There must be a few things that I learned in January. Thirty-one days of nothing seems a little out of character here. As Winnie-the-Pooh said, “Think think think!” January was occupied with relearning, persevering, and never quitting. (If I was a smoker, I would have really done a number on my lungs in January.)
Something that I thought I learned in October (Item #1) turned out to be an “urban myth”. (I put that in quotes because I am not urban but I bought into the myth.) Microwaved water does NOT kill plants. A friend tested it. She also sent me to Snopes, a site that I don’t fully trust, so when I heard that myth from someone I trusted, I just believed. I’m sorry for misleading you.
Every Drop, graphite on archival paper, framed and matted to 14×16″, $400, available here.
2. After over a year of wrestling through design, decisions, details, logistics, and finances, this is the result. It was a process, and I think the overarching theme is “Nevuh nevuh nevuh give up”, as pronounced by Winston Churchill (This seems to be a post of quoting English sources who repeat words. )
3. While putting in my monthly shift at the Mural Gallery and Gift Shop in Exeter, I discovered a new kind of picture frame for paintings—oil or acrylic, not watercolor, which require mats and glass because they are on paper. If I can find them AND if they aren’t expensive AND if they look good, this could be a way to frame my plein air paintings for the show coming in August. (Did anyone from England famously say “If, if, if”?) I paint on board, not canvas, when painting plein air, so they need to be framed. (Just learned these are “float frames”)
4. There is another topic under the heading of “Nevuh nevuh nevuh give up” which deserves its own post and requires some permissions, so it will have to wait. But here is a clue (just the preliminary cover design):
5. I am now in the process of editing and formatting two new books. Neither one is ready for public disclosure, and as I work, it becomes very apparent to me that I will NEVER be comfortable with anything designed by Microsoft or Adobe. When I think I understand how something works, either it gets redesigned so that I have to spend time relearning it, or so much time has passed that I have to start over because NONE OF IT, NONE NONE NONE, is intuitive like Mac.
February, my first favorite month, will rescue me from this malaise.
A commissioned pencil drawing for a retiring Visalia city council member in 2022.
This post is just to vent my thoughts about a day spent in Visalia. It might fall into the categories of “Why is She Bloviating Again?” or perhaps “Too Long, Didn’t Read”.
I headed down the hill to Visalia one morning and was tailgated around the lake. What does tailgating accomplish when there is no place to pass and the tailgatee obviously cannot drive any faster than the person in front of her? The tailgater ignored the first 2 passing lanes, and then roared around at the third one. Good riddance. (See you at the light at the four-way, if I’m careless and you are lucky.)
My first stop in town was one of those giant office stores to get some papers shredded. There are 2 on the same side of the same busy boulevard, and I picked the wrong one. “Wrong one”?, you may be asking. This one apparently had only one employee who was running his feet off. It also is the one where the customer has to stuff all the papers in a bin, rather than the employees just taking care of it.
I survived. That sort of situation with waiting and inconveniences is a chance to just look around and observe folks. I saw 2 other women near my age, and all three of us had our hair up in those claw-type clips. There was an obese man in a cart who felt the need to explain to the clerk (a second employee eventually emerged from a break room) that he had been a dedicated baseball player who played on winning teams until age 38. No one seemed put out by his need to explain why he requires a cart to get around; the dude was obviously very lonely.
There was a quick stop to unload a box of unnecessary items at Rescued Treasures, a thrift shop enterprise run by the Salvation Army the Rescue Mission. It was close to the wrong giant office store, so maybe that wasn’t the wrong one after all.
A kind and generous friend had given me a gift card to Sprouts, which is a fancy grocery store with bright lights, organic foods, and shockingly high prices. My hope was to buy raw milk, something I have been curious about for a long time. (My interest began when I met some people associated with an Arizona dairy called Fond Du Lac Farms.) Alas, it wasn’t meant to be because their shipment hadn’t arrived for the week. Another customer was waiting for it and he told me that he pays $17 a gallon. I would have been quite content with just a pint, but that curiosity will have to wait.
The prices almost made me need oxygen, and the lights were so bright that I wondered if sunglasses might be in order. I wandered around the store, reading labels, thinking, doing math, not wanting to waste the gift card on stupid stuff. Finally, I chose some lunch meat and a tray of sliced cheeses to share with friends on an upcoming outing, found some herbal tea that supposedly fights blood sugar levels, and a few mixed nuts that promised no peanuts (because they are just too pedestrian for Sprouts’ customers). The checkout was a self-serve with a friendly worker there to assist. The total for my four items was $29, which was $4 over the gift card. (I thought it was better to be over and pay some cash than to have to return to use up one dollar.)
Next, I headed out to find another new grocery store, about which I have heard great stuff for several years. Aldi’s is on the far south end of town, bringing to mind a threat in my childhood that “one day Visalia and Tulare will be merged into a single town.” Hasn’t happened yet but the growth is steady in that direction.
Aldi’s is known for charging 25¢ for its shopping carts, which gets returned to you when you put the cart back in the corral. (It locks into the cart behind it to spit your quarter back out.) I wandered around the store, comparing prices with those on a Winco receipt, trying to be smart about spending. I bumbled and fumbled through the self-checkout with its pushy computer voice telling me to either scan the next item or finish and pay. I kept telling “her” (it didn’t announce its preferred pronouns but the voice was female) to just hold on. Oddly enough, the total was also $29, but this time I got eleven items.
My grocery list was barely touched, so next I headed to Winco, my normal grocery store. I try to only shop every 6-7 weeks, with Trail Guy supplementing for dairy and produce at our local overpriced but convenient market (Let’s see. . . 1-1/2 hour driving and $15-20 for gas to save money? Nope.) It was a thrill to quickly find just what I needed at prices I was accustomed to paying. It had only been about 5 weeks, so the cart was manageable. Sometimes I almost need 2 carts when I wait too long between trips.
It was a massive relief to finally be on the freeway heading east into the mountains. The foothills are green, the sky was blue with puffy white clouds, and although there were a few tailgaters, I was heading home and didn’t care. Does it bother anyone else when people try to force you to pull behind a big rig so they can drive 80, not caring that you are quite happy to go 70, which is 5 miles over the speed limit, not caring that you don’t want to drop to 55 or 60 behind a big rig? What is wrong with people?
Here is my theory about what is wrong: people live in crowded conditions, with too many stores, too many choices, too high of prices, too much to do, too little quiet and privacy. It makes them anxious and cranky and impatient. Or, to quote Anne Lamott from her Twelve Truths of Life: “Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy and scared.”
P.S. Dennis Prager wrote about this topic several years ago:Imagine No Big Cities. (Thank you, DV!)
Today’s post is long, lots of words for a subject I have pondered for over three decades. It might fall into the category of Too Long, Didn’t Read. If talk about art business bores you, please come back tomorrow. If you make it through to the end, you truly are My People. If not, I hope you will rejoin My People tomorrow!
An important question to ponder when considering one’s next step in the business of art.
In an ongoing conversation with an artist friend who is working hard to build up her art business, several things came up. I told her that much of what I have tried through the years either didn’t work, or it is now irrelevant and out of date. After the 30+ years of building an art business, my main takeaway is a very valuable and hard to earn item: local name recognition. I know My People and My People know me.
When in a quandary in life or in business, sometimes it helps to go eat some ice cream.
List of No Mores
I spent years trying many avenues of marketing; here is a very long list of things I now simply say “No, thank you” to.
People want to borrow our work and not buy it. When someone says “It’s great exposure”, in an effort to get artists to participate in something that will take time, expense, and effort, I say no thanks. A person can die of exposure.
No more giving away my work (unless it is an organization I support). It never resulted in any sales, and one year I actually gave away more than I sold. (Another artist friend told me, “Oh, I just give my junk that no one will buy”. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? What does that do for an artist’s reputation??)
No more shows with entry fees. It costs to make the art, deliver it, and then retrieve it; IF the piece sells, the show organizers keep a percentage.
No juried shows—my work is rejected more than accepted. Most often these are juried by folks from cities who do not value realism. These are not My People. I’m looking for sales, not ribbons. (I did very well in the Ag Art show in Madera for a handful of years; then when their entry fees went up, they shrunk the number of categories, and gas became so very expensive, I said “NO MAS!”)
No traveling for art fairs—my work is locally based, and there is no point in chasing down new markets with new subjects which don’t speak to My People. Entry fees, time away from home, equipment to set up, producing art that is specific only to that area, travel costs, being unknown in that city—none of this seems like a prudent use of time, treasure, and talent.
No more chasing internet stuff—it takes hours (and hours and hours and hours. . . ) of engagement on FB, Etsy, Instagram, Pinterest, to build a name and get sales; then, those platforms can mess with the with internet magic and cut off your followers. I tried all of those, and concluded that my time was better spent actually making art while communicating with My People through real life, snail mail, emails, email newsletters, and of course this blog, followed by tens (people I know, bless your little hearts!)
No galleries that keep 50% (or more), are far away, and can stuff your work in a closet or take a powder in the middle of the night.
No reproducing my work other than on cards; if the original doesn’t sell, why would the reproductions?
No framing my work; people’s tastes vary widely, it increases the cost of the work, and it ties up money in something that requires care and special handling.
Ducks don’t ever think about these matters of consequence.
Exceptions
There are many many exceptions to these rules. They are not etched in stone, and I break them occasionally without expecting any results except satisfaction that maybe I helped someone.
The day after I sent this list to my friend, I got a request from a local nonprofit gallery seeking more art to fill up a group show opening in two days. I called my friend who quickly chose 2 of her paintings along with one of mine which happened to be handy. She delivered, attended the reception, and will go pick up the work when the show is finished. (I have no illusions about selling my one piece.)
My People
My audience is local people, real people I know or have met or who know people I know, people who appreciate this place and my style of painting and drawing. They are people who say things like, “I don’t know anything about art but I know what I like.” They want to work with and buy from someone who makes art they understand, and often custom subjects that mean something to them. They want to work with someone who will listen to them and help them figure out what they want, not confuse them with ArtSpeak or make them feel stupid. My People!
So, my efforts go into making my work the best it can be, pouring myself into my drawing lessons (I LOVE MY STUDENTS!), representing Tulare County to help My People hold their heads up, living here in California’s fly-over country.
I use pencils, oil paints, and murals to make art people can understand of places and things they love for prices that won’t scare them. I make art for My People!
My first blog post was April 15, 2008. Since then, I’ve posted over 4000 times, and my “media library” has around 19,000 pictures.
Tech is continually updating, which is just a euphemism for “complications”. Stuff that used to be easy becomes more difficult. Companies that used to sell products (virtual products in this case) outsource their services to other countries, where people can work from home on the phone, while practicing their English. Services that used to come with the virtual products now cost money.
Programs that used to be bought on a disk to get installed in your computer became available only through the interweb airwaves. Then, they became outdated, stopped functioning, and updates started to cost money. Next, you have to subscribe instead of owning the program (now called “apps”, short for “applications”). The price starts out small, but incrementally increases.
The pressure to buy continues to increase, often built on the fear that you might lose your information.
This is happening with my website. I’ve had four or five web designers, and each one either quit working for him/herself* and went to work as an employee of a company that charges 2-3 times as much, or quit to have a baby.
Now I have to pay to get help, pay to protect my information from getting stolen, pay to store my information, and pay to protect from getting invaded by anonymous creeps.
IT’S ALL TOO MUCH!!
So, I am now deleting all my old photos and old posts. Nobody cares, so why am I keeping it stored in some virtual cloud, paying some mysterious company full of advertisers, fear-mongers, pushy sales people, and strangers from even more companies to protect it all?
So, here I go. . . trash, delete, trash, delete.
I wonder if anyone will notice? I wonder if anything will improve on my site? I wonder if I will be able to back it up without getting an error, a message that I don’t have enough space, a warning that my whole site might “crash”, and someone with a difficult-to-understand accent telling me I will need to rebuild my entire website from scratch?
I just came here to be an artist, to depict the things and places that we know and love, and to show and tell you about them.
Okay, back to the virtual dump. . . thanks for showing up today and listening to all this.
*Nope, not going to use a plural pronoun for a singular situation.
No round-up of the year’s accomplishments, best-of lists, goals for next year—just some photos of another walk in Three Rivers. (Captions are a little bonus for you, or perhaps just an annoyance.)
Will this tree ever finish changing to fall colors? This photo was taken on December 21. HEY, FLOWERING PEAR! DONCHA KNOW IT’S WINTER NOW??
One day this Valley Oak (quercus lobata) will fall and go boom.
People decorate for Christmas in ways that defy taste. I guess that’s why some refer to this as “the silly season”.
See what I mean?
When my neighbor was a little girl, she declared in no uncertain terms, “That’s the wrong color for a church!” She also taught us to say “Remorial Building”.
Thank you for continuing with me in this non-eventful, somewhat mundane life as a Central California artist, using pencils, oils and murals to make art people can understand of places and things we love for prices that won’t scare you.
1. Aldi’s paper bag says something about no longer providing plastic bags, which causes me to ask this: Hey Aldi’s, why is all your produce pre-bagged in plastic?
2. To “prate” is to bloviate, to chatter endlessly about inconsequential matters.
3. I learned how to block email addresses of people I’ve never heard of—so many of those advertising emails have a non-working Unsubscribe button; not sure that Unsubscribe does anything even when it is working. It seems that many of those “people” just resubscribe you after awhile, hoping you will change your mind. Or they sell your eddress to another crowd of unethical moneygrubbers. So, I block them as they arrive.
4. GARDENING: sweet potatoes grew in knots, so next year I will make a great big gopher cage instead of using individual cages; all lettuces vanished—both cheater-starts from the nursery and tiny sprouts from seed. I haven’t learned what ate them, only that lettuce is almost impossible to grow. (And the broccoli is alive but appears to be comatose.)
5. TUBING MASCARA: Never heard of it but it definitely sounds like a better cosmetic improvement than fake lashes. Prolly not ever going to buy it, but found it curious.
6. A friend sent me this quote, amended and paraphrased by me: “We have a candy holiday, followed by a pie holiday, followed by a candy and cookie holiday, followed by a booze holiday, with another candy holiday on its tail. We call this ‘flu season’, but shouldn’t it be called ‘sugar poisoning?'”
7. Three random thoughts from the bathroom: a. It is a good sign if your toilet plunger has spider webs, but not the brush; b. If you think your shower is clean, put on your contact lenses; c. If you get mascara on your bangs, they need to be trimmed.
8. All the reasons that I avoid medical offices were verified in December; the level of incompetence, chaos, and confusion defies all logic and tests the outer limits of human patience. You will be told that an appointment isn’t needed/is needed/isn’t needed/is needed. You will be given wrong addresses/no addresses and wrong fax numbers. You will listen to many robot switchboards run through long spiels in Spanish. Your insurance will be denied and you will be told that a fax about it has been sent multiple times although no fax will ever be received (see previous—wrong fax number) You will drive to Woodlake, Lindsay, Exeter, and Visalia, all to gather information which will lead to many other appointments, phone calls to verify and correct and remind and question. You will wonder if you will be dead before anything is diagnosed and treated. You will be thankful that all the people you have spoken with are very nice.
There is more order in random leaf patterns than in the medical system or in providers of technology.
9. All of the same sort of chaos and confusion and contradictions from the Medical Circus apply if you experience multiple internet/phone/teevee outages and try to get your bill lowered (looking at you, Spectrum). You will be told that you will/will not get a credit, that the credit has/has not been applied, and that you need/don’t need to call back to verify an amount which continually changes depending on which “helpful” person you are speaking to. The people who answer questions with confidence rarely come up with the same numbers as those who read your bill back to you rather than answer questions. Some are smart and quick; some are stupid and slow; all are polite. You may conclude, as I have, that everyone is trained to say what you want to hear while actually doing nothing to credit you for all the outages.
10. A website called “Bored Panda” is an enormous waste of time along with being highly entertaining, if this post is any example. Funny Vintage Costumes Book. I didn’t look any deeper because I was able to exhibit remarkable restraint and self-discipline.
11. Did you know that there is a Botkin Hospital in Moscow? It was something else until 1920, when it was renamed Botkin Hospital in honor of the founder of the Russian therapeutic school – Sergei Petrovich Botkin. It is the biggest multispeciality hospital in Moscow. The name appeared in some novel I was reading (chewing gum for the mind) called “Our Woman in Moscow” by Beatriz Williams.
Important question: have I been prating at you in this blog post??
For the first many years (how many??) of my art career, I only worked in pencil, with occasional forays into colored pencil. The detail, the precision, the accuracy, the requirement of strong contrast and composition—all of these things held my attention. Plus, pencils are easy to transport, use, clean up—simple minimal equipment is all that is required.
Despite my devotion to the humble pencil, I am a self-professing color junkie. Here are a few examples of colors in Three Rivers that recently have grabbed my attention.
Someone’s yard has the most brilliant Japanese maple around.
Those bright trees across the river held on until the last rain.
The enormous flowering pear is starting to color up, while mine at the studio has dropped all its leaves now.
The patterns of leaves against the wet asphalt added to the intrigue. (Easily amused, easily entertained)
I went through my yarn scraps and arranged these in the order that pleases me for a multi-colored scarf— ’twill be a gift for a friend.
Sage is blooming in this fantastic blue-violet color beneath the flowering pear at my studio, with its brilliant leaves now all on the ground.
See that piece of dried mural paint? It is a green which I used to think looked fake. When I dropped it on the ground, I was astonished to see that it is almost the identical color as the new weeds now sprouting, at least when they are in sunlight.
SIMPLY HOME
This might be the painting in the show of which I am the proudest . . . yes, I know that “pride goeth before a fall”. . . I hope this painting falls into the right hands!
ENTERING WHITE CHIEF, 12×16″, $387
*The show hangs until December 29 at CACHE in Exeter. Their hours are Friday 1:30-4, Saturday 10-4, Sunday noon-4. It includes about 50 paintings, 3 original pencil drawings, calendars, cards, coloring books, The Cabins of Wilsonia books, and a few pencil reproduction prints.
Because this post is full of complaints, I will intersperse the verbal bummerations with nice photos.
We had a week when the internet went out 2 or 3 times a day on 4 days, and one of those days it was down all day long. This meant that neither the cell phone nor the landline worked. We also had an unscheduled half day without electricity and another day without power from 9:30-6:15. All of this took place during the week when I was preparing for my demo/talk How To Draw. In addition, I had people waiting for emails, with proofs, sketches, and price quotes to approve. It was also a week that I had set aside to make multiple phone calls to a tech service in order to repair and understand my wonky website.
Without power or internet, how does one print drawing exercises? or scan things necessary for handouts? or print one’s own notes? or let inquiring customers know you are not a flaky artist? How does one repair a website that one cannot access?
One waits. One uses a yellow legal pad and a pen. One waits some more. One composes emails and puts them in a folder called “Drafts”. One keeps waiting. One works in quiet, without tunes or podcasts. And one waits some more.
When the power came on, the printer wouldn’t print anything in color until I cleaned the heads about 6 times. Then I had to replace the ink, of course. I believe that printers were designed by ink companies. The next one I get will be a laser printer. I don’t know what that actually means, but people who have these say they are very reliable and use less ink. Everything uses less ink. EVERYTHING. (Excuse me, I need to leave this blog and order some more ink while thinking about it.)
Okay, I’m back, $48.70 poorer.
Eventually, I was able to get everything printed and scanned in time for the talk. Eventually, the emails went through. Eventually, I was able to make one phone call to repair one thing on my website. I also got a bit of painting done on one disrupted day before it got too dark to see.
From this:
To this:
To this, when I finally decided it was too cold to leave the door open, but too dark with it closed.
Thus, we end today’s complaint session with a vague sense of productivity and thankfulness for autumn beauty and electricity and internet and telephones.
Simply Home
Alpenglow on Homer’s Nose, 8×16″, $275
CACHE Gallery hours are Fridays 1:30-4:00, Saturdays 10:00-4:00, Sundays noon-4:00.
Because I ran off to Fall Color Week on September 29 – October 6, there was no Learned in September list. After spending an intensive week learning about plein air painting, I couldn’t remember a thing about September. Fortunately, I had already started a list.
September
If you schedule a meeting with someone, perhaps someone at a company to help one choose the best Medicare plan, it is assumed you will be using a cell phone. If you give a landline number because perhaps your cell service is spotty, they will be perplexed as how to help you. It certainly would be helpful if such businesses would say that a cell phone is necessary before one goes to all the trouble to schedule an appointment. (The meeting got cancelled before I learned how the landline would be handled.)
There is a method of healthy* eating called Zoe, a way to learn how to eat for your optimal “gut health, blood sugar, and blood fat”. The website has all sorts of information except it doesn’t tell the price. Nope, you have to “start the quiz” first in order to “choose your plan”. Does that make anyone else nervous? *Who even knows what “healthy” means anymore??
There is too much in the world right now: too many websites, too many opinions, too many podcasts, too many books to read, too much art to see, too many friends to stay current with, too many patterns to knit, too many yarns to try. I cannot keep up, and don’t want to. FOMO is real, but I will NOT cave in to it. (This is not new information, but I feel it strongly right now.)
I read this quote on a site called The Boring Newsletter—Frequently Taxed Questions: “Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to a job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.” -Ellen Goodman. I don’t know who Ellen Goodman is, but she is right and I am very thankful to be abnormal.
Boring Warning — if you ever need to remove hidden tags on a Word document, there is no way to do them all at once if you have a Mac. Why would anyone need to remove hidden tags? Because Word’s indexing is in combat with Adobe InDesign’s book formatting. They hate each other. They might both hate Mac too. It’s a rough world out there in Puterville.
Mineral King Country, a book by Henry Brown published in 1988, finally landed in my life. I was aware of it but didn’t have a copy. I recently acquired one (thank you, DJ) and read the foreword, preface, and introduction. This book covers Mineral King history between the mining era and the Disney days.
Cerakote cleans foggy car headlights in 3 steps. It is wonderful stuff! Costs about $17 if you are interested. My friend found it at WalMart and I found more on the big A, of course.
A few repeat photos of Mineral King in September
Simply Home
The Best View, oil on wrapped canvas, 10×20″, $450
CACHE Gallery hours are Fridays 1:30-4:00, Saturdays 10:00-4:00, Sundays noon-4:00.
ONE MORE THING: Tuesday, November 12, 6:30-7:30, I will give a demo/talk called How To Draw at CACHE. Contact me if you are interested, because seating is limited.
