Welcome!

This is the first post to my blog, which will accompany my online art gallery. Here, I will chronicle my journey from rekindling my desire to paint again, after a long hiatus, to, hopefully, becoming a full-time professional artist, which is my ultimate goal and life's dream.

That dream is one I have pursued, off and on (mostly off), for most of my adult life, interrupted, here and there, by all the things life throws at you, from the loss of a job to the loss of a parent, and just the ups and downs of everyday life.

But, in returning to my dream goal, I have the benefit of hindsight and many years of accumulated knowledge and hard-earned wisdom I wish I'd had when I was a younger man. So, I am now better prepared to do whatever it takes to realize my goal than I have ever been before.

I don't really recall when the idea re-occurred to me to paint again. It was a few months ago, while perusing the websites of some artists, in particular, abstract painter Michel Keck. I had painted in a number of styles, both realistic and abstract, over the years and the last time I had picked up a brush was during the mid-nineties, when I was working toward a teaching certificate at the University of Central Oklahoma, where I had earlier earned my B.A. in Graphic Design. My plan, at the time, was to become a high school art teacher - until I found out the ugly truth was that art programs were being cut all over the country and that there would be no jobs for art teachers in the future. That, coupled with dealing with the death of my father in 1996, brought that idea to an end.

Anyway, as I was saying, I was looking at Michel Keck's work and, in particular, noting her success in selling her paintings online, as an independent artist. It was at that point I thought, "I could do that!," and so began the urge to paint again.

When I get interested in something, I usually research the heck out of it, and this time was no exception. In the course of finding out what was going on in the world of online art sales, I stumbled onto the "daily painting" phenomenon and the various artists' blogs that have arisen from it. I have toyed with the idea of starting my own art blog since I began painting again and, since I have been pursuing the "daily painting" regimen, myself, I figured now is the right time to do it, now that I have been at it a while and have accumulated a small and growing body of work.

So, with that thought in mind, this blog will contain photos of my latest paintings, updated either daily or when I can get to it (the blog, not the paintings). So far, I've succeeded in keeping up a daily painting practice, since the end of August, and now have a gallery of over 45 paintings on canvas and paper to show for it. So far, due to economic constraints, most of my work has been in acrylic on paper, rather than canvas. This is in response to the cost of art materials, of course, and not by design. If money were no object, I'd not only be painting nothing but canvases, but I'd be painting rather large ones, at that. Then again, I have developed an appreciation of small paintings on paper and I've discovered there is a fairly hot market for them, these days, probably due to the fact that most people, if they can afford original art at all, are more inclined toward the cheaper works on paper, as opposed to canvases. So, my larger inventory of works on paper may work to my advantage, at some point.

I mentioned, earlier, the accumulated knowledge and wisdom I've come to have at the age of 56, and part of that is to realize, with a more mature attitude than I had in the past, the importance of having a recognizable style and sticking to it. This is especially true for abstract painters - much more so than it is for realists. A photorealist's whole focus is to mimic photographs faithfully and, to that end, the only thing a photorealist has that approximates a "style" at all is his choice of subject matter. He can choose to do photorealistic renderings of, say, architectural close-up details, for example and, if no one else is doing that, he'd have something approximating a unique style. Other than that, the realist painter can get away with not really having much of a recognizable style because the subject matter dictates the look of his work.

Not so with the abstract painter and doubly so with Abstract Expressionists. We are in a unique position, stylistically, because there is no subject matter - just the handling of the paint and the surface and the types of images that arise from this. A color field painter has an especially difficult task in arriving at a unique style that sets himself apart from all the other color field painters because of the very nature of color field painting, itself. It is such a narrowly defined style of painting that there are few ways to distinguish one's self from others. Even more so for minimalists. One square canvas painted red looks like any other. That's why I laughed my head off when I came upon an online gallery devoted exclusively to the work of several minimalist painters - and everything there looked the same! Fortunately, while I love color field paintings, I am more strongly drawn to gestural painting in my own work.

But, even among gestural painters, it's hard to set one's self apart from the herd. Some don't even try to, opting to follow in the shadow of greats such as Jackson Pollack, doing drip paintings. Among the aforementioned color field painters, there are those who follow the Mark Rothko approach. I guess being called "derivative" doesn't matter to these painters. It does to me, though, and so I set about to find a way to set myself apart.

I began by exploring several different styles and techniques, but I found that, the more I did so, the harder it became to choose just one and stick with it. Then I recalled a small series of paintings I had done in 1988, which I had dubbed my Flowspace series (and which I continued, recently) and in which I had used a painting technique I hadn't used since. So, I began using it again and it was then that I realized my unique style would arise from the process I was using. Voila! I became a process painter! Nothing wrong with that, and it's really the best way to nail down a style and to stick to it, by simply developing a process and using it exclusively.

As for whether that process is unique enough to set me apart, I have found - in researching the paintings of hundreds of contemporary painters - only one other artist who is using the same technique and, fortunately, he doesn't use it consistently.

Anyway, since adopting my earlier process, my work has begun to have a unifying look to it that makes it a cohesive body of work; i.e., it all looks like the work of the same artist: me. While this may not seem greatly significant, bear in mind that most painters struggle with this issue of sticking to one style. They want to be everything at once - like the teenager who wants to be a graphic designer/writer/musician. They just can't make up their minds what they want to do, so they try to do it all and the result is that their portfolio looks like the work of ten different artists. Thus you see the value in finding a unique process and sticking to it rigidly.

While it may seem boring, to some, to do everything the same way every time, I have found there is an overwhelming wealth of options still left open to me, despite using the same process for every painting. I can vary the colors, I can change paints, and of course, there are almost limitless compositional and textural variations possible. So, this will never become boring, for me.

Now, those who are not aware of this issue of style may ask, why is it so important, anyway? Well, the answer lies in the art martket. Galleries and dealers, as well as art consultants, interior designers and art collectors, all want to know that an artist can continue to produce whatever attracted them to his work in the first place. Galleries have to be able to fill the demand for more of it and collectors want to have a unified collection of works that are unmistakably the work of a particular artist.

All the biggest names in the artworld got that way because they realized the importance of having a unique trademark style and of producing a large body of work in that style. Few would recognize an early Jackson Pollack, but everyone in the world immediately recognizes a Jackson Pollack drip painting as being a Jackson Pollack. If Pollack had decided, one morning, to change to color field painting, like his contemporary Mark Rothko, his career would have been over. Which is one reason why I wonder why anyone would want to paint just like Pollack or Rothko today and run the risk of never being taken seriously. Every amateur who gets into painting abstracts always does a drip painting and/or a Rothko color field impersonation. I admit I've done so, myself. We all do it. But, if you're serious about a career as a fine artist, mimicry is the kiss of death. What will make you stand out from the herd of would-be artists is to be different from everyone else, not the same.