A very cool marketing Idea,WIP's continue,Trail Mix

The big WIP is coming along. I have enjoyed employing the Notan elements as well as the manipulation of form in this painting. Another session or two should do it for this one.


I read on Empty Easel HERE about a great marketing idea.

Basically the blogger decided to make her readers affiliates for selling her paintings. She agreed to pay any blog reader a percentage of her painting sales, who closes the deal for her. Essentially, that is what my agent does for me in a limited way. She has a portfolio of my work to promote for herself apart from what I am doing. I love the idea of engaging blog viewers in the process of selling work. I think it is a brilliant idea.

Hey, anybody who wants to sell my work for me will definitely get a reward!! I think this concept could be worked out in more than one way for my own studio. Options could include a credit bank for the affiliate. He/she could build up a credit to use for buying paintings ,taking workshops, purchasing tutorials,notebooks,career consultations,or a 20% of sales in cash through paypal or check. It would be up to the affiliate how they would like to use it. It could be expanded to the web site paintings as well as the blog. Can you imagine the potential of having dozens of affiliates out there promoting and selling your paintings? It is a simple, great idea. Let's do it!!!

Today's Recipe:

This is a favorite snack that I used to make for my kids all the time. You can get various renditions of this at Fresh Market but it is cheaper to make it yourself, going to Sams or Coscos for the ingredients.

Peanuts
craisins(dried cranberries or raisins or both)
plain M&M's candy
Reeses Pieces candy
pistachio nuts
cashew nuts

Mix it all up, Yummy!!!

Salted pecans or almonds are also great.

The cheap version uses raisins,peanuts and M&Ms

Marketing these days, A WIP request,Road trip to the Orange Shop,Honey Citrus Sauce

Last night I ordered a book about marketing. I had read a review about it. It is called "Waiting For Your Cat to Bark". An odd but catchy title. I'll let you know if it is useful. I am thinking that art patrons are a lot more interactive than they used to be. They are also a lot more interested in a relationship with artists than in the old days. Relationships are less formal in our casual society. I believe that may be why galleries are on a downward slide. The possibilities for direct sales through our studios and the Internet have made actual contact between patron and artist far more common. It seems to me that this changes the relationship greatly.

I know that personally, many of my patrons become close friends to me and I value that as much as the sales. I used to have a retail studio/gallery space in a small town. It never worked for me. Moving my studio back to the little shack behind my old mobile home in the country was the smartest marketing move I ever made. I am comfortable there and therefore my friends,students and patrons are comfortable there too. I think it is important to them to see how an artist really works and creates. The fact that I live a minimal lifestyle doesn't seem to bother them. I believe that people want to see honesty and integrity in the artists they associate with. They don't seem to care how we live, being more interested in what drives us to create what they love too. I believe my patrons have more invested than physical ownership of a painting. They have an emotional investment in the work and that spills over to a relationship with me, or so I hope. We have the commonality of a shared emotion and language though the paintings.

Above all is the honest commitment to my patrons, their lives and interests. If you are faking that interest as an artist, then you are doing both yourself and your patron a real disservice. Actually, most of my patrons are very interesting people with passions for many things I feel love for, including nature conservation, parks,ranching, wild places, the coast,animals,art and so forth. We have natural bonds which drew us together through my paintings in the first place.

Patrons enjoy good service. They expect their artist friends to provide good advice on sizes, framing, installation, delivery and shipping. Providing these courtesies is fairly easy and certainly makes a difference to them. I offer car delivery in North Central Florida for large sized paintings. I am willing to meet their needs for color matching, decisions on decor and so forth. I provide archival information for future restoration. These services don't take up much of my time but they are important to my clients. I guarantee my work 100% for both web site purchases, studio purchases and commissions. This is important to patrons. They know they will receive satisfaction.

I really don't know that much about marketing, but I do know what I feel about my patrons and how grateful I am to them. When I see all of these marketing schemes on the Internet and hard sell tactics, formulas and so forth, it makes my head hurt. That is just not me. I think treating my customers like family and being involved in their lives as someone they can rely on and share the love of painting with, is more my style.



Stage 1
Florida Cattle Ranch
12x16 inches
casein underpainting to be followed by transparent oils

I have a request to do a WIP in my mixed media technique, so I will share it with my blog friends too. This is the beginning bloc in. Playing around with it at this stage. I will make some adjustments in the composition in the next session.




All that talk last week about the Orange Shop sent me on a quest for their good eats. I took Mommy and Sis with me again. We started out with a good breakfast at the Clock Restaurant in Gainesville and then headed over to Citra. This time I bought a gallon of fresh squeezed Orange Juice, which I am sitting here enjoying. No preservatives and ice cold. Wow is it good!! I also got a jar of tangerine marmalade and orange marmalade, both sugar free, a bag of red grapefruit, and a pecan roll for Mommy. She said that when she was a little girl, she used to go fishing with her Daddy on Lake Lochloosa and the pecan roll was her treat when they stopped for supplies. She says it is every bit as good as she remembered. It is a bit too sweet for me. My downfall is the Pay Day candy bar. That combination of a caramel center and salty peanuts on the outside just does me in. Salty and sweet is a Southern thing for sure. There is nothing that comes close to a bottle of RC Cola with salted peanuts dropped in it and a straw :>)

We headed back through Hawthorne and State Road 20, passing fields of lovely old oaks and fat cattle. This is Florida at it's best, Fish camps, creeks, lakes,rivers, ranches and farms. I'm getting the itch to get back out to paint again at least early in the morning while it is cool. I want to go over to Twin Lakes Fish Camp in Cross Creek and paint again. It's been quite a while and also over to Mike's Fish Camp on Orange Lake. It has been ages. I think it might be wonderful to do a series from all of the area fish camps.


Today's Recipe:

Honey Citrus Glaze & Sauce

12 Oz. Can Frozen Orange or Tangerine Juice
2/3 Cup Honey
1/2 Cup Frank's® Original RedHot
2 Tablespoons Ground Ginger
1/2 Teaspoon Celery Seed
pinch of dried onion flakes

Combine all ingredients in small saucepan. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium-low. Cook 15 minutes or until thickened and reduced, stirring occasionally. Use sauce to glaze ham, ribs or chicken during last 30 minutes of cooking.

Musing About Form,Smoked Tuna Ball

WIP Stage 3

In working on this large painting, I am mulling around with thoughts about form, which is basically mass and volume. You remember art school, when everyone painted spheres,cones, and so forth. I have found that over the last year my work is beginning to stretch the basic ideas I had about form, playing more with three dimensional forms next to fairly flat shapes with little volume. I've discovered that this can be very cool indeed. In the old days, I was stuggling so hard to achieve three dimensional qualities to objects in my work, feeling that copying nature as closely as possible was the goal for good painting. It had to jump off the canvas and impress people,or it had to be loose, expressionist,or non objective to be good for the abstract fans. I think I am beginning to find a bridge between the two camps that works very well for me.

Placing flat areas of shapes without much form behind more dimensional areas,creates atmospherics very successfully.



I love the jump that it gives the eye too. Laying in crisp brushwork over flat areas really makes the separation work dynamically between planes. I've always been a stickler for intervals and this creates intervals for the viewer. Of course it can work equally well using flat volumeless shapes in the foreground pushes the viewer back into the picture plane to more developed areas of interest.

One of the exercises I give my workshop students ilustrates this. I have them do three paintngs. the first with a foreground center of interest, second, a middle ground center of interest, and lastly, a background center of interest, which is the hardest to do successfully. It is always quite revealing to them in that most painters automatically use the middle ground as an area of focus.

One of the problems I see in a lot of paintings is that all parts of the painting are the same. It is basically the same brushwork all over the painting. Either all sharp and crisp,all loose and messy or all brought to a particular stage of development with no variations. Then the color intensity is all the same, or the values are all the same. Variety is the spice of life and I think this cliche' certainly applies to painting too. My experiments with shapes and form are a way of stretching the boundaries for myself. They are not always successful and sometimes I am well into the process before I realize that is what I am doing. It did not occur to me until today while I was painting that I was playing with form and lack of form, playing them off each other 2D and 3D, at least in the 2 dimensional framework of a canvas. I looked around the room and saw this process in other paintings too. It is always great fun to discover new things about your work process.




Today's Recipe

Smoked Tuna Ball
1 pouch smoked tuna
1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese, softened
3/4 cup chopped pecans
1/4 cup chopped onion




DIRECTIONS
In a medium bowl, blend tuna, cream cheese, 1/2 the pecans and onion. Shape into a ball or loaf. coat with remaining pecans. Refrigerate until serving.

The Big painting, Heart of Florida Paint Out Stats, Blue Cheese Butter

Goldfinch
4x6 inches
gouache on acid free mat board

40.00
shipping 1.00

I've been having a lot of fun studying these little birds. They are interesting and lovely little creatures.


I put the Orange Shop painting aside to dry a bit and got out the big 40x48 inch canvas I started a month or so ago. I got quite a bit done on it and it looks like less of a mess than I started with. I had some problems with it early in the process and was dissatisfied. I was under a lot of stress at the time, with many events stacked up, one right after the other. The studio was full of equipment and supplies stacked all over and I just had difficulty focusing. That's why I put it away for awhile. I needed to get away from it to get a better idea of what I wanted to do and what I was unhappy with. I recommend that all the time to my students too. Now and then I start a painting that I just can't get a feel for. I'm not sure what to do with it and I'm not progressing well through the painting process. There is only one way to resolve that for me and that is to get away from it and go to another painting. Sometimes I will only need a day or two away from it to see clearly. Sometimes it takes weeks or months. Occasionally, I simply cannot resolve the problems and just need to give up. That doesn't happen very often but it used to, when I was starting out.

One of the difficulties for a painter is to make the decision to keep plugging at a painting or give up on it. I think the decision for me is based on composition. If it has a poor composition, no tweaking on earth is going to save it. The skeleton has too be good or it's over. Values can be adjusted, color can be adjusted. Once you get past the block in and start applying paint, your composition had better be good, or you are wasting paint and time. When I look at my old paintings in the painting bone yard, ones that never made it, I can almost always see weak compositions and design errors. In fact, it is always shocking to me at how dumb I have been to do such poor compositions. I think that I know how to paint. Because I have studied design and composition for years and have advanced art degrees, I have the idea that I will not make these stupid mistakes. That is simply not the case. Keep dreaming Linda!!!!

There are so many elements that factor into good design, so many approaches that it can be overwhelming. Second guessing oneself can ruin a good painting too. Do you let it flow and approach it with intuitiveness letting the painting take on a life of it's own or do you think it through, sometimes thinking it to death? Difficult decisions.

Which path to take? There are many decisions in each painting and more than one way to go. I sometimes wonder if my direction was the best one or whether another would have been even better. That is what makes painting always new and exciting for me. I know that masterpiece is right around the corner.



Tomoka River
40x48 inches
oil on canvas


I made a few changes in my original block in. I made the palms smaller, simplified the water, added a few rocks to the shore line, and it is looking better. Unfortunately, I forgot to get a photo of the initial block in.


Yesterday we got the statistics from the Heart of Florida Paint out. I found out that my sales were a bit higher than the average, so that is nice to know. Unfortunately, only 30% of the paintings produced sold, so that is really sad to me. The work was so splendid. Interestingly, it was the people who live in tiny Evinston who purchased most of the work. They should feel so proud of themselves for supporting the artists who came. I am so impressed by that. The HOF promoters are going to put two each of our paintings in an online gallery to sell for three months. I hope that will work well for them, and us of course.






Today's Recipe:

Today's recipe come from the Land O Lakes web site. I love blue cheese.

Blue Cheese Butter

1/2 cup LAND O LAKES® Butter, softened
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1 ounce (2 tablespoons) blue cheese crumbles
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley


Combine butter and lemon juice in small bowl. Beat at medium speed until well mixed. Add all remaining ingredients; mix well.

Store refrigerated in container with tight-fitting lid up to 2 weeks.

Serve with warm artisan breads or tossed in hot cooked rotini, ziti or penne pasta.

A new painting student,Grits Toast

Sabal Palm
4x6 inches
gouache on acid free mat board
40.00
1.00 shipping

I met my new painting student today. She came out for a consultation on supplies and to get it straight where we want to go with her game plan. She is a quilter, interested in the fine art quilt movement that is coming into vogue. I love her ideas. She wants to learn to paint and then put the paintings in her sewing machine to top stitch them and add embellishments, turning the paintings into quilts. It sounds very very cool. This old dog will learn some tricks too. We are going to be painting with acrylics, starting in the studio for the summer and then moving out on location perhaps in the fall.

My friend Carol Drummond does beautiful fabric paintings with all kinds of awesome things incorporated into the painting. Her work reminds me a bit of Marc Chagall. It is really wonderful. She has one of the best art collections around too and lives in a grand old vintage house in the historic district. I want to introduce the two ladies to each other. They will have many ideas to share I'm sure.

Whenever I get a new private student I try to invite them out to the studio in advance to sit and talk about their expectation and goals for painting. It help me to decide the best direction to help them advance. They are able to see my work and the palette I use, my equipment and supplies etc. I give them a basic supply list to pick up. I require that they have a 3 ring binder for notes, painting practice sessions and lessons so that they gradually build a pretty good working journal for painting.

I treat it like a patron visit. I make a nice snack and make them as comfortable as possible. This initial time together lets both of us become comfortable with each other and lets us both decide whether our personalities will work together. Sometimes a student and teacher just don't fit well together and I would rather find that out before actual lessons commence. Years ago I had to take all students whether we fit or not, but these days I don't have to work with students who don't make a good fit. I look for students who are eager to learn but not too pushy. I don't take students who feel they know more than I do. Why would I? That would waste both of our valuable time. They need to study with someone who knows a lot more than I do. I run a relaxed atmosphere in my studio and don't want it to be tense.

By having a visit first, I can also find out their preferred learning style. Do they like demonstrations? Hands on learning? Are they timid about painting, or bold and raring to go? All painters are unique and need to be taught with care. A bad teacher can ruin an artist's love for painting and learning. I feel a big responsibility toward my students and I take teaching very seriously.

I have had students come and go over the last 30 years. Some stay with me for years and others only for a short time. Usually the ones who move on quickly are looking for a teacher who will show them how to make very fast paintings without having to do much work. They need the instant gratification to feel they are making progress. They are not interested in painting fundamentals and the grind of study and exercises which improve work over the long term. They want it to look good now. I am not that teacher. I do try to be flexible, allowing them shortcuts like tracing if they don't want to struggle to learn to draw and so forth. I always incourage them to learn drawing skills, hoping they will not rely on tracing but I must accept that we are all different after all.

Mostly, I want my students to experience the joy I feel each time I pick up the brush. If I can give them that, I have done my job.


Today's Recipe:

Grits Toast (Adapted from Paula Dean's Recipe)

3 cans chicken stock
1 1/3 cups quick grits
1 cup parmesan cheese or shredded cheddar
1/2 tsp salt
cracked black pepper to taste
Melted butter


Cook gits with chicken stock 5 minutes add all ingredients except butter. Pour into butered greased sheet pan and refrigerate covered overnight. Warm up the pan in the oven to melt butter on pan. Turn out onto large cutting board. use a can to cut out toast rounds. Bake on a buttered sheet pan for 15 minutes at 400 degrees. Turn over and bake again until toasty.

You can freeze them to use later or use right away. Top them with any kind of topping like tuna salad, shrimp salad, bacon and cheese, ham salad and so forth to serve as appetizers. Yummy!!

Whatever Happened to Salons? The Work in progress continues,Painting Historic Architecture

I have put a poll on the blog to see which topics you like the most. I always want the blog to be interesting to my friends. Please participate. It is painless :>)


salon- a French cultural institution consisting of a weekly social gathering at the private house of an aristocratic lady, at which social, artistic, and scientific questions are discussed. From the early 17th century to the early 19th, several important literary and philosophical salons provided a social base for French writers. The term can also refer to an exhibition of paintings by living artists, so that in a second literary sense the title Salon has been given to an essay on contemporary art and related matters: Diderot in the 18th century and Baudelaire in the 19th both wrote important Salons.

I love the idea of having salons. It would be a fantastic way to communicate with other artists and guests. How would I go about this? I love the idea of lazy Sunday afternoons with my studio filled with writers, artists, and thoughtful people who want to talk about art. We could take turns bringing refreshments and invite lots of different people to come and perform music or poetry,read wonderful stories and do painting and drawing demonstrations. I wonder if there is anyone else who thinks about doing this, or if there are Salons around on a regular basis?





Orange Shop Stage 2
14x18 inches

The painting is starting to look a little like something now. I need to make several adjustments in the values under the awning and so forth and to work some more around the painting, adding a few details. It is hard to work from a small photo because I don't see the details. I have really enjoyed doing this one.



Painting historic buildings is wonderful for the soul. A couple of years ago I painted two views of Louis' Lunch in Gainesville. One is hanging for sale at my local frame shop. Last year a collector bought my Marjorie Kinnen Rawlings Home painting. It was large, 24x24 inches. Sometimes it takes me a while to sell these paintings because the market is quite small, but I enjoy doing them so much that I am willing to hold them until the right buyer comes along.

Some of the historic buildings always sell right away when I do them. I have painted the old packing house in Evinston Florida several times and they always sell almost immediately. Privately owned buildings often sell fairly quickly to the owners, but public buildings and museum estates like the Rawlings House are less likely to sell as quickly.

I know one artist who specializes in vintage architecture, doing many commissions for owners and it is a nice idea. I also admire a California artist who paints the bungalows there in acrylics. I wish I could remember her name. They are really wonderful She has a flat large massed areas style in her work, mostly flat shapes of color and they are really nice. I used to see her paintings on Ebay and they were always the vintage homes in neighborhoods in California. Very impressive.




I spent yesterday finishing up some paintings I had started a couple of months ago and were almost through with. Tomorrow I want to try and get back to the large painting I started before the Heart of Florida paint out. It is 40x48 inches. It is a big mess right now. I hope I can do something with it and whip it into a decent painting but I never predict success. That way I'm not disappointed.

I have a new private student visiting the studio today and I will need to get her supply list typed up.



Today's Recipe:

Left over casserole

I made this last night. The night before we had tacos for dinner with Spanish rice. I had about 3 cups of rice and 8 oz of taco meat left.

I mixed that up with a can of diced tomatoes with peppers and onions, and a can of cream of mushroom soup. I put all of that mixed into a casserole dish and baked at 400 degrees for about 30 minutes. I added canned French Fried onion rings to the top and browned them for about 4 minutes. I served it with sliced melon and mixed veges. It was really great and a good way to revamp left over taco fixings.

The Orange Shop,More on values, Pork with Orange Sauce

Have I told you all about the Orange Shop? It is one of Florida's last great citrus shops. Back when I was a little kid, they were everywhere. They lined the major highways like US 441, US 301 and so forth. They sold bags of citrus from their own groves, all kinds of cool tourist junk(by that I mean Florida related items like key chains, flip flops, neat little boxes), and homemade orange marmalade and citrus candies. They served fresh cold orange juice and grapefruit juice.

The Orange Shop is the coolest. It is located on US 301 in Citra Florida, a sleepy little town. It is owned by Pete and Cindy Spyke and they keep up the building beautifully. There is a palm tree that grows through the roof. I love to go there and I painted a small painting for them a few years ago. They are very adept at good marketing, sending out a very nice monthly Internet newsletter and they have a great web site too. HERE

I'm getting in the mood for some of their fruit and juice and to paint another painting of the shop. I'll be heading over there one day soon. They are always so nice to north Florida painters, allowing us to paint all around the shop when we visit. There is a shady park across 301 from the shop and I often paint there having a good view of the shop without being too close to 301, a very busy highway.

The other reason to go is that right down the street is a nice wildlife refuge on Lake Lockloosa. The last time I was there, it was mostly underwater and very hard to drive through. I'm thinking it might be just right for painting, now that it has dried up some here in North Florida.



I think it is so important to preserve these historic places by painting them and supporting them. North Florida is rich in history and heritage. It is so important to me and I hope, to others who live here. If you live near the Orange Shop, go there often and buy their fruit.

Today, I am determined to do my final finish up on the commissions and put them away to dry a bit. It will be nice to finish them but I enjoyed the process very much. I am thinking of starting a little series of paintings of the Orange Shop, just for my own pleasure. Perhaps they will sell to a Florida buff. Who knows? In any case, I will enjoy them and painting architecture is always a huge challenge for me. Here is the one I started today.



The Orange Shop
WIP
14x18 inches
oil on panel

Sometimes I enjoy doing a painting just for the pure pleasure of it. The above is such a painting.

More on Values

One of the ways to help yourself with a painting is to look at it's tonal range. Take a photo of your painting and print it out in gray scale. There should be definite separation in value families in the image. Often if you don't know what is wrong with a painting, looking at the values this way will help you to correct it. You may find that the vaues are a bit bland after viewing the gray tone. The opposite can also be a problem with too harsh value separations. In that case, more mid or half tones placed in the painting may help. It's an easy way to correct values.

I seem to have developed a slacker mentality since I've gotten off the road. It's not that I'm not doing anything. I do paint each day and do my usual routine. I have been picking up the studio and doing some touch up painting. I did make the post cards and address them for the Hot Dog Party, but I feel like I'm not doing much of anything and have no direction. I feel unorganized and that is rare for me. My mother says that perhaps I need to be a slacker for a bit. She says I am a workaholic, so perhaps she is right. I must be making the transition to summer, winding down a bit. Most of the year is so packed with responsibility, I actually feel guilty when I'm not working 18 hours a day.


Today's Recipe:

Pork with Orange Sauce

2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 lb boneless pork, cut in 1/2 inch cubes
2 carrot, sliced
2 celery rib, chopped
1 tablespoon orange zest
1/2 cup orange juice
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 teaspoons cornstarch
1/8 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 cup cashew (optional)
2 teaspoons sugar
3 cups cooked rice, kept warm
Directions
1Heat oil in large skillet until hot. Stir fry pork until browned, 3-4 minutes.
2Add carrots and celery; stir fry until crisp-tender, about 5 minutes.
3Stir in remaining ingredients. Heat to boiling.
4Cook, stirring, until thickened, about 1-2 minutes. Serve over rice.

From Recipe Zaar