Well I've been licking my marketing wounds now since last November after having my hope resoundingly crushed when I submited two paintings for auction and its time for me to get back on that horse and get back to business. Which is difficult when your business is exposing your humble, naked soul to perfect strangers.
But there it is. Its bootstrapping time. Onward we trudge, with our heads down and resolve firmly in tow, even if it has to be dragged kicking and screaming back into the fold. I've been working on a painting, a large piece for me at 24x36". It's not the size of the painting but the sentiment that is taking me an inordinate amount of time to create a picture that satisfies me.
Over this past spring, summer, and fall I was posting new plein air work every week and offering the painting as visual stimulus for the weekly blog updates. That on top of the business of running a business proved to be too demanding. It hung over me like a dark cloud threatening my peace of mind almost daily. I want to offer something that no one else is offering though, that no one else can offer. A fully rounded experience that immerses people in the moment and leaves something to think about long after having seen the painting or read the blog or poem or whatever. I'm an admirer of the late Robert Genn's work with respect to his "Twice Weekly Letter" and remain influenced by his excellent example. "...ask yourself, what could be".
You see, I'm limited by my heavy metal poisoning, I've discovered that I can't keep that pace up indefinitely so I've been trying to come up with an alternate but still regular blogging schedule. Above all though, I don't want it to be just a blog. I don't want to make it a daily diary. I'm not narcissistic and I know this isn't about me. It's about something larger than myself. Something inside all of us that appeals to our sense of the spiritual, intellectual, emotional, philosophical and hopefully a little humorous every now and then.
Being a visual artist with a website, I feel obligated to offer as rich of an experience as is possible in this new medium. And a new medium it is. The presentation of new artwork coupled with prose and a dose of the very personal. Artists of the Far East have offered poetry with pictures since antiquity but lacked the personal background, the insight, and the close relationship that is formed between reader and writer that happens when following an artist regularly through a blog and/or social media.
If you were born before 1980 then you know the excitement of getting a personal letter by, 'snail mail', from a friend. I want to have a bit of that personal interest so people aren't just getting a laundry list of new events and work. Being new to this, having just kicked this thing off last April, I'm finding that expecting that level of quality is overly demanding of my fragile psyche to produce week in and week out, month after month. After all I'm an artist, and we're notorious for needing our downtime to allow new ideas to simmer and stew before producing something that is meaningful and lasting. I'm scaling back my weekly ambitions, starting last October ;) , and will be able to focus more on the quality of the blog without the hazard of risking complete burnout. I'm shooting for every other week right now but can guarantee at least 1 per month. There may be a sprinkling of new stuff more frequently as we move forward and I get more comfortable, but that will depend on the volume of qualitative material available at any given time.
So in the interests of getting back to some sense of regularity, I'm offering a poem this week with my current wip(work in progress).
Stay true,
Rob
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Dedication To Traci
She's the type of love that wars are fought over.
My love rights all ships and blooms in fields.
My love radiates.
My love consumes.
She is color in clover
and a breeze through lilacs.
My love is the calloused hand that holds a brush.
She is the skin on her inner thigh,
beauty in the stars,
and company in the night.
My love soars;
riding thermals to the moon.
Hers is the kind of love that makes men desperate.
The kind that leads to murder.
The kind that men starve for.
The kind of love that men die for.
She is warm
She is wet.
She is drunk on jet fuel
and calls me to heel.
She sends me spinning
and convulsing through my dreams.
She is the offered body.
Naked to her painted toes.
My love chokes on desire.
She is that one day that will never come again.
Breathlessly infinite.
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