I added eight new paintings. I've done about 40 diamonds so far, including ones that didn't make the cut, and they are still developing so I will continue with this theme for the forseeable. I also made some design updates to this site, tweeking everything a bit here and there, exerimenting with embedded fonts using CSS3 and bringing the blog functionality up to speed with some navigation improvements. With exception of the bio page which is on deck for a cleanup, I feel like the web site is about 90% where I want it to be, though I'm sure that whenever I get to 100% there will be another bunch of ideas that I want to implement. At any rate I can say now that I have the web site I've always wanted. The main focus of course is creating awesome content for the site which in this case requires hard work in the studio.

Beyond this I'm integrating my artwork into several social networks that provide sales platforms for artists. More on that soon.

Some thoughts about being an artist in the 21C

It takes an enormous amount of energy to do something real. What is real? We live in a world that is changing at rates that humans have never experienced. The notion of 'reality' is as ephemeral is the notion of 'friend.' Indigenous people in a forest live with essentially the same tech for many generations. They know what to eat, how to survive, etc. and they tell the same stories and pass down the same songs, and nothing much changes from one generation to the next. How different this is from the world we Internet users live in today. I remember using rotary phones. My first modem ran at 300 bits per second. And through my lifetime I garnered a set of skills that reflect my talent and ability and predispositions. Some of those skills, like the skills of hunter-gatherers, haven't needed to change much. I learned to paint from my father, who was an interior decorator. My earliest memories include "reading" color swatch books at the paint store. When you consider painting as an art form, you can say that it really hasn't changed much over the past 20,000 years. 

What is technology, then? And what is the value to be found in things that change at differing speed? Why does painting even matter any more? Shouldn't it be long dead and gone? Well, it's not! I've got a dead iPod Photo that was all the rage five years ago. Today it's a worthless, brick-like hunk of trash. Yet I still have artwork that will outlive this thing.

to be continued...