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Art Fanatics Thread of Visual Dominance


HoustonHorn

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53 minutes ago, RDCanecutter said:

tldr: no and no.

If you're bored and still hanging around: Queen Bee is living life, and now that I don't have to interact with her brain worms, we get along fine. I have very little contact with that club other than bumping into friends at shows, and one woman I convinced to study Scottish Gaelic, because that is what one does.

Witch and/or a dozen other nice friendly art show women: my wife says she likes it when other women flirt with me, with the unstated message that if I fool around, I will be living in a muddy ditch eating baloney sandwiches. The first time I met her, she told me how she destroyed her cheating first husband using private detectives, the best divorce lawyers (one that she hired, and a lot more that she "consulted" so they couldn't work for him,) and of course the divorce papers that she delivered to him after midnight at his girlfriend's apartment. So no.

presumably the right call for you and your well-being and happiness...likely the wrong call for your art and the rest of us.

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  • 2 months later...

Been working on this painting the last few nights, and for awhile now. Part of a series that I’ll pitch for a show. One of nine, each almost six feet by six feet. Some people like fancy cars, and I like painting, and a dc studio in an old factory. Not my day job, or the class I teach in the evenings, but I get to this in my time, late night, after the wife goes to sleep. I’ve done a lot of writing for the work, but want to hear comments. The floor isn’t finished. All nine paintings are almost all together 50 feet with no spacing between. 

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Edited by Mdhorn
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13 hours ago, Mdhorn said:

Been working on this painting the last few nights, and for awhile now. Part of a series that I’ll pitch for a show. One of nine, each almost six feet by six feet. Some people like fancy cars, and I like painting, and a dc studio in an old factory. Not my day job, or the class I teach in the evenings, but I get to this in my time, late night, after the wife goes to sleep. I’ve done a lot of writing for the work, but want to hear comments. The floor isn’t finished. All nine paintings are almost all together 50 feet with no spacing between. 

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Damn, boss, that's like Real Art Stuff. Get after it! Post more!

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12 minutes ago, RDCanecutter said:

Damn, boss, that's like Real Art Stuff. Get after it! Post more!

Thanks RDC, it's been a journey.  I paint a lot of simpler stuff in between because these are a lot to do-andI get the occasional portrait commission or painting sale. But this whole thing is a story called Floodland or something I'm working on--the scale kind of emulates a modern flood path when all put together. A lot of this stuff is from river cleanups and just discarded by the side of the road--like cultural refuse or artifact discards of modern civilization.  We live in a flood zone so the marks on the wall, blah, blah.  I can send you the text.  But these are basically all also items of a broken escape as well--as in we're stuck in our own mess.  I probably could have also put this in the I'm digging a hole tab.  

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In the Goblin World where I dwell, I have been tweaking the booth displays for more oomph.

Back during the pandemic, I did mountains of small paintings that I could mail for $5. I had a lot of them left when face-to-face shows started back up, and even though they were cheap (40 bucks,) they really boosted my show sales. I was outselling my peers.

But then they ran out, and they weren't really an efficient use of time-- I could knock out larger, more profitable paintings in almost the same amount of time. Those sell too, but more slowly. So, short-term, I fell behind my friends, who started kicking my ass in the 20-40 dollar slot.

So a couple months ago, I decided to just copy what they were doing-- order a shit-load of 8 x 10" prints and offer them at $30/ea. I used digital images of long-ago-sold paintings. Ordering them takes no time, the only work is cutting mat board to go behind them inside plastic sleeves. Maybe now I can finish more big paintings while occasionally slapping out scads of quick $10 drawings to cover the low end.

The past two shows where I sold these prints have been the best two of the year, with the prints doing the work. They cost me about $5.50 each when I order them in quantity, and folks pay 30 without blinking. (If anybody here is interested, they're available on my Redbubble listed earlier for maybe 10 bucks for a one-off. But selling eggs on Malta and all that.)

Now maybe one day I'll get a van that can hold wire screens for displaying more paintings.

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Been working on this painting the last few nights, and for awhile now. Part of a series that I’ll pitch for a show. One of nine, each almost six feet by six feet. Some people like fancy cars, and I like painting, and a dc studio in an old factory. Not my day job, or the class I teach in the evenings, but I get to this in my time, late night, after the wife goes to sleep. I’ve done a lot of writing for the work, but want to hear comments. The floor isn’t finished. All nine paintings are almost all together 50 feet with no spacing between. 
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That's going to be an incredible piece! Wow
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  • 2 months later...

Year-End 2024 Art Report

Year started slowly and was interrupted with occasional tedious stuff, but that's normal.

Paid all bills.

Finished strong. Did 29 shows total. Would have been 30 but one was on my mom's birthday party, so I skipped it and took gifts of jewelry to all the womenfolk. To keep with the metal theme the men will get plunking ammo for their favorite toys, but I am shopped out at the moment.

Geographical Conquests: actually retrenched a little, concentrating on Birmingham and Montgomery. I must go to Atlanta and Nashville soon. Plan is for me to get travel van for overnight travel farther afield.

Still avoiding local "big" multi-day shows. I think they are way over-priced for the profit, and the thought of leaving art unattended to the mercy of weather afflicts me with sleep deprivation. Did some new shows, one of them was the #3 best seller.

I am way behind on commissions. I have them, I am just slow.

Leaning on the prints has been a winner. I have hundreds of sold paintings saved digitally, I order them in batches of 20 or so from Redbubble, but only 2 or 3 of each. Back them with mat board, put them inside ClearBags, bingo, nice instant art widget that sells itself. Then order different ones so it stays fresh.

In 4 local stores, it's not big but it's fun. Like having 4 fruit trees spread around the county that I am allowed to graze.

For the Cold Wet Time of Jan-Feb 25 I plan to go back to my roots, swamp eBay with fast simple art, while putting down a drop cloth in our "loft" (top of staircase) and laboring on large vainglorious canvases. Like maybe "The Night Watch" except with Apes wearing 1600s munitions armor and elkhide coats, matchlocks in simian paws.

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On 8/25/2023 at 9:55 PM, RDCanecutter said:

Slapped those pics on my Instagram and immediately drew the attention of an NFT connoisseur and Crypto wizard. I used to avoid these accounts because they're scambots, but I just have a good feeling so I replied:

 

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Are you wearing a fez in your profile pic?

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I dunno if I ever mentioned what I do to make the most of drawing time. At least once a week I'll get stuck somewhere boring for an hour or two. When I know that's going to happen, I take a couple of Sharpies and at least a dozen "baseball card" panels I have chopped out of wine box (a beautiful honey graham cracker color with fine corrugation.) Then I draw, draw like the wind.

At shows I will put mini-shoeboxes of these drawings on the corners of my front table at 5 bucks or 3 for 10, and they stop people like they've been tased. Then after somebody loosens up and relaxes, they might look up and get interested in larger paintings. Or just get a scad of these little ones. S'all good.

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If y'all are current on cholera and dengue shots, I'll invite you inside my home studio/print shop.

It's a small bedroom w/bath on the NW side of the house. Mrs. Canecutter abandoned it to me more than a decade ago and is not to blame for anything you see.

What's got me jazzed is this large battered shelf thing that I got as a gift from a gallery. It doesn't look like much, but ohhhh... It's Fortune and Glory kids, Fortune and Glory.

Up til now, I had table space for drying maybe $200/day of block prints. You can knock those out in a long hour, but then I was cramped and had to stop.

This thing will hold an extra $1,200/day of production. That will be tiring, but my goblin greed is strong. I can take all my designs and do a good chunk of each, and have them all dry at the same time.

I think it'll easily jimmy back into that space in front of the west window you see behind it, get some good beat-down warm sun on the prints. In art school I always heard about how painters craved the north light, but I suspect that had to do with expats freezing in a Paris loft while begging maMA and paPA for more money. Me I like bright colors, bright light, and heat.

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Edited by RDCanecutter
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