Sometimes it feels as if being an artist occurs in a parallel universe, sharing each breath with being a functioning member of society, a participating family member, a wife, a daughter/sister/aunt etc...

It's often a strange task to reconcile who I am in front of the canvas and who I am in the rest of Life. And no matter what, every time I go into the studio, there's the blank canvas, an open question. Or, sometimes more distrubingly, there's the canvas I worked on yesterday ....
 

That reminds me of a question somebody asked me just recently, asking for names of famous female artists that don't have a messed up family or social life.
I couldn't come up with one. I also thought about well adjusted famous males artists too, and came up with nothing.
It's not easy mixing a creative life with a well adjusted place in society. There must be some kind of middle ground though.
 

Thoughts while having a Colonoscopy

While having a colonoscopy I was thinking in a drug induced dream state about the experiences life brings to one’s art. For me life changes my art continuously. I have never been one of those artists that found a subject, style or whatever they find and made a career of it. Many names come to mind when you think about those artists, many of whom are incredibly successful. Gallery owners and curators like art in the brackets and I think that is why many artists have developed the work habits they have. But not me. That’s a marketing thing and it isn’t that I don’t like to market my art and ideas it is just that I want to do it in a different way, not (Art in the Brackets). I read an article recently in Art News about the Multiple Personalities of contemporary artists, and I thought-- that’s me! Really I just have too many interests to stay on one road, I have to travel as many roads as I can and I will say that it is this approach to my art that is in the brackets for me. Or maybe it’s outside the brackets. Whichever-- I like it and I am not going to change my approach, just everything else.

The modern world is the driving force behind these multiple personality artists, it is the rapid pace of life at cyber speeds that take us to so many places along our personal roads. Technology has changed the way we approach life and work. There are many of those among us that resist this ADD life style while most young people are fully engaged. Some would say that the attention span of the modern youth is shorter in all respects, but I think it is just expanded. I watch my own children who are amazingly successful, far more than I ever was at their age, and they are multi-tasking. They manage their studies with text messaging and web searching while listening to music or watching a movie, all at the same time. They are active and busy mentally and physically. The new world is a much more complex place. I look for ways to insert my art into this framework of modern activity.

I have tried creating websites as art and have found real promise in the activity. The Open Sign Project, an experimental website, was an experiment that looked at a common theme in the global urban landscape, the Open Sign. The website operated for one year. I linked the site to search engines so that when a searcher looked or Googled for Open Signs it would pop up on their search browser. But when people searched for a business by name that was listed in the photo record, the site came up in their search, also. Suddenly more people were looking at the installation, because they happened on to the Art. Several thousand viewers looked through the gallery and accompanying text. I put art out as a stumbling block and they bumped into it and looked for a while. I am not sure what my next cyber project will be just yet.

Artocracy is a web based gallery that is trying to introduce a new concept to the selling of art on line. Digital prints are available for downloading for a fee. The patron can purchase the artwork of their desire and pay for the right to download the work and print it at home on their own printer. The site offers tutorial for printing and framing the artworks. It is original artists works of art {Authorized Prints} at your finger tips, for a reasonable price. It serves the artist who is working in digital formats well and it also give the patron an opportunity to own real art. The music industry has been doing this for a while now and iPods are rocking the world, they have sold over one billion music downloads. For me the internet has brought a new audience to my door. My work is seen globally and that is big.
Painting I think has become more important than ever before, because in this fast paced global marketplace a need to rest at a welcome oasis is needed more today than in the past. A place to ponder a focused gaze into a familiar work of art hanging on one’s wall brings sense of place to the art patron. As I tramp my way through Glacier National Park, doing my day job I have seen the most amazing sights, a landscape that is un-compared to any other. Each place has its own unique attributes and as an artist that is subject matter. With the threat of environmental catastrophe perhaps the Landscape painting will have a new place in the hearts of human beings and I hope that is soon. In Glacier the effects of Global Warming are present and observable to anyone who cares to look. I don’t know why it is getting warmer but the evidence is in front of my eyes. I have been lucky enough to stand on a glacier and look at the bugs, leaves and other natural material trapped in the ice for millennium. Our glaciers are shrinking every minute of everyday and have been for who knows how long. Maybe it is the way it is supposed to be, but at any rate it is the way it is. The Landscape is disappearing at an alarming rate. Development threatens every inch of space on the globe. Poor resource management threatens society as it exists today and will determine the society of tomorrow. Walt Disney’s Tomorrow Land never talked about the future we seem to be heading towards. So painting is a rest stop a place to ponder unformed thoughts and ideas about where you are. The Landscape for me is a study of where I have been, I paint what I feel more so than what I see, though the two are married within me as the artist.
That multiple personality continues in the search mode within my hard disc of a brain looking and exploring for the next idea, the next artwork or the next way to make art, it is an American thing a Pioneer thing, we are the descendants of special people who took great risks with their lives and acted on their ideas, we should act on ours even if we risk stepping outside the bracket that frames the art world.
 

Yeah, that's a challenge with art.. keeping any kind of focus. I would hate to be one of those artists that get trapped into painting the same painting all their life. And when they do eventually try and do something different it never sells and/or is criticized enough to return them to doing that same painting.. again and again.
It's what I like about Picasso.. as his life changed or when he found a new woman, his art also changed. It wasnt always accepted by critics or collectors, but he did it anyway. Imagine if he remained a cubist all his life. We would now think of him as just another Braque (not that Braque is a bad artist, just that he never covered much ground past cubism).

And bring on the new landscape movement. We certainly need something to snap us out of the insanity we have found ourselves in. Landscape artists won't save us, but it's a start.

Artists are good at getting attention though, so I hope more do start pushing for the environment. They're also good at making things "cool" or fashionable.
 

I think this status of being an 'ARTIST' is so false and pretentious. You are only an artist, not a God. People express themselves in many different ways, artists do the same but it is also their job. Less of the ego and more of the truth is what art needs. In saying truth i mean, as in the truth of themselves, the truth of their concepts, universal truths. These are idea's that help humankind. Idea's that come from your ego, who do they serve??