Who has the time for so many things creative and not? I love being a single dad and although it fills much of my time I am always able to squeeze some hour out of the day for creative release. My son being fourteen needs to have a bit of time for himself as well, so any time available must be used wisely. Luckily for me as a creative as previously mention I have a short attention span and an hour of painting is usually adequate for a day.

The thing that is interesting about the process of grabbing a bit of time for being creative is the fact that I am able to give so much more of myself after I’ve given to the creative process. It’s almost as if the slate is clean for a bit, allow some of the creative juices to flow and than I can be normal for a while without the angst to go create something.

Other places I’m able to steal time to be creative is on the road, I like to text long creative texts while I’m on the highway-I’m kidding, just wanted to make sure you were paying attention. I like to think a lot while driving and many inspirations come to me while driving. This awareness of the time is actually the state of taking time instead of letting time slip by.

This aspect of time management may seem a no-brainer but it is notable that one must cease the time they can to be creative and to live creatively. Time passes us quickly-squeeze as much life and creativity out of every bit. How do readers like to steal those moments of being creative? What time of day are you most creative and are able to save time to paint? Would love some comments. Thanks
for reading.

This is the first in a series of cartoons on critics. First off-critics are helpful and very purposeful in some aspects of the creative world-critics such as John Ruskin come to mind. The other side of the critic is the legless man that teaches running-to be really cliche, but it is accurate. There are several reasons for the negative side of being a critic.

I have noticed a lack of knowledge or security can make those in the position of being a critic that much more critical and not always with enough knowledge or insight to correct a design problem. Another reason for the lack of quality or a critics ability to be objective is the would-be artist that always wanted to be an artist or creative but never quite had the skill or ability- this would be a problem of envy or ego getting the better of an otherwise constructive viewer. A final reason for the negative or nonconstructive critic would be the fear of failure which would be a corporate problem with the creative project. This would also include the idea of having too many people having input into a single idea. Again to be cliche but there is a reason for the old saying-too many cooks spoil the broth.

 Creativity in itself is so subjective, one persons masterpiece is an other’s paint pallet, in  a corporate setting you can not please all eyes and attempting to please all eyes will get you a watered down design with flaws that happened by too many ideas and options trying to fit into one design. In this instance usually the intricacies and spontaneous process of the original creative is usually lost, the colors don’t work anymore as originally intended and objects tend to overcrowd or fight with each other for attention.

To go back to the idea of the helpful critic- a second pair of eyes will many time refine the often original rough creative thought so working with a single or minimal decision makers can really make a great design better. Again, realize that the customer is always right even when they are dead wrong-we as artists can sway and attempt to move them in the right direction for the success of a project but in the end it is their project. My best advice is to work with clients that have strong ideas and if they don’t have strong ideas at least they are open to new thoughts and have good ideas to lead the process.
Luckily for the painter or independent artist, they always have the last say-your customers or patrons will than either buy or you get to hang a wonderful masterpiece on your own wall-that’s the trade off.

Do any designers reading have stories of how a project went from good to bad to worse? Do any readers know about designing by committee or being micromanaged? All comments and thoughts on the critic-the good, the bad, the ugly-would love to hear it. Thanks for reading.

I’ve had a few days of break from painting and the problem with this is that I either come back into the series really strong or completely feeling like I’m working with someone else’s vision. I have had some blank spots where I don’t have any idea of what to paint never mind how to get into the process and be able to see in a somewhat subconscious state. This is the reason why I have had so many paintings waiting to be completed-years of these mental blocks.

Another aspect is switching gears between designing for clients and getting to your own vision is the fact that between work and home there is no break to allow for that change of thought and priority. Tonight was surprisingly productive, even if it doesn’t really feel like it now. I am working on a waterfall scene of Turner Falls Oklahoma and in the middle of the process I felt like I was getting too thick with paint and losing my clarity of water but tonight I was able to freshen the image and just about complete the painting. Something I struggle with a problem of jumping into the immediate inspiration and knowing exactly what needs to be done but the peripheral image sometimes falls short and I  think that is what holds up finishing a painting.

One great thing I learned from teaching painting is with some discipline and ignoring the hesitation and overwhelming state of details, you can get through a block and continue to paint. I feel the reason I have been able to finish so many recent paintings is because of the discipline I learned through having a student and a certain amount of time to paint whether I was in the mood or felt overwhelmed I had to continue and work through the block.

So my question to other artists-what are your obstacles in the creative process and if you work through them are you able to continue painting? Do you have a problem working between your own stuff and commissions or freelance work? How do you get past mental blocks when it comes to creativity?
Thanks for reading and keep being creative.

There was a post in the Linked in group about rejection and I felt with the interest that was expressed
and the fact that these days rejection tends to be such a difficult thing for us to stomach, I thought it would be an interesting topic to expand on. This topic could be included in both my personal and artistic blog but I felt since we are talking art and that was the origin I hope some of the creative or not so creative types-okay anyone can post a comment whether you agree or disagree, it would be an interesting topic to explore with fellow readers and bloggers.

First of all, when did we become so afraid of our children receiving rejection-we have built up rejection to be some sort of insurmountable obstacle instead of a learning process or character builder. The funny thing about this question is that everyone I talk to do not seem to be the ones afraid of the rejection-it’s more some phantom victim that has helped create rules that shield children from any form of loss and punish anyone too happy in winning.

The previous description has been experienced more in my personal life raising a young child but rejection has always been a part of my career as well. I started in production art, I have always been an out of the lines coloring kind of personality, now my first job and I have to not only draw within the lines but I need to perfect the lines and keep them perfect and consistent. This was back in the day when we were excited to see a new piece of equipment called an apple computer-what a novelty it was. We still had to rule separations for photographs in publishing yearbooks, create windows and strip film with an exacto knife. I started out with all my work being thrown in the garbage before I had a chance to realize I was being reassigned to another less precise project. This insecurity building exercise continued until I was moved to a department that didn’t realize I didn’t yet have the skills to do all the work they required.

After a great amount of trial, error and more trial-I became a production artist that could use an exacto knife, a mechanical pen, strip film or and do any kind of paste up with more than adequate quality. If I would have succumbed to the pressure and rejection and the fact that for part of my first job as an artist I was driving a van to deliver work to other artists, I would have been dead before I started but I didn’t give up and used the rejection to improve my skill and over time not only did I become a production artist but also learned the computer on the fly. Again, trial and error, mistakes, low raises and all around general stress of a new job made me a quality production artist and set the wheels for the next job I was unqualified for, but we won’t tell anyone about that.

At the job I worked on a mac, at home I worked on a small ridiculously inadequate PC, with one of those very cheap drawing programs. The first drawing I ever completed was a green treefrog, a very detailed and colorful tree frog which used every aspect of the primitive drawing package I was using for all its worth. My portfolio was a bunch of high school kids drawing and folios as we called them, nothing even close to adequate for a job as a computer graphic designer. My wife at the time even ask me if I was sure if I could do the job. I was strongly encouraged not to show the tree frog but it was the only thing that actually showed I could use drawing tools on the computer. I got the job and in the years following was told that the tree frog was the only thing that actually stood out in my portfolio and convinced them that I could do the work they needed.

It was a very scary, humble beginning and yet I was able to master photoshop, Micrografix Designer, Pagemaker and Illustrator all on the job and made a highly technical job as creative as it could possibly be. In the first year or so I became a manager after originally being told there was no chance of me being the manager, after months of trying to hire a supervisor for myself, my boss decided that I was doing all the processes that a manager does and so I became a manager. This was another point where rejection could have been a defining moment for me but I improved my skills on the computer and learned how to manage.

Up to now I have talked about rejection and how it relates to a job in general but on the job rejection is the norm not the exception. Being a designer, you normally have to read minds-I didn’t know being a medium was part of the process but it is. You need to read minds, you need to guess what people are envisioning and after you have created what you think they have described you must start all over again. One of the funniest aspect is when a client says he or she loves your design, just not the color, the main graphic, the other image, the size and the style-other than you really nailed it. I learned very quickly that it is their project and I am just a steward to get them to create what they envision. I can be totally in the right and their scope can be completely off and failing but if I do not capture what they need I have failed. As a designer it is my responsibility to steer them into what I think is a better direction and create something that works for their marketing needs and graphic appearance but ultimately it is their project and in the end the customer is and always will be right. I learned that the project, as much passion and love I had for it, would never be mine. I have always said if a client wants a stick figure and you feel you can deliver the mona lisa in all its perfection, it doesn’t matter that your artistic tendency insists that the master work would be better for the client, the client asked for a stick figure and if you can’t convince them otherwise-you’ve failed-mona lisa and all-sorry Leonardo.

Another aspect of rejection is in my painting. Now I don’t have the separation that this is not mine, this is mine and me and everything about my passion. I remember meeting with my first gallery owner and was sure they would just be blown away by my artistic mastery. My ego expected an easy path to a great success and yet as soon as I saw the paintings on the walls mine shrunk in comparison. I don’t take that lightly as I am not quick to put another artist’s work over mine but it was obvious, I was a very young artist and the other work was from greatly more experienced and it was clear I had much to learn. I wasn’t accepted to the gallery but the things I learned about perspective and color, tone was just amazing and have helped me in my current works. The gallery owner dissected my work and instead of just freezing and never painting again I jumped very quickly to another level within weeks. I suddenly was able to see past my amazing work and see the flaws which was the only way I could have improved and perfected those flaws. After my meeting I was able to see how depth and perspective appeared to form and after a few months of awkward painting I took the tools I acquired and use them to this day.

The awkwardness I speak of is the fact that when you paint or create for a long time much of what you do tends to be subconscious or second nature, when someone breaks that habit suddenly you are overwhelmed by the fact that nothing is natural-you think about every line and stroke and the awkwardness is the fact that you analyze and use the left oriented logic instead of losing yourself in the work.

The next great rejection was a teacher-again I was excited and knew she would be impressed and she was but also told me I had much work to do. After that meeting, I learned to change the texture and colors instead of going with a technique I was comfortable with and using it throughout the work. I was awkward and consciously changing my work and again felt a great ship to a higher level of work. I believe the only way I could have improved is to see what an outside eye saw, especially one that had knowledge of my craft.

No one loves rejection, but rejection can be the most incredible tool to improve yourself and your art. Rejection is something that allows you to see outside of your comfort zone and motivates you to improve instead of keeping to the norm. It can be awkward, it can hurt sometimes but being artists and the fact that we do work within an ego driven trade, we must be able to separate ourselves from the rejection and realize that there is always room for improvement. At the same time we must also know where the rejection comes from and take it from its source. See if there is anything that is constructive in the criticism, try to see your work from another perspective and realize realistically where you can improve and where your style ends and flaws begin. It is a thin line but always be open, rejection can be your friend and mentor if you have the right attitude.

So here is my question for you-what was the best bit of rejection that motivated you to improve your work? Did you reach another level in your art or career through criticism? How do you separate yourself from the art you do for the client and how would you steer a client in the right direction-how often are you successful. I’m hoping for many comments as I know rejection is part of all of our lives as artists and people in general. Thanks for reading.

So where do we stand in this economy, in this country, for religion, racism and just life in general? I believe we have developed more ways to communicate and with that ease of communication we have stopped communicating. I watch people in a local coffee shop and we are all sequestered to ourselves, whether it be we don’t trust or we’re waiting to be sold to or hit on-we protect ourselves adn we have lost our availability to communicate. I would say we’ve lost the need if it wasn’t for the fact that when you get a conversation started with someone I think we all want to reach out and communicate, most of us either don’t know how or are afraid to start something we are not interested or don’t think we are interested in.

I think at the core of our lack of communication is the fact that we work very hard to keep our houses and our cars, all the things we think we need. Not to say if you want an expensive toy you shouldn’t if you can afford it, it’s just that we have to work hard to support what we have bought or borrowed on credit. I also think there is so much stress that none of us are able to react to, but it’s always there hanging over us like the economy that has been failing for how many years now? We are always on the edge of a disaster which I will get to the culprits of this chicken little syndrome in a moment but for this point, I think we are all underneath a great weight that tends to just sit there and we are expected to keep our heads up and keep doing what we have always been doing when this great disaster is just a job loss away and the impending doom of failing health and a crumbling economy is always just sitting there staring at us. What do we want to do outside of our work-we tend to want to escape to our homes, our families, we can barely communicate with the people we know with the stress we carry so never mind getting social with the community.

I drove through the suburbs yesterday and there is no one living in these empty houses or that’s the way it seems. There are cars in the driveway, that is the only proof that anyone lives in these houses. Maybe there are cliques that the people stay with, only their immediate family and friends so there is no time or need to reach out to other people or friends. In the city, I noticed there are more people out and around, perhaps because they are younger and less jaded or just have less on their plate. I remember when my exwife and I bought our first home and instead of us running around enjoying the outdoor stuff, there was always something to do around the house. This brings me back the fact that we are so busy in our lives and detached from people which I feel we really crave to be spoken to or communicated with. I believe there are many of us that feel they are outcast from this society and you can see on many occasions they strike against the very society they feel has made them an outcast, which brings me to the next hypocrisy that is rampant and brings me closer to one of the culprits in the failing of our society and community.

We talk so much about bullying, everyone is against bullying and we all need to do something about bullying but the very same people that are crying about bullying are the ones that bully more than anyone. The political correctness that is rampant stems from what I feel is a guilt in our society, we aren’t getting nicer, we are getting more nasty and vicious to eachother. Another thing about bullying, it is not a new thing by any means and what used to be a motivation to improve ourselves or protect ourselves has turned into a means to be victimized. I’m not saying that bullies are helpful in our development it is just something that has been around since the very beginning of our society and it will never end, it’s just the way we don’t teach our children to deal with this bullying, I would think anyone that has gone to school has been bullied in one way or another and we reacted in various ways. Another aspect of the bullying-thr that someone might lose. e bullying that used to occur seems nothing like the vicious and dangerous bullying that occurs these days. I believe that we are suppressing our boys and girls, all aggression is deemed unnatural when aggression is completely natural, it should be used in the right direction, in sports where we dare let our children compete with the danger that someone might have to actually lose.

We have decided that there is one sex, boys and girls are the same which they are not, instead of celebrating the wonderful differences that are evident between boys and girls and between each of us, there is a definition of who or what we need to be and how we need to act and unfortunately we are suppressing the natural urges and emotions that we all feel and trying desperately to adapt everyone into a weak and pliable child that doesn’t cause their teachers or families any problems. We have drugs for everything, we have to anesthesize our kids, calm them down, they have their folders signed for doing stupid things that kids do, they are chastised for acting out in anyway and we have to call it a disease or some disorder that we can treat. Granted, there are real disorders and ailments that need treating, I just think that we have put everyone that steps out of a calm uncomplicated place must be medicated and that’s where I think we are wrong. Of course in the past we would be disciplined by our parents and often maybe more than we needed to but we knew there were consequences for our actions and we were not the ones in control, again there are parents that have destroyed that whole healthy concept of discipline- a spanking is not a beating but some parents have taken discipline to a sick and twisted place. So, the government and teachers step into our parenting and says we can’t look wrong at our children and meanwhile our children realize there are no adults in charge of us and there are no consequences for our actions-we’ll just call CPS.

So how have we come this far? I believe that we have lost our basic values for life and the idea of selflessness has given way to narcism, raising our children with the idea that everything is about them. Whatever happened to the old quote-think not of what your country can do for you, think what can you do for your country. We have been lead in a bad direction by the fact that common sense in raising children has been replaced by sociology and psychologists telling us how we should do and freeing us from any blame or guilt by generous portions of rationalization. Our complacency in our society has allowed the stage to be set by the media which pander to us, pull our strings to be afraid of certain aspects, they act like they are our parents and we are too stupid to know better and in actuality we have become the child lead by the media disregarding common sense and listening only for the processes that directly affects us. The next entity that has moved in to be the parenting role is the government who sees fit to explain what drink we should and shouldn’t drink and how much of anything we should have. Our chains are pulled when they need us to react to something, their fingers point to the other side always playing the shell game with us while the money is already gone. And once they do what they knew they were going to do all along there is no word of any crisis until the next crisis they have to threaten us all with certain doom if we dare expect the to be responsible in the use of our money.

So where in all of this do we stand? I feel we should be Americans before we are races, sexes and our own specific causes. I think we need to avoid being victims so the lawyers have no one to pander to. No one says that the money they steal from the insurance company for the so called deserving victim with an amount that the person would never see in their lifetime, that great sum of money, most of it goes in the lawyers pocket and the rest of it we all feel as costs go up from everything from medical to car insurance-we all pay for it even though the one that hit the lottery by getting hurt feels they are entitled to however much money the lawyer can get them. I believe we as a nation can not stand divided, we need to come together as a nation, not a race, sexual orientation, democrat, republican-they have us right where they want us. The child that does not have the capability of fighting against a rampant government and a divisive media that work together to extort what they need from us, using fear, guilt, racism or whatever other tool they need to keep us divided and most of all complacent.

We need to be a nation again, we need to stop fighting among us and start becoming aware of the similarities we have among us and start running the government instead of letting them run us. We need to stop listening to the media that uses propaganda to separate us and control our actions. We are a nation of hard working individuals that all love the idea of  succeeding in whatever success that deems appropriate for each individual. We need to stop using the word deserve, stop being victims and start earning back our country. The government has done so many bad things to our families and our childrens’ children, they have stolen futures and the money we have entrusted them with has been stolen, it is our time to get our country and our government back to by the people and for the people.
Its time to stand united because divide we will definitely fall……We need to come together as Americans with common interests and needs and stop letting outside entities divide us for their own gain. Forgive me for a long. long blog but I want to live in America not a divided mess that this country is becoming.

This question is for writers, of poetry, prose, short stories, etc- Where does the inspiration for words come from and how do we access that stimulus? For me, it is a very strange and much more awkward option than paintings and images-the painting and images tend to create themselves, they sit in the folder in my mind for a long time, either a memory, an idea or the full blown sketch that no one could decipher even myself sometimes.

There are three basic forms of the stimulus that creates words. I will try to articulate this process and the way it feels when the words are at their best or worst. There are three distinct feelings that occur during my writing which I believe depends on where in the brain the stimulus begins.

I would say the best words that come out, almost always in poetry, are when I have no idea what I am writing. It is almost an out-of-body feeling-the hands find the keys and I can’t even read or decipher the words that form. The words come out of nowhere and the sense that you would afford individual words seem lost in the translation and can only be deciphered after the process. I don’t look for words that rhyme, I don’t even think of any specific word or theme, these kind of writings I tend to forget immediately afterwards and the connections of thought and ideas seems very abstract. I equate this to a divine intervention as the thoughts are often very deep and personal and often with a religious slant or questioning premises that are hard to articulate without great use of metaphor and far reaching analogies.

The second best process of writing and usually a bit more clearer and more to the point is when I can barely decipher the words that I write, in other words I don’t look for the rhyme the words I write just seem to be there and they flow as quickly as I can write them. These writings seem to already be written but they just needed to be processed. Poems like these are often sparked by lines or just the title, the awkward problem of this process is when you write the initial title or start the first line the inspiration is so intangible that the idea often disperses the moment the words or phrase hits the page.

The next process is the inspiration that is much more conscious, seeing a beautiful landscape or describing something that is emotionally or physically directly relatable. This is kind of the standard of many of my writings and the quantity of words is usually a large amount and very quickly, fifteen or twenty poems at the same time. I still don’t remember the words I wrote but the idea and the inspiration is very clear and conscious.

The hardest process of writing for me and I think this is just the lack of comfort writing this way is the prose or story pieces. I have always had books full of ideas and premises of anything from short stories, essays to full novels. In the past I have never acted upon the words always questioning the quality and the lack of formal grammar and being able to self edit. I used to self-edit myself out of ever writing anything, feeling the final would be without purpose. Lately, instead of story ideas in books, I have stories started, about twelve of them now and instead of just inspirations and ideas they have turned to actual works in progress. There is always the desire to write the story but when I begin I am often left with a bunch of hard pressed words and attempts at writing that go nowhere.

Stories will often start out with great details and I don’t have the idea of specific words and the idea flows very quickly and as I write one part the next part is in the process of becoming processed. As suddenly as the idea begins the story dissolves and I am left with awkward words that don’t support anything tangible. This is why, like my paintings, it seems that words tend to hang around unfinished for a long time. I am working on the discipline to work beyond the writing block.

So how do other writers feel the process of writing? When does the start of a block begin and how do you get past that stumbling block. Do you remember the words you write, do you self-edit while you write and what motivates you to write? So pick a question and answer, we can start a dialog on the writing process and the intangible act of poetry and prose.

After finishing up a series of twenty paintings, the old group of paintings have merged into a larger more recent group of works. What I have learned through teaching painting and through moving into projects out of my comfort zone,  is to enjoy the process even more and go where the impulse takes me.
I have learned to push through that point where the confidence of my skills gets lost in venturing from what is comfortable.

Some things that have changed recently is the enjoyment of thick areas of paint, my older paintings tend to have smooth layers of paint and in my new stuff, the paint sometimes moves across the canvas from a clump of paint right from the tube. It is almost like I am doing palette knife painting without the palette knife. The movement from the inspiration to the actual finished piece is getting faster and more spontaneous. I am jumping into the night scenery and the water inspirations from previous with an excitement and a new found knowledge of my medium and subject matter.

I’m caring much less about the realism of colors, not so much of form but of colors, I’m much more interested in the overall effect. I have different techniques that I am using that I haven’t tried before and my sense of exploration is growing daily. Another aspect of change I am experiencing is the feeling of perspective-I’m capturing images from different vantage points, this idea includes a painting of the ocean from a birds eye view and the view up a tree looking at blackbirds or the stars at night. I am increasingly attempting to change my vantage point of the viewer and the standard traditional view of a landscape is being altered.

I have always wanted to perfect the landscape as realistic as possible, now that I have gotten to a point of realism that suits my overall vision it is finally time to adjust the viewers perspective. I am venturing somewhere between realism and impressionism and finally to the point of surrealism.

I am also working on poetry that suits the paintings-from this standpoint I am excited about the idea of
an inspiration being registered through words and images. I hope that landscapes can illustrate feelings and emotional responses and feelings and emotional responses can be illustrated through words.

I am in the process of getting the most recent series of twenty out to the website, I will have a new series page. I am also learning more about flash and intend on having more interactive options to the website. One of the many added options is a small but very interactive gallery, where all of the paintings on the wall you can link to either the website or a larger version of the painting. The discipline of the scripting has been very grounding for me. It’s amazing how you can learn one small aspect of a program and that small aspect can lend itself to more options. Yesterday I created a skeleton of the gallery and working with flash, I was able to move the viewer through the gallery and to other scenes in the gallery, honestly it will be a while before this will be live but I am in the process of perfecting the movements and positioning of the veiwer to start.

In the studio, the twenty paintings that have gone live have been replaced with an additional fifteen paintings that are waiting to be completed or finalized. I hope to have the new page on the website before they go live on the blog so stay tuned. The water scene above is the start of the surrealistic change of perspective. Another image below is the start of several night scenes that are still in the stage of being painted.

I was just going through old stuff, getting the spring cleaning itch I guess and I discovered an old box of treasured keepsakes. The contents of the box was a sales associate tag from a first job, letters from close friends and matches from various bars. I don’t like the fact that at one point this collection meant so much to me but now its nothing more than garbage only escaping the trash because it had been hidden under debris for so long. Here is my dilemma, when in life do collections of things lose their worth? For me, I believe its the dreams and aspirations that mean much to the younger person but as we get older other more important tangible aspects of our lives push the urge to collect the trivial things in our lives to small boxes we lose or tuck away.

I want to collect things again, things about now, about the places I go and the people and things I see. I think as children we are so excited about life and possibilities and experiences we tend to collect remnants, keeping a piece of our memories that we can go to again and relive. I used to photograph everything, I have photo albums filled with pix of my life from when I was ten to probably my early thirties. We shoot pictures, collect things, we are excited about our lives and the possibilities and somewhere along the line we lose that desire to maintain keepsakes. Time and people pass through so quickly and we don’t have a chance to stop and capture moments never mind trinkets.

I think my turning point was the end of my marriage. I look at a garage almost like a beach where all the belongings of your life wash ashore. All of the objects in your life seem familiar but they tend to blend in with the dust and the memory becomes so obscure you lose the need to maintain your collection. Another aspect of your belongings is the move from one life to another, you tend to see your
collectables as more weight that you have to carry and less like the fond memory. Boxes of stuff flood into the garage, whatever you can carry gets gathered into your vehicle and by the time you get to the next destination all you know is the objects of memory are just clutter in your life.

So now I am in the process of cleaning the slate, discarding remnants of my life that don’t lend themselves to my future. I want to start collecting small objects, I have seen artists that tack things up in their studio and my studio is filled with notes and unfinished works. I don’t collect tactile stuff, stuff to inspire me to write or paint and I think I am missing a great aspect of the artistic experience. I know when the child becomes the adult, we lose much of what was important, much of what made us children we stop wasting time and interest for. Although I realize that every part in our lives, we gain and lose stuff, I feel the artist and the poet must keep the child that sees things as only a child can see alive somewhere. Something breaks in us, some piece of us that finds joy in insignificant things but I do believe this is where the artist lives and those pieces of youth must be preserved.

I have taken the artist way class and I know much of what the course is about is getting back to ourselves, getting to know ourselves again, I am eager to get back to the eye of an artist that is excited about sunsets and nature, the collector, the child that was passionate about life. I plan on starting a box today, I can hardly wait to see what piece of my life is the first to find its way into my box of treasures-I plan on keeping it small and simple so it never becomes the weight I can’t carry but important and of substance that it doesn’t get lost in the debris and thrown away during another one of my spring cleaning jags.

So what would you keep in a box of memories? What do you collect? What objects would fill your box and why? Would love if even just the followers might comment and explain their boxes that they would create.

I have just released twenty new paintings,  I say new but they’ve been hanging around waiting to be finalized for several years, now after finishing the final touches on the twenty and putting them into the blog and out on the website-still working on that. It’s kind of unnerving to go back to the studio with all the remaining paintings in varying degrees of progress. How do I keep the momentum and how do I avoid cookie cutter finalizing-there are so many varied ideas in all different states.

I think the first task is discipline, just showing up and attempting to paint when there really isn’t much floating around at the moment. I start one oil, put that aside do some finalizing on another and than mess with a large pastel, suddenly I am back in the process of painting. It’s a state where you don’t really recognize what you are working on, everything kind of blurs and you go into a zone where you know where each blob of paint goes and what needs to be highlighted and what needs to be left alone. During the process I can’t really fully see what I am in the middle of-it is only after observing the image afterwards that the detail and the specifics become more apparent.

Today I reconvened a pastel of two light posts reflecting in a park pond. It is a large image and therefore hopefully a dramatic image. I am excited about the fact that the colors are just kind of flying across the page-darkness isn’t black, it is reds and blues and even browns but each element of the scene must heighten the effect of the light, the colors become dark but only by touching the areas of light do they take on their final colors and the working up of the darkness is more complicated than you would think. I used to blur pastels, even using the whole palm of my hand to rub the hues but now I much prefer working up the colors slowly. I don’t even mind the movement and the changes of colors that the layering effects, it adds to the depth and creates darkness that is not opaque but more transparent. The viewer sees all the colors and how they react, they  don’t consciously realize the colors but the glowing of the light makes the process secondary which heightens the effect of the light. This particular image will be cold and dark with a great accent of light. I plan on doing more night scenes for this series.

Another night scene I am just starting to work on and started the underpainting today, its a view of Lake Ray Hubbard, an actual recent view with all the lights reflecting on the water. I have attempted this image  before but always tend to lose the lights and colors too much turning a night scene into more of a dark image that misses the vibrance of the colors. In this case there are several images in the scene that are lit up and stand out-one image is a steeple in the nearby town, it is a small intimate image that allows the light to tell a story and street light to illustrate a town at night. I am striving more lately to have some sort of story behind the painting, some of the stories are real and actually happened but others are more poetic snapshots of some time and place that didn’t necessarily happen but the viewer has the ability to create his or her own story from the elements in the painting.

I am finishing up a second swallow image as well-it is an image of swallows and passionvine under a bridge. I am enjoying the freedom of this new series and feel the previous series is a pathway toward the work I’m doing now. If the previous series was an introduction of looking at the landscape from a different perspective and adding a story and figures of people that add to the imagery without taking away the basic element of the landscape. This new series will take up where the previous ended with  more experimentation, more blobs of color and richness of light and darkness. I have given up the safety of the landscape I know and have welcomed the idea of adding elements and perspectives I haven’t explored previously.

One particular change in perspective is looking straight up a large oak tree-the blackness of the tree takes you into a cloudy sky and the sillouettes of the blackbirds fill in the image almost as if there were fingers reaching into the clouds. I want the viewer to follow the branches into the sky and almost become lost in the branches of the trees in a sense becoming a part of the tree. The blackbirds will be  haunting and dramatic against the soft cloud filled sky.

The momentum has picked back up quite quickly and I feel I have many exciting elements to explore in this new series. I can’t wait to process and debut the new images, these will be more fresh and spontaneous than previous and the ideas I hope will be of recent and updated images. I will keep you posted and would love any comments on the previous images and the new ones coming up.

After several years of painting, stagnating, painting and more procrastination-I finally have a new series of paintings coming out. They will be up on the website shortly with more information about each. I will give a brief explanation of the images and hopefully you will see there is a thread that kind of connects the images-nothing particular as far as a common theme but more of an idea of telling something of a story.

These paintings are experiments, waterfall series and overall explorations of color and form. I look at them more of a starting point for a larger series that is in the works. This next series will be more with a bit of an edge or theme and the reason will be that the ideas and images are fresh. This prequel to the series is more like an introduction to taking chances and exploring without the fear of any failure.

The subject matter is different, there are people in the works, there are structures and more wildlife, this is the beginning of jumping into the exploration of anything from portraiture to wildlife. The images tell a story that is not necessarily happy and serene and that’s the idea-I really didn’t think first of how peaceful or beautiful-it’s more the idea of how it feels to be there.

I am also working on perfecting the water-the different aspects of it-from the clarity to the opaque surface that only reflects and hides the bottom. I hope the viewer will be taken places with temperatures and emotions to enjoy in each place.

This painting is of Navarre Beach Florida-the original idea is from five years ago, the first time we stayed in a condo overlooking the ocean. It is a bit of an exaggeration of the light and the colors in a moonscape. I hope the viewer can imagine standing on the deck looking out across the ocean-an intimate moment with the moon. This oil painting progressed slowly and was only finished just recently with some accents of light.

The next painting on the right started with the sky, it stayed just a sky for several years probably. The beachcombers were always intended to be there but they didn’t materialize until long after the original sky was created. This painting brings a bit of the happiness of the ocean but also a little bit of the loneliness of a single parent-her face is barely discernible and I hope you can tell she is pensive while playing with her son in the waves. The waves and the sky are also both less detailed than previous works allowing the imagination to fill in much of the gap of the details. I wanted to feel the depth and get the feeling of cold windy day and let the viewer fill in the rest with their imagination.

The blackbirds on the left is an image I have seen on numerous occasions and am still perfecting, call it just an intro to the blackbirds, a larger scene which will have much more details of the purple grackles and their shimmering purple and black feathers. I have several sketches of the blackbirds a sunset, early evening and splashing in a puddle. The image on the left is of a coming storm. Blackbirds are a recurring theme in much of my poetry and writing-they are symbolic of darkness and impending sadness or regret. They also create a mood of sadness or violence.

The pastel to the right is of a park in Wylie Texas-it is called the dragonflies-you can’t really notice the dragonflies in the image but they are in the sky around the trees. This image was from after a storm during a the football practice four years ago-again the image stayed in the sketch form-I still don’t believe it’s finished as the dragonflies need more of a presence-The light captured my rendering more than the dragonflies and the image became more the storm and the tree than the focus on the dragonflies. For a future image I plan on having several large dragonflies with brightly colored wings and the storm is more muted and blurred in the distance. I will probably finish this image with oil paint to allow for more detail with the dragonflies.

The oil painting on the left started out with an orange sky and cool blue water, it was loosely based on an image of the highway coming home during sunset and originally inspired by a early morning at the oil rigs fishing with my oldest son. This image was inspired attleast twelve years ago when we went fishing in Galveston, I think it’s incredible how long the ideas stay before they actually become reality, it’s just a very long process and I’m not sure if they perfect themselves over time or maybe they allow themselves with my skill level or strengthening of my observations in nature. Either way, it is a long process and a very interesting process of becoming a finished painting from just a fleeting idea.

The pastel of the cars in the city was an
image of the rain which I have never
quite perfected. The blues and the dark reflections is how the rain becomes a mirror. I envisioned this probably twenty years ago and I
have many sketches, I still have not perfected the idea but the basic flow and the feeling of the city I believe is a great start. I am working on creating more images of water that are not actually just lakes or oceans, the way water reflect the sky at night or in the rain. Other options that I am pursuing is a night scene of a fountain-all ideas of water and its many different appearances in unique places. In the past I wouldn’t have pursued the car-it wasn’t where my skill set was but more the idea than the perfection of its individual pieces. I believe the overall idea supercedes the flaws of rendering.

This whole series I wanted to have fun with whatever object I introduced, not bogged down by details. I wanted to attempt to capture the images that have been sketched out and waiting to be finalized for many  years. I feel I have accomplished the flow and the light and hues that bring emotion and temperature to the standard landscape.

The waterfall oil painting is of Petit Jean, this is the start of a collection of waterfalls including Turner falls in Oklahoma. This is the first image I started and it was after teaching a student how to paint water, rocks and reflections that I was able to work with the details and perfect the reflective nature of water in my own painting. I believe this mini series of waterfalls will have probably five new paintings from across the country from trips I took with my son-this one is from a spring break trip to Arkansas.
The next idea will also be the caves that we observed which I think will complement the images of the waterfalls.

This is an image where the water is dark and the mirror blocks out the bottom, something I normally capture in most of my water scenes. In this image the reflection made the water surface completely opaque. More time was spent on the rocks than anything else in this image.

This oil painting is of a killdeer, I have envisioned this image for many years and just recently began sketching it. There is supposed to be a bit of darkness in the coming storm. I still haven’t decided if the bird needs to be more of a sillouette but it is an image that is still in the works. I also captured the whisps of the water in the background catching the last bit of light.

I don’t do a lot of wildlife but am in the process of trying to capture more as they are appropriate in specific scenes. This image is supposed to be a golf course and the storm is looming in the distance.

Continuing with the wildlife theme, the swallows on the left capture that moment before a storm, the awkwardness of a chance meeting between two male swallows. I have started a series of swallow paintings, this is the first that I’ve finished. The painting hung on the wall for a year before being completed recently.
I blurred out the distance and introduced the fog that captured an image of a late afternoon fog and the communication between the two birds is the main focus instead of the background.
I left much of the background with less detail again so the viewer can fill in the details with their imagination.

The sail boat is an oil painting, it began as the sky and the light in the distance. It was an image of Lake Ray Hubbard in Rowlett, Texas. It started more light and pale and as I finished it up I ended up darkening the foreground and the boat hoping to focus more on the light breaking through the clouds. I left much of the detail to the viewers imagination-another image I tried to leave a bit less overworked.

The next painting below is a sunset image of a clearing not far from my house. The image began as just the trees and kind of stalled in the water. I like the idea, the initial light and color but the water just seemed to end abruptly, again it’s amazing how a painting can seem unfinished and it not actually be missing anything but accents of light, the boat on the left was an afterthought to strengthen the idea of perspective and distance, the image below seemed to be finished when I simply detailed the trees and made the light in the foreground become its own element-I thought any image in the foreground would detract from the light instead of focus the eye-I hope this image comes across
somewhat raw and appearing as if there’s a power of light
piercing through the dark trees.

This image was originally just the sunset sky, I saw it while my son and I walked the bridge in Rowlett-it was seven years ago or so and the image just sat there unfinished for six or so years before finally adding some people in the foreground and a person in the background. The image really focuses more on the sunset and the sky was what I saw that day we walked the bridge. The people are really for scale and distance and only to complement the sunset sky.

The oil painting on the left is an image of Wylie originally, just the moon and the waters of Lake Ray Hubbard, I have seen the sunflowers for many years and have made mental notes on many ocassions, I have several very detailed sketches of the big trees and the many wild sunflowers that grew in that area. I also have an image of the same field in the darkness and starkness of winter with a torn up turf ground and the blackbirds flying through the field. the girl was an afterthought but I wanted you to not be able to see her face, she is almost like a ghost in the scene and you can’t tell if she is pensive, sad or just emotionless. I really focused on the rich blues and violets that fill the shadows around the sunflowers, the garden is supposed to be more dramatic and vibrant with just a calm pastoral feel of the lake and the moon in the distance. This painting took probably two years to perfect.

I would consider the meadow on the left to be more of a study. It started out as just the flowers and the woods in the distance. I was attempting to capture depth in a small painting, the flowers give you the detail to realize depth and the field in the distance is the late fall as the trees are losing their colors. This painting sat on the wall for a year before finally finishing up the final details.

The pastel of the umbrellas are from an image I caught at work, there were two people walking in the rain and it was quite recent. It is a very quick sketch and another way of looking at water. I wanted the umbrellas to capture the coolness of the rain, each person is turned away from each other showing how we are all very isolated. I still plan on working more on an image similar to this but I felt like this captured the general idea because of its simplicity and the space between them that alludes to the loneliness and the coldness of the rain, the umbrellas brighten up the scene as a complement the coldness of the scene.

This scene is from Uncertain Texas, when my son was just two or three we watched the fireworks, the sketch waited for nine years before it became an oil painting. I am still perfecting this one and will probably have several different views but this image captured pretty much exactly the scene that fourth of July, it was probably one of the longest fireworks we had ever witnessed.