Snow-bright

Snow-bright

Oil on canvas, 20x20

Call me at 860-442-0246 or email me

if you are interested in buying this painting

As I was standing in the back yard painting this piece yesterday, I found myself thinking about success and how it's measured.

When you're employed by a company, it's relatively easy to measure success. You get raises and promotions. Even the worst boss occasionally tells you that you've done a good job - or tells you you've done a bad job and then falls quiet while you improve.

In this new life, it's harder to find the markers of success. Or maybe it's that the gauge keeps changing. Making a painting that pleases me, that's a wonderful marker. But by now, I have made a hundred paintings that please me.

Painting a scene, or part of a scene, in a way I could not have managed a year ago, that's another great marker. In this painting, the background trees have a luminous and abstract quality that I'd never have seen a year ago, let alone been able to paint. And the foreground trees are touched by a streak of light that, again, I'd not have seen a year ago. Surely, this is success, I thought - except that it was easy, and so, the achievement didn't feel like success.

Having a show is a marvelous marker of success, in and of itself, and I know this. Having my work in galleries is a marvelous marker of success, too. But showing work and selling nothing shakes the ground beneath me.

In the end, it feels to me that sales are really the truest marker of success. And artists aren't supposed to worry about money, right? But the truth is that I can only continue to do this if I continue to sell my art.

So as soon as I have my work together for the March show at the Wallkill River School Gallery in Montgomery, N.Y. , I am going to make another huge marketing push. Get my work in more galleries, in more places where more people have money.

If any of you have ideas about galleries I should approach, please let me know. Some of you have sent me to places that have really helped me define and find success.

A leap

First snow II. Oil on panel 
sold

This is a painting I've been hoping to make for a long, long time. It's the painting I've been heading toward for a long, long time. It came to me, and I painted it in a blur of energy and risk-taking. I leapt - and landed well.

There's almost nothing in this painting. Bigger, and in person, you can see that it has a little more in it than it looks like it has here. The sky has some streaks in it, and bright spots. The snow has some depth and a little bit of color. The stone wall has an interesting snow-on-rock delicacy that seems to work.

It's hard for me to be so minimal. And yet, I find that, every time I manage to be minimal, the painting has strength - a kind of strength that wanes with each added brush stroke, each addition of paint.

I realized the other day that I've never explained the title of this blog. Anyone who knows me understands it, knows how I fell into painting at a time when I desperately needed it. But the title means more than that. It helps me remember my commitment to experiment, to try, to find ideas and opportunities by accident. I'm happiest painting, and I'm happiest painting when I'm trying something new.