Promoting Paintings

I have recently joined a group called We Are Art Gallery.

Two pieces of mine - Darkness Visible and The Playwright's Study - are on sale through this site, as well as through my main art site.

Beyond the actual work of painting, I am learning the hard way that some element of marketing, public relations, and story telling are involved. The name, American Primitive (inspired by the title of a Gauguin book, "Writings of a Savage"), is a part of that.

One of the neatest thing about painting, however, is the creative process and sometimes just doing a piece for someone. It's almost as intimate as the literal act of lovemaking.(Obviously that sensation varies depending on whom the someone is...no one wants to paint for mom and say that it is similar to lovemaking).

To create a painting, thinking of your friendship/relationship with the individual for whom I am painting. You proffer the final piece to the intended. It is quite a feeling.

"A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

I think that happened to me yesterday...I was a bit drunk, so I am not sure.

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

- William Butler Yeats

This painting is titled "Waiting for the Muse," which was done for a friend of mine, in recognition of the friendship and inspired by a sketch she gave me.

Valentine's Day

For those who are coupled...or in a triad, v, quad, group setting, or even just plain unattached, happy Valentine's Day.

Of course, every day should be Valentine's Day.

A friend of mine is getting married today. It is not a bad day to get married. I wish her all the best.

I Plan to Live to 100 Years....

...if not longer.



We all have to have goals for ourselves. I figure 100 is a good age to pass, barring any unforseen accidents or acts of god. Get my daughter through high school and college, move on to Spain, live in a small coastal town on either side of Barcelona, make new friends, have old ones visit, make love to a redhead or two, paint and write, drink wine and whiskey and be happy.

Abraham Lincoln was born 200 years ago on this day, February 12, 1809.