art marketing workout

We took a walk, a companion and I, through part of Capitol Hill in Washington on route to one of our favorite eateries because you must eat and you must get exercise.  Spring’s first flowers and lovely city architecture are fine things to behold along the way.  (Ah, there’s the house with the cobalt blue shutters!) And then too it’s beneficial to do a little marketing.

I used today’s journey to leave some of my cards along our path.  Some of the cards are expressly designed to direct people HERE to this blog.  And if you’re finding this post now because you got one of those cards, I welcome you!  I hope that you’ll find ideas and pictures that bring you joy.

It’s really important for artists to share art. I’m marketing beauty.  While I offer my paintings for sale, I’m also marketing beauty itself.  Part of my aim is to persuade whoever will listen that we are surrounded by beauty.  The sky alone has tons of beauty in it.  Don’t even get me started talking about the earth.  Beauty is everywhere.

I am continually searching for beauty in my art — in shapes, lines, textures, colors, and in patterns of darkness and light.  I look for it in ideas, too, but that gets a little tricky.  I don’t know how to define what beauty is.  I do recognize it when I see it.  And I see it often.  And I’m always striving to imitate its appearances in pictures.

So welcome visitor.  Welcome long time reader.  Welcome silent guest. Welcome to whoever you are.

 

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First time Fishing

I remember such a long time ago.  I was a high school student who had fallen in love with a much, much older guy — this guy above, the artist Duccio di Buoninsegna who painted this picture of Jesus calling Andrew and Peter.

As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will send you out to fish for people.” At once they left their nets and followed him.

For me the calling I heard was to become a fisher, a fisher of pictures.  When I catch people, I catch them through art.  Drawing and painting have become the bait I use to catch people.  When I catch them, it’s to say “Look!  Look!  The world that God made is filled with marvelous things! Let’s look at them and think about them together.” Okay, maybe I don’t say it in quite that goofy way but that’s the basic sentiment nonetheless.

Let’s pay attention to what we see because we are surrounded by marvels.

In my youth I fell in love with “the Italian primitives” at the National Gallery of Art.  I started my journey in Gallery No 1, and it was shock and awe from thence onwards.  I had no idea how to do any of the things I saw, not drawing, not mixing color, not painting.   But I felt instinctively that it was the thing for me.  Somehow I would learn.

Little did I know how lasting the influence of the first loves would be.  Little did I know how much just Duccio di Buoninsegna’s painting alone would affect me.  Decades later I am mesmerized by lattices such as the one in his painting, the net that holds the fish.  I paint them in different ways than he did, but they occupy lots of space in my cranium.

Even a fish’s body has a lattice incorporated in it.

So, artists and art lovers, let yourself fall in love with art — and see where it will take you.