Diary of A Working Artist
A typical winter week
Thursday Feb. 1st
Spent a couple of hours after lunch in the
studio working on a new painting in my 'book pages' series.
Forgot to wear old clothes as usual and ended up ruining a pair of tennis
shoes, which are now covered in Payne's Gray drips!
Also ruined a perfectly good brush with my obsessive scrubbing technique.
The studio is currently a mess, due to all the old cardboard boxes I've been
rummaging through for shipping purposes. The floor is papered with loose pages
from old copies of Macbeth to be used for collage. But the painting is going
well and I feel excited about it.
In the evening attended First Thursday gallery openings in
San Francisco. A good opportunity to see what's current, what's selling, to meet
the artists, and to discuss it all with a friend or two.
One of the galleries I've been checking out for a year or two (with a
view to submitting my portfolio) was unexpectedly exhibiting old-masterly
luminist landscapes. Usually they show painterly abstracts more like mine. Need
to find out if there's been a change of management. Stephen Wirtz gallery had
Deborah Oropello's huge screen prints on canvas of industrial barrels. She's
famous in the Bay Area so there was a big crowd.
Friday Feb 2:
Taught my abstract class in the morning. They were doing
imitations of Joan Mitchell, a great way of loosening up with large gestural
brushstrokes. Lots of white paint, too. Some of them were trying canvas for the
first time. Couldn't wait to get home and work on my new series of large
canvases. (During winter break I went down to the Palm Springs area and found a
great new abstract gallery and chatted to the owner for ages about the
resurgence of interest in abstract painting. As hoped, he eventually asked me
what I did and, of course, I just happened to have a brochure with me. He liked
what he saw and told me to send him some slides. He also commented that he
prefers artists who are pro-active when it comes to the business side of art,
not prone to fantasies about making it big with very little effort, or
unreliable about delivering work on time. Anyway, he loved my slides but told me
he was only interested in work larger than 48"x 48". Could I produce a
series of large pieces by next Fall? Without
hesitating I said YES. I already have a whole bunch of large canvases. Only the
size of my minivan has prevented me painting on them. That and a storage problem
in my studio which is really my garage. In the last year my entire house has
become a glorified storage space for art. Luckily I've been selling quite well
at art fairs and open studios, or I'd have to move out.)
I hurried home and straight into the studio to admire the
piece I'd been working on yesterday only to discover that it looked unexpectedly
horrible. How could this be? When I'm utterly absorbed in a painting the very
process is enough to satisfy me, so much so that it's hard to judge the product
objectively. It feels good so it must be good. Only this one definitely wasn't.
I'd spent some time critiquing my students' homework in the abstract class and
was now able to apply some of my own principles, all of which told me it
wouldn't do. I'm ashamed to say I was so disheartened that I decided to spend
the rest of the day updating my website, something which has to be done
regularly if it's to attract visitors back. I'd taken photos of my students'
work in the class and some of my most recent collages with my digital camera
(Olympus 2500SL) and downloaded them to my computer. I recently bought a
SmartMedia reader which makes the process of downloading very fast indeed. Then
I use PictureIt! Express to adjust the color, sharpness, and contrast, and to
decrease the size of the JPEGs for the web. I also have Photoshop but find it
unnecessarily complicated for this purpose. I save all my images on zip disks so
that, if my computer crashes, I'll still have the originals. While I was at it,
I printed up a few of 5"x 7" black-and-whites to send with press
releases for an upcoming group show in Wyoming. My Hewlett Packard 882C printer
may not be the latest model but it does a great job with photos on Konica High
Gloss Inkjet Paper. The photos cost about 30 cents each and they only take a few
minutes to print. Now there's absolutely no excuse for not including one in a
press package.
Saturday Feb 3:
Delivery day for the 3-person show at Gallery One in
Petaluma, which runs through February and March. The owner, Linda, gave me a
solo show 3 years ago, but this time asked me to select two other artists to
show with me. They both do mixed media collages so we decided to call the show Mixed
Messages. Linda paid for 1000 5"x 8" color announcements
(from Modern Postcard) which I designed on my computer using Microsoft
Powerpoint, incredibly user-friendly software intended for making electronic
slides for projection. She mailed out 500, I sent 250, and the other two artists
mailed the rest. My mailing list has 2,000 names by now, so I took some time
sorting it into the 200 most likely to attend plus 50 people who I really wanted
to know about it - galleries, collectors, previous buyers, etc. I use Microsoft
Access for my database and give everyone on the list a code 1- 8 according to
their status as curators, collectors, buyers, appreciators, studio visitors,
workshop participants, fellow artists, and friends. I also make a note of where
and when I met them.
Sunday Feb 4:
Collected a painting from a juried group show 30 miles away.
I've sent in slides for the past 6 years and this is the first time I've been
accepted. It's a small gallery which tends to show more cutting edge stuff than
mine, so I entered one of my 'computer' paintings. It looked a bit tame beside
some of the others.
Tuesday Feb 6:
The mail brought rejections from a couple of
group shows juried by slide (one in a museum which I'd really set my heart on),
an acceptance into a one-day art fair in Silicon Valley, a nice check from the
company which produces and sells my limited edition prints, and yet another
request to donate a painting to a local charity. Always a tricky one,
this. On the one hand it's a way to help out a worthy cause, on the other it's
hard to select something to donate. One of my older pieces, which I can no
longer exhibit, would be the obvious choice. But do I still want to put these on
show? I don't want to donate an inferior artwork, as that would be very bad
publicity indeed. But I'm reluctant to part with one of my better pieces, since
it will probably fetch a lower-than-average price in a silent auction. In the
end I've decided to send a money donation instead. I do about 4 auctions a year
anyway.
In the evening I attended an opening at a local cooperative
gallery where one of my photographs has been accepted into a monthly juried
show. Really I'm a painter; my career as a photographer has barely started. At
the reception I noticed that my choice of frame - maple museum-style - was all
wrong. Should have gone for plain black with a much wider mat. I know exactly
how to frame a collage or a painting, but I'm a beginner when it comes to
presentation of photographs. Ah well, at least when you see your work hanging on
the wall of a gallery, you're able to judge it more objectively. The photo
wasn't that great either. Lesson: stick to painting!.
Thursday Feb 8:
Three more hours fixing the painting, finishing up
with something much better than I started with. Couldn't wait to show my
husband. Bad idea. He's a scientist who knows very little about art. He said the
bottom two-thirds was 'boring'. I told him it was 'minimal'. He revised his
description to 'uninteresting'. I then spent a full half hour badgering the poor
man for a fuller explanation. I even asked him how I should go about making it
more interesting. As if he knew! Why oh why do I fall into the trap of asking my
nearest and dearest to critique my work? I tell all my students not to do it.
The problem is that studio work is a lonely business - it's just you and your
art. Perhaps if I was painting just for self-expression it would be all right.
But I'm trying to make a living here. In the first 5 weeks of this year so far
I've sold only one original and one print myself through my website. The rest of
my income has come from my limited editions and workshops. Stop now - think
positive.
Saturday Feb 10th
The opening of our 3-person show was very well attended,
despite the fact that several of the local papers failed to include it in their
listings (you win some, you lose some). Linda had done a great job hanging the
exhibit. Three paintings sold, none of them mine, but I felt pleased for the
others whose hopes were high. However, my hairdresser dropped in with his wife
and asked me if a painting of King Lear he'd spotted in my studio two years ago
was still for sale. I said it was and he agreed to buy it for his wife for
Valentine's Day. Generous fellow! I'll deliver it tomorrow. That's the thing
about Art Life - one minute you're down, the next you're up.
©
Ann Baldwin 2001