Pencil Sharpened at Both Ends
Oil MDF
This one should make up for the pencils with no point! One of the reasons I havn't been painting much recently is that I've been pursuing my other passions of music and building things. I'm at present building a stratocaster style guitar. You can read about it here on my Another Day blog if anyone is interested or curious.
My other ongoing project is playing around with music making software, a Digital Audio Workstation or DAW . The technology we have available to us now gives ordinary people like myself something we could only dream of a mere decade ago. It's possible now to have a fully equipped recording studio that would have been worth hundred of thousands of dollars only a few years ago, on a personal computer for only a few hundred dollars! Click here for my Soundcloud page of musical madness and nonesence. I've always loved music as well as painting. I enjoy playing guitar and in recent years have started playing drums. I don't kid myself that I'm particularly good at it, but I enjoy it! And I have reached the time in my life where I come to the sobering realisation that this life is not a dress rehearsal... there's so many things I would like to try my hand at before I'm through..
Painting is the thing I'm good at but I feel totally disenfranchised by the Art World. I'm fiftyfive years old and have been painting for over thirty years now, struggling to get a toe in a door that seems to be permanantly closed to me. I am now capable of producing work that is of very high quality and yet it seems to go largely unnoticed. I still struggle to get shown in real world gallerys which is why I started this blog. So all this is by way of saying that I'm finally through trying. I've been through all the deppression and sense of failure and inevitable bitterness. By deliberately not putting myself in that position of feeling that I "have to paint" because I'm a painter, I feel a lot happier about life than I have been for a long time. There are all these other things that I can do and I don't have to be particularly good at them! It's fun and exciting learning new things!
And so... a pencil sharpened at both ends...
I like the last part of your blog. I totally am with you there. I had been painting since 1970, struggling throughout, especially the latter years. A couple of years ago I said "Sod them all" and haven't painted since, bar some botanical work.
ReplyDeleteI have, however, found Photoshop and Second Life, and now have a great place on Second Life (Artists Garden SL Botanicals) where I sell my Photoshop painted plants.
The relief when I gave my traditional painting up was enormous and I am now happier and richer, in all ways.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlTy6BowEF4
http://www.flickr.com/photos/artists_garden_sl_botanicals/
http://artistsgardenslbotanicals.webs.com
Good luck with all your new ventures and I do love your tiny paintings, and found the little video fascinating.
Janet Marshall
THank you Janet! It's interesting hearing your response, as I've always regarded you as a very succsessful artist, and I know some people feel the same about me. So I guess it's a universal sentiment that aflicts us artists! We must be a needy lot. lol
ReplyDelete