working for me. Being on my own too and not in a family reality, even if it’s a cottage apart. That did not work well for how I work as an artist or writer. I truly need the kind of time I get as an independent person. Better control of my time and less interreference. People may not mean to interrupt the day, but it happens. I recall myself trying to do art and having my own small children. It was frustrating as there was no time or place, I could set up to work in away from the kids. Your always on Mommy mode when you have kids. Not easy to separate unless you have the luxury of your studio elsewhere. When your children are grown it is a different matter! It’s time for who you are. And as adult children, they have their turn at learning their way forward with their own kids.

Letting go as a mother is not always easy. That mother hat wants to pop on, and I bet a father hat does too! The parenting hat____. Self-time won’t ever happen without setting boundaries nor if you don’t allow, give yourself time to be yourself.

Being the artist is no different than any other job. It is a job! If your to be serious about it. And you are the boss and employee all rolled in one! There is time to plan your way, then time to pull it off! You can’t sell without finding your target patrons or those who will aid you to sell your “wares”. You won’t sell without ever being seen! Don’t worry about competing with other artists. Do your own thing and you will attract patrons to you, purchasers of your work. Be creative with your art don’t pigeonhole yourself into being a certain way as an artist. Be creative in other ways. It is different today for artist. Don’t by into myths about artist instead pave your own way! Develop your art according to your own interests. Court those willing to hang something different not just what sells! There are people who like “different!” Crave it! I know I am always looking for the unusual. Yes! Artist do collect other artist work. I admire or love the work of another artist’s work. It’s wow! How was that done! Stunning! Beautiful! And also, that is what I would like to convey.

Artist are facilitators. We say what others may not be able to convey. We express life as we see it, and often as others do. A viewer will look at our work and recreate it by wondering just how it was done. Successful art indices the viewer into it. As if the viewer had a tiny spaceship and could travel in and around what’s there. If a viewer can do that, he or she is traveling into a painting that has depth. Not all creative work has to have great depth to work. Let’s say this, it has a degree of depth, enough to travel in.

Abstract art is often found as interesting when a viewer takes notice of it without bias. A story I like to tell is one when I was manning the Pro Art Gallery in Dover-Foxcroft Maine. The Maine Art Commission’s goals were to help mid-Maine artists. I believe I was involved pre-art school days.

The story: One day an elderly woman and her middle aged son came into the Pro Art Gallery. Wally Warren a nationally known artist had a sculpture just ahead of the door entering the exhibition. This was an obelisk with different objects attached to it. An old rake painted a bright color, a flip flop painted pink, and other objects I do not recall. The rake an flip flop got the attention. These two individuals came in and the comment for the older woman was, “And they call that art!” The son nodded and something in agreement. What happened next was brains need to understand what their eyes see. The went around several times and continued to stop and look at Wally’s obelisk with all the things attached. This obelisk was a barn beam where a point was made at its top, narrowed to a point. Before leaving the comments for this pair were. By the son, “I remembering going to the lake and wearing flip flops! Going to the lake was so much fun. The mother, “Your grandfather had a rake like that”. She began telling a story about the grandfather. I stepped up behind them and said, “It’s working!” And stepped back out of the way. They stared at the obelisk. The point had been made.

Now, it was not until I went to art school that I began to understand more about abstract art. I like many things I had seen prior to school and had become less bias. This was not always the case. When a teenager I would covet my father’s Readers Digest so to study the artwork often on the back page. One day it was a Picasso, I believe. A white canvas with just a black line figure drawing of a naked women with a small flower on the lower left corner of the painting. The price of the work was in the millions if I recall right. I thought to myself at the time that this was absurd and it angered me! I felt frustrated. I thought good art was all the other kinds I saw, landscapes, seascapes, paintings of animals, humans___. How little I had seen and how little I had known at that point. I wanted to be a really good artist one day! I knew nothing of the artistic process, did not recognize what I did was indeed such a process. I only new it was a compulsion I had to do. I was fascinated with exploring what I was doing. Thank goodness I became a broadminded artist as I became older experiencing more of life. You cannot become broadminded about any particular thing without experiencing it.

I promise to get new works into this computer but am sharing my work with you today, which you may have seen in other blogs.

~In The Studio~

Today will be different as I will work on a digital image using a photo of a Shibui foundation. I like the foundation so much but wish to test out the ideas before I commit to the paper. So, charging the pen. Digital will help me with color placement for one thing. Enough I think to imagine what happens on the Rives Printmaking paper. Size 22X30.

Best wishes! May love and laughter find you! Pejj

I