Thoughts:
Imagination is a gift granted us at birth. This childhood trait produces an optimistic time in life that we are not apt to see again. Dulled by their own uncreative lives, adults delight in watching children as they and imaginary companions discover simplistic joys hidden inside empty cardboard boxes. Given choice, a child will pick the most vivid colors and boldest patterns.
Perhaps the gift, like a milk carton, has an expiration date. Too soon imagination is cast aside, morphed from delightfully unique into diminished ordinary. Pablo Picasso lamented that he lived his whole life learning to once again paint like a child.
A time percent of truly fortunate infants are blessed with an additional gift of extraordinary intellect that enables the genius to maintain imagination. Leonard da Vinci drew detailed images of flying machines hundreds of years before Wilbur and Orville Wright made their brief flight in North Carolina. While contemplating aerial travel, da Vinci was creating works of art so breathtaking they must have been painted with divine inspiration.
Logic is an organized procedure usually developed at about six years of age. Picasso, weary with “reason”, longed to return to the place of pretend.
Vincent van Gogh left behind a vast wealth of personal correspondence. About 800 of his letters survived. A small group written from 1887 to 1889, during his most creative period, gives evidence that he was pursuing a path of fantasy. In April 1888, he wrote to, “My dear old Emile Bernard ...I sometimes regret that I can’t decide to work more at home and from the imagination. Certainly--imagination is a capacity that must be developed ...A starry sky, for example, well --- it’s a thing that I should like to try to do … I follow no system of brushwork at all, I hit the canvas with irregular strokes, which I leave as they are, impastos, uncovered spots of canvas ---corners here and there inevitable unfinished.
A new show was hung in the PAPA Gallery at the end of January. Tony Kent, a prolific painter, told me he had tried “something new” and I would “certainly know it when I saw it”. It is he who gave me inspiration for February Thoughts. The painting is quite simple in composition, gray trees with impasto applied paint of a limited palette. To quote Dutch Thurman, “check it out”.
Margie
TWELVE ART MARKETING TIPS (Nita LeLand)
1. Describe yourself and what you do in 25 words or less.
2. What is your goal?
3. What is your market? Be specific.
4. What tools do you need? (business cards, letterhead etc)
5. How will you use these tools? (pass out cards to everyone in reach, do
community service, offering a free class or demonstrations)
6. Start a mailing list.
7. Budget your time.
8. Budget your money.. (price your work to fit your market. once you are
established you can adjust your prices.
9. Write a step-by-step plan for your art events and promotions.
10. Follow up. (write notes to customers and show sponsors. don’t procrastinate)
11. Be professional.
12. Review your marketing plan again and again. Look for new opportunities and
venues for your art marketing.
“Talent is long patience.” Gustave Flaubert
