Is this an art blog?

As you know if you've read a few of my posts, there is no theme at all to this blog. Unless that theme is that I write whatever I feel like writing. But sometimes a few posts in a row are similar. So, these little promotional pieces will probably be showing up for a while. So here is a link to my latest drawing on my gallery.

The image is called "Hand To Mouth" that is just for reference though. Really, it's self titled. But if I called everything "eponymous" I would be creating more difficulty for the people who might buy my work.

When I was young, I always thought that I would need to move to the "big city" to sell my work. I really wanted to show my work at galleries. By the time I was 18 and living in Minneapolis - which had a thriving art scene - I spent whatever time I could find hanging out anonymously in the downtown warehouse district. This is where the galleries all seemed to live back then. I was shocked to see that I didn't fit in with the whole art scene. Almost all of the artists were too heavily swayed by opinion. It seemed to me that they were trying to ride dead ideas until they rotted out from under them. I had insulated myself from culture (which was very easy where I grew up) and yet I had seen all of this before.

To me art was always expressing a thought I had, and thoughts I had were generally new and unique. It was easy to see that the majority of these artists had some real talent, but that talent was hidden beneath layers of "skill". I never wanted to see a display of skill. Skill CAN be great, if it doesn't obscure talent, but how many artists do you know of who can really do that? There aren't many, alive or dead.

Don't misunderstand me. There was some really cool work on display at many of these places as well, and some of it by the same people who did the trite stuff. I just expected to see something fresh, and my own drawings and paintings were the freshest things around. After spending 11 years in Phoenix, I long for the old Minneapolis art scene. Now, I'm in the high desert in the middle of nowhere, and I never once took an opportunity or even an offer to do a gallery show. I always said, "I don't have the right collection to show". When offered money for my work, I've always avoided the subject. So many people have said, "I really want that!" only to get the reply, "well you can't have it".

Well, an artist with real foresight would have acted on the inevitable moment that has now arrived. ART CLUTTER. I threw away all my work that I did as a young kid. But at some point when I was about 16-17 I started to hang on to some of it. Now, I still own almost everything I have drawn or painted since then. I don't have most of it on display, it just sits in boxes, taking up space. So, now after all these years, I'm willing to sell it.

I used to have several of my paintings up in my office at work. People always would ask excitedly, "who's the artist?" I would tell them that it was me, and they would hire us to do their web site. This worked exceedingly well with the women, but men would often hire my team based on the fact that I was 1) clearly great at my job, 2) creative. So I did sell my art in a sense. Or I used it as a sales device to sell my commercial art.



Above is just a picture of one of my old offices with a couple of my paintings in the background. I also insisted on real plants. People don't buy web sites from plastic plants.