Artists are inherently curious. They have a certain sense of curiosity and wonder about the world around them. How does the world work? Why does the world do what it does? “The world” can be anything in one’s environment, constructed or otherwise.

I think curiosity is essential for artists. If it weren’t for curiosity, artists wouldn’t be compelled to create. The very act of creation is on some level an attempt to either answer or ask a question.

I see two kinds of curiosity:

• Literal:
  An artist with literal curiosity says, “This is what I see, and I think it is interesting in some way. I am depicting the world around me in a representational or abstract manner to understand or demonstrate how the world is.”

• Emotional:
  An artist with emotional curiosity says, “I am emotionally involved with this question I have, and it is a serious confrontation for me. I’m sharing that with you whether you want to or not.”

When curiosity is carried beyond mere interest it becomes nosiness. This usually happens when the subject is emotionally charged to one or more parties, or it crosses and/or challenges certain barriers or boundaries.

An artist’s nosiness can go two ways: by intrusively invading your “space,” whether physical or emotional, or by obtrusively forcing you to look at something of the artist’s that most people would rather keep bottled up.

I think art that crosses into that emotionally charged, more personal area is more interesting and memorable.

Case in point: consider Monet’s paintings of water lillies. They are peaceful, full of curiosity about color, light, and form.

Now consider Picasso’s Guernica, which forces you to come to grips with its tortured, anguished forms of war.

Which one sticks with you?

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso had a very strong personal brand. Of course, he didn’t call it a brand. He probably thought of it more of his reputation. He did such a good job honing his personal brand that his name is synonymous with Cubism.

Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dalí gave a lot of thought to his personal brand, from his appearance to his wild parties to his writing to his paintings. He was the ultimate poseur, and I don’t mean that in the negative, wannabe sense. He was purposefully flamboyant with his cane, long hair, velvet jackets, and of course his famous mustache. His art was famously strange, too, with burning giraffes, melting clocks, rotting donkeys, and obscure (or not-so-obscure) sexual references. And some kind of odd crutch fetish.

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol is probably the only other great twentieth-century artist to match Dalí’s flamboyance. He really sort of pioneered the linchpin artist thing, with his Factory where he essentially acted as a Creative Director over drones who churned out his silkscreen prints. His background in advertising was probably a huge factor in his understanding of branding. It certainly played a role in his aesthetic and the way his work was produced.

Damien Hirst

Another artist with a “factory” of his own since he subcontracts out a lot of the manual labor is Damien Hirst. He has a reputation for making insanely expensive works that get people talking: a tiger shark in formaldehyde, a human skull encrusted with diamonds. He’s associated with really out-there high-concept works of art. The way he works is not new, though: artists in the Renaissance ran “factories,” too. The Master would do the line drawing or the important details, but his apprentices would do the heavy lifting for him. Except Michelangelo, ever the renegade, who fired every assistant he ever had and wound up doing everything himself.

It is more important now than ever for artists to create a distinctive brand. If anyone can do a little bit of art (whatever art is; it’s a pretty fluid concept) they can easily throw up a website and gain a following. You don’t even have to be a good artist. Damien Hirst is evidently not a very good painter, and even Dali’s paintings are not technically sound. What those artists offer is a combination of shock value and tricky concepts. For what it’s worth, shock value goes a long way, even today. The key is that an artist has to do something memorable. (I suppose shocking things are more “memorable.”)

What are you doing to create a distinctive brand for yourself?

If you’re like me, you’re a non-conformist by default. You don’t try to be weird or unconventional, but it just happens. You get all these crazy dreams, wild ideas about something like making a living from painting stuff, and sometimes it feels like no one supports those dreams since they’re scary and “not safe.” (I now know that comes from the lizard brain.) It seems the pressure is on to conform to everyone else’s idea of making a living: go to work for a Big Company with great “benefits.”

I have nothing against working nine-to-five. There’s nothing wrong with benefits, either. But I certainly don’t want to be a clock-watcher, and I certainly don’t want to take a job with more pay and less joy just because it’s more pay. (I know, joy is an internal thing, but that’s beside the point.)

Here’s where the Generation Y part of me speaks out: I want a healthy balance of time with my family and time spent making a living. I want to work to live, not live to work. Too many people have it the other way around. I remember when I spent Christmas break 1998 working at Toys-R-Us. I came home exhausted, and my parents said, “Welcome to the Real World.”

I don’t think the Real World has to be that way.

At the risk of being a deranged lunatic (like our friend Eric above, drawn by Hugh McLeod) I want to be able to work just enough to enjoy life and have money saved up to provide for my children when I die. I want to enjoy the work I do. Is that too much to ask? No. And yet… as that Lateral Action post points out, the lunacy is in expecting the world to adapt to him without doing anything for the world first. Eric has it backwards. In some ways I have it backwards, too. I want to change that. Here’s what I want to do:

I want to do work that matters.

I want to do work that touches people’s hearts.

I don’t want to be a “Sunday painter.” I don’t have time for hobbies. I have a war to fight.

Life is too short to spend it in a way that doesn’t create any sort of lasting value.

I want to create value. Meaning. Logos.

That logos in me is crying to get out, get on the canvas, get into people’s hearts. As long as I’m living a conventional life, I’m afraid it’s never going to get out, and it will wither up and die.

I’m tired of deferring my dreams to everyone else.

I’m gonna do this, whether I have support or not. To the naysayers who say I can’t do it, I say, “Watch me.”

The main premise of Linchpin is that you have to be indispensable if you want to have any sort of job security. You have to do something that cannot be easily commodified.

It’s gotten me wondering what it is I can do that nobody else does. What makes me indispensable?

Just about everything else has been commodified, from products to service. Even graphic design. Especially graphic design. (I won’t get into that now.)

Even fine art has become commodified to some degree. There are assembly-line/sweat-shop paintings available out there. You’ve seen them in little kiosks in the mall, these really bad, kitschy copies of famous works, but they evidently sell or else they wouldn’t be there.

And on the other end of the spectrum, you have rockstar artists who, like normal rockstars, are pressured by galleries to keep putting out “hits,” so they return to the same material that gets more and more watered down as time goes on.

So what can I do that nobody else can, the one thing that can’t be commodified?

I think the thing I’m best at that nobody else is is being myself. Being Brad Blackman. Nobody else is Brad Blackman. I know, it’s almost stupidly simple. Sure, I may have similar tastes, perspectives, and even talents as other people, but I’m uniquely me; no one else is this exact mixture of things.

In short, I want to build my own brand, called Brad Blackman. What I would like to do is make the Brad Blackman brand “internet famous” and leverage that “fame” to sell my art. When people buy art hey are buying the artist (and the story of the artist and the art). Sometimes they’re buying a specific work, but when you get to the big dogs, they’re buying the artist. You buy Picasso, Pollock, Parrish, Peter Max, Warhol, Koons, Hirst, Van Gogh, etc. You get the idea.

My friend Jimmy Benedict has created a brand around his t-shirt art, called jimiyo. He is jimiyo. He’s “internet famous” in the t-shirt community. I don’t know if this was his original goal or if it just happened organically. Either way he’s worked hard for it.

I don’t expect it to happen overnight. Chris Brogan says his “overnight success” took 11 years.

It’ll take a lot of work, a lot of small things. Using my blog as a home base, Twitter as an outpost for that, and slowly feed people little interesting tidbits about myself and my art, and express opinions about things, and just make a general habit of being Brad Blackman and being clearer about what Brad Blackman is about. It’s not so much navel-gazing as it is thinking critically about what I create and why. I doubt it’ll start with a manifesto, although one will probably emerge. (Then again this document is itself a sort of pre-manifesto.)

I just think I’m crazy enough to try this. I just hope it’s not egotistical or self-centered. I don’t think so. Fortunately my wife doesn’t, either. We see it as necessary to survival, and a way to provide for our family as well as pursue my dreams. It’s not fame or celebrity in itself I’m seeking, but as a means to an end. If it sells my art and allows me to be myself by being myself! then by all means, I’ll do it.

“Real artists ship.”

Page 101 of Linchpin opens with this quote from from Steve Jobs, who was calling the bluff of an engineer who couldn’t let go of his code and deliver.

See, that for me is one of the key takeaways for Linchpin: do your art and deliver. If you let perfectionism get in the way and keep you from delivering, you’re not a real artist.

It’s harsh, but true. On page 103 Godin says, “I think the discipline of shipping is essential in the long-term path to becoming indispensable.” He goes on to cite that much of what makes SNL (Saturday Night Live) work is that the show is live every Saturday night and everyone better deliver. Sure, the pressure is on, but the comedians make the best of it, even if they mess something up or a joke falls flat.

The solution to fighting this lizard brain resistance perfectionism is straight out of The War of Art: You show up. Do your art. Deliver.

It’s a lot like what Chuck Close said:

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just get to work.

The second part of Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? (Amazon affiliate link) is about understanding and overcoming the Resistance that holds us back from being truly remarkable, irreplaceable, and indispensable.

Throughout the book there is a sense of urgency that it is of utmost importance that we pick up the slack and do what it takes to make ourselves or our companies indispensable so that we don’t get left behind. Godin calls us all to be “artists” — changing the definition of “artist” to mean someone who doesn’t approach their work as a replaceable cog. They transform their work — whatever that work is — into an art form, making themselves special, different, and indispensable.

Godin describes art as:

“… a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another”

and

“… a gift that changes the recipient.”

This is immensely important in a world of copycatters who take the path of least resistance. Which, ironically, is Resistance in disguise. Resistance to being great and indispensable. Being a copycat is “safe” in the short run, but destructive in the long run. If you don’t make yourself necessary you will be overlooked and ultimately forgotten.

In a way, I see Linchpin as a huge contrast to The 4-Hour Workweek (4HWW), since 4HWW encourages you to start your own little factory so you can make yourself replaceable and take yourself out of the picture, creating a hands-off approach so that you can traipse around the world like its author Tim Ferriss. Find people who can do the work cheaply, since The World Is Flat due to the miracle of the Internet.

I know that’s not entirely the point of 4HWW — the point is to eliminate work that bogs you down so that you can do what you’re good at by taking advantage of the flattened world, which is where the two books converge.

Back to Linchpin: it encourages you to take advantage of the flat world (perhaps by using the Internet) in such a way that you show yourself to be a unique different voice in a sea of sameness. Isn’t that the essence of marketing in a nutshell, minus the part about the flat world? (Using the flat world is a strategy, but showing yourself to be somehow special is what marketing is all about.)

One of the most interesting things about Linchpin is how much it draws from The War of Art (Amazon affiliate link) by Stephen Pressfield, especially in the second half. In fact, Godin got the name Resistance from Pressfield, since The War of Art is all about fighting the Resistance that keeps you from doing your art. Godin just expanded the notion of “artist” to encompass a lot more than what you do on canvas or the stage.

And like The War of Art, Linchpin has a gutsy no-nonsense approach to what could easily become a self-help book since one of the main messages is to overcome the overprotective lizard-brain that is the voice of fear, judgement, and criticism. Overcoming that fear, that resistance, is hard. It requires a sense of prajna — a Buddhist concept of realizing that the stresses of Right Now will likely disappear and become irrelevant. (Which really boils down to being mature about what’s going on, and getting a sense of the big picture.) Be bigger than the moment. In other words, don’t freak out over every little thing. Pay attention to detail, but keep your eye on the goal. That sort of thing.

The path to mediocrity is paved with fear, because fear is what holds you back from your full potential.

By the way, Chris Guillebeau has a really good interview with Seth Godin here: ART AND PLUMBING: THE INDISPENSABLE INTERVIEW WITH SETH GODIN.

I love the way the book is written, with short bites that might very well have started out as blog posts. The tone is very similar to Seth’s Blog, perhaps a little more polished.

When I started reading Linchpin, I realized that it converges with several other major books of the past few years that I’ve read, such as The World Is Flat, The 4-Hour Workweek, Expanded and Updated: Expanded and Updated, With Over 100 New Pages of Cutting-Edge Content., The Rise of the Creative Class , A Whole New Mind, and Free Agent Nation , (which I haven’t read yet, but it’s on my list) and the newly released Rework, in that they all tend to come at a single, main issue from different angles:

“Innovate or die.”

The book is divided into two main parts. The first “half” deals with how the economy got here, going from the Industrial Revolution to a post-industrial society, diving into the future of work, which looks to be largely post-corporate and freelance-driven. Of course, this future economy will require us to make ourselves indispensable, or we will be left behind. The second part of the book talks about the resistance that holds us back from becoming those indispensable linchpins.

The first main premise of Linchpin is that since big corporate factories (blue- and white-collar) no longer have the power they had 100 years ago, there has been a natural rise in smaller shops, and it is necessary for them to differentiate themselves and be distinguishable from everyone else – remarkable, irreplaceable, indispensable. You can do it in a cubicle in a big corporation, but it is necessary to think like a freelancer even then. We’re on the brink of a freelance economy, and some might say we’re already there.

It seems that so many people I know – especially in the Nashville technology community – are already freelancers or at least have a freelance mentality. By that I mean that they have a decent grasp on their own personal brand, and they are known as the go-to guy or gal for whatever it is they do. For example, Mitch Canter is the WordPress guy in town. If you want to know about the future of content, talk to Rex Hammock. (I’ll talk about more linchpins I know in a future post, but those are two examples.)

Nashville is not Silicon Valley, but it is well on its way to becoming a hotbed of innovation, and I’m excited to be surrounded by such amazing, nimble, forward-thinking people.

Note: Wednesday, I’ll get into what for me was the real meat of Linchpin, understanding and overcoming the Resistance that keeps us from being linchpins. Friday, I will wrap up with a little bit about what Godin calls “Shipping.” Next week I will highlight some linchpins I personally know as I mentioned above. Then I will report on my own personal reaction to Linchpin and where I will go from here.

In going through some old files on my old Mac G4 tower (Quicksilver G4 for those who are into that sort of thing) I found a text file with my goals for 2005. It was created January 3, 2005 and modified February 3, 2005. Naturally, some things are now irrelevant, still on my list, or already accomplished. It’s interesting to compare this with my goals for 2010.

• Do about two paintings per month
• Do Nanowrimo (www.nanowrimo.com) in November (write a novel in a month)
• Get a Powerbook
• Move into a nicer/bigger apartment not attached to someone’s house
• Exercise 3 times a week
• Get buff
• Become a good host and host parties, dinners, etc.
• Make concrete plans for a trip to italy, perhaps going in the fall or next winter
• Complete version 2 of my website
• Complete an all-Flash version 3 of my website
• Drum up enough freelance work to work on one freelance project per month
• Treat my fine art efforts as a second job, probably as a part-time job (20 hours a week?)
• Come up with some new painting series
• Develop desktop art for people to download from my website
• Start a visual journal, somewhat like Spilling Over by Sabrina Ward Harrison
• Get in the habit of running again
• Get in shape
• Go a month without watching TV
• Limit TV-watching to one hour a day when I actually do watch TV
• Read really good books that have something important to say
• Watch Classic movies
• Have theme dinners with friends
• Get a studio space (if I have the money for it)
• Dress nicer (not so sloppy)
• Broaden musical and cultural horizons (ex: expand jazz collection)
• Create provocative art and design (like James Victore’s posters)
• Carry a camera and sketchbook everywhere
• Incorporate type into my paintings
• Try printmaking again
• Drink less coffee (one cup a day?)
• Drink less Coke (and other fizzy drinks) - maybe two per week?
• Be more open and honest with myself and my friends

I still don’t run, I still haven’t made it back to Italy, and before the flood I was working out 3 times a week. But now I’m married with a baby and another one on the way, and we close on a house at the end of the month, and I have no time to watch movies or TV, but I am typing this on a MacBook Pro, and you are reading this on Version 4 of this website, which uses NO Flash at all, but a little jQuery here and there. Still have a hard time finding time to paint, but at least I’m making money freelancing. And I read thought-provoking books constantly, more than I ever have before.

I did this sketch of Ben Vitualla way back before I first got the idea to start blogging my art.

Originally this blog was called the Vizjrnl, and it was just going to be a bunch of sketches and Photoshop collages. I never did any more “visual-journal” type collages after 2005, though.

Last Saturday night (May 29) I did a new small painting. I did the sketch for it a month ago and finally painted it. I’ve been pretty busy with freelance work so I can’t complain too much. But it was nice to paint for a change.

This painting was somewhat difficult since I am a little bit out of practice.

It’s a simple composition with a good amount of symmetry, and I think there’s something calm about it, with the balance between elements, the wall and the parts of the wall, the shadows and the sidewalk, and whatever that box thing is.

The thing is, as I got into the painting, I began to struggle with some choices and questions: How abstract or realistic do I want to make this? How flat or deep do I want to make it? What kind of brushwork? In essence, what kind of stylistic approach do I want to take in my art from this point on?

Which I suppose is the whole point of doing these little paintings: to help me find my style and figure out what and how I want to paint. The only way I can find my voice is by using it. More on that later…

I recently read Merlin Mann’s post Watching the Corners: On Future-Proofing Your Passion where MM talks about some of the stuff he wishes he could go back and tell himself when he was in college… and it got me thinking about the kind of stuff I would say to myself if I had a time machine and could set it to the fall of 1997.

If I were to go back to 1997 to tell myself what to do differently in college, I would’ve said to have a double major in Fine Art and Graphic Design, and a double minor in Marketing and Business.

What I did was major in Graphic Design, without a minor. Big mistake. Here’s why:

My passion is for painting. Sure, I love graphic design, especially typography and web design, but my passion is for fine art. I traded my passion for a “sure-fire moneymaker,” graphic design, which is an industry that has been glutted with over-qualified professionals like myself since 2000. I graduated in 2001. Great design jobs have been hard to find. The dot-com crash happened and tons of designers were out of work, and the market was glutted with out-of-work designers, kind of the way it is now. Then 9/11 happened (I was on my way to a job interview that morning.) At the same time, anybody with a computer and a pirated copy of Photoshop could call themselves a designer. Now, we’re seeing more and more of that outsourced overseas, so the really primo design jobs have turned into marketing and design consultant jobs. Which brings me to my next point.

I took one class in marketing, and that’s it. I should have taken more, so I could better understand how marketing works, both as an artist and a designer. If I better understood marketing, I would probably have a more secure position as a marketing/design consultant rather than just a designer still banging out mechanicals like I was ten years ago as an intern. Also, it would better serve my passion, fine art. I would have a better foundation for marketing my art and getting it into the appropriate places for the right people to see and be compelled to buy it.

But all this isn’t to say that there’s nothing I can do about the situation. It just means I just have some learning and catching up to do. But to any young aspiring artists or designers (or designers who would really rather be artists, for that matter) my advice is to learn the business and marketing side of things, and develop something that makes you indispensable, unique, special, un-copy-able, apart from everybody else. Because if you are just like everybody else, you will be paid just like everybody else and remembered just like everybody else. Which is to say, not much.

What is the Golden Mean?

The Golden Section, or Golden Mean, is one of those concepts that is somewhat shrouded in mystery, yet the ratio it represents is found everywhere in nature, from the breeding patterns of rabbits to the arrangement of seeds in a sunflower head to the proportions of the human hand. It is a proportion that is generally considered to be particularly pleasing to the eye. Mathematically, it when the ratio of the sum of two quantities to the larger quantity is equal to the ratio of the larger quantity to the smaller one. It repeats itself to infinity. You can keep subdividing the box the same way and end up with the same ratios every time. Put simply, that comes to roughly 1 to 1.6180339887, just shy of a 2/3 ratio.

There’s a lot of information out there about this ratio, how it is applied in architecture, painting, graphic design, music, and the like, applied primarily in the distance from one thing to the next, or the relationship of one element to the whole. (Mathematical info here and here.)

But I want to talk about how I personally use it in my art.

Canvas Size

A quick way to start off with the golden section is to begin with a canvas that uses this ratio. I tend to favor canvases that are generally close to a 2:3 ratio since that is fairly close. I know the 5-inch by 7-inch small canvases I use aren’t that close to this ratio but they work for me since 4 x 6 is too small, and 8x10 is too large. (I’m afraid I’ll get too carried away with the detail at that size.) I’ve used a lot of 3:4 proportioned canvases since they’re pretty easy to find. That’s actually a pretty pleasing proportion as well.

Divide up the canvas along the golden section

Sometimes I use the golden section to compose my artwork by dividing up the canvas to create ratios from parts to the whole. In other words, if I am working with a 22-inch square canvas, I might draw grid lines at something close to 13.596 inches (20·.618), and divide out squares from there. Along those lines I can position elements so that they are harmoniously placed in relationship to each other. An easy way to get close to this is to use the rule of thirds, since phi is actually pretty close to 2/3.

Objects in proportion to each other

Another way to do it is by placing elements so that they are scaled in proportion with each other using the golden mean. So if one element is 5 inches in size, another is roughly 8.09 inches to maintain the 1:1.618 ratio. I can’t say I’ve consciously used this method, though.

There are some really complicated methods for using the golden mean that involve calculating various angles and curves and circles and whatnot and subdividing the canvas in ways more elaborate than the one I demonstrated above. That’s cool and all, but I don’t really have the patience for it.

The only real exception is the “Mystery of the Brevity of Life, Fig. A/B” painting I did a few years back, where a chambered nautilus spiral is depicted, with a series of light and dark lines that get longer by adding the length of the previous line. (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233,etc.) They create a Fibonacci string, which very quickly comes to a ratio close to .618.

Going forward

While Googling for reference images for this post, I found a bunch of really interesting information about “sacred geometry,” and it looks really cool. I want to try my hand at arranging things using interesting shapes that line up with each other in the form of pentagons, etc. which should make for interesting, compelling compositions. I think it should lend itself well to the architecture-influenced abstract realism my work is taking.

I just finished reading Rework by Jason Fried and David Henemeier Hansson, the founders of 37signals.

It packs all the common-sense punch and urgency of Seth Godin’s Linchpin in very simple, no-nonsense language.

It’s geared mostly at small business owners like the authors. They wrote it for themselves, really, based on material from their own blog. (At least that’s the impression I get. I have subscribed to their Signal vs Noise blog, but I haven’t read any of it yet. It’s been a busy week.)

There are so many great sections that really jumped out at me as an artist. I’ll highlight a few of them:

• Workaholism
  Workaholics wind up creating more problems than they solve. … They try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them. They try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force.
• Build half a product, not a half-assed product
  You’re better off with a kick-ass half than a half-assed whole.
• Tone is in your fingers
  People use equipment as a crutch. They don’t want to put in the hours at the driving range so they spend a ton in the pro shop.
  …
  It’s not the gear that matters. It’s playing with what you’ve got as well as you can. Your tone is in your fingers.
• Interruption is the enemy of productivity
  Getting into that zone takes time and requires avoiding interruptions. It’s like REM sleep … Any interruptions force you to start over.
• Go to sleep
  Forgoing sleep is a bad idea. Sure, you get those extra hours right now, but you pay in spades later: You destroy your creativity, morale, and attitude.
• Make tiny decisions
  When you make tiny decisions, you can’t make big mistakes. These small decisions mean you can afford to change. There’s no big penalty if you mess up. You just fix it.
• Don’t copy
  You have to understand why something works or why something is the way it is. When you just copy and paste, you miss that. You just repurpose the last layer instead of understanding all the layers underneath.
• Decommoditize your product
  Make you part of your product or service. Inject what’s unique about the way you think into what you sell. Decommoditize your product. Make it something no one else can offer.
• Let your customers outgrow you
  You can’t be everything to everyone. Companies need to be true to a type of customer more than a specific individual customer with changing needs.
• Be at-home good
  When you get the product home, you’re actually more impressed with it than you were at the store. You live with it and grow to like it more and more. And you tell your friends, too. … You’re aiming for a long-term relationship, not a one-night stand.
• Welcome obscurity
  The early days of obscurity are something you’ll miss later on, when you’re really under the microscope. Now’s the time to take risks without worrying about embarrassing yourself.
• Build an audience
  When you build an audience, you don’t have to buy people’s attention—they give it to you. … So build an audience. Speak, write, blog, tweet, make videos—whatever. Share information that’s valuable and you’ll slowly but surely build a loyal audience. Then when you need to get the word out, the right people will already be listening.
• Emulate chefs
  They cook, so they write cookbooks. What do you do? What are your “recipes”? What’s your “cookbook”? What can you tell the world about how you operate that’s informative, educational, and promotional?
• Drug dealers get it right
  Make your product, so good, so addictive, so “can’t miss” that giving customers a small, free taste makes them come back with cash in hand.
• The myth of the overnight sensation
  Trade the dream of overnight success for slow, measured growth. It’s hard, but you have to be patient. You have to grind it out. You have to do it for a long time before the right people notice.
• Skip the rock stars
  Great environments show respect for the people who do the work and how they do it.
• Sound like you
  Talk to customers the way you would to friends. Explain things as if you were sitting next to them. Avoid jargon…
• Inspiration is perishable
  Ideas … last forever. What doesn’t last forever is inspiration. [It] is like fresh fruit or milk: it has an expiration date. … When you’re high on inspiration, you can get two weeks of work done in twenty-four hours. Inspiration is a time machine in that way.

So that’s what really grabbed me. Have you read Rework? If so, what did you think?

Note: I meant to post this Tuesday, April 26, but never got to it. Whoopsie. Probably because I still have yet to dig up the original photo files.

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I usually get up about 5:30 or 5:45 to go and work out with my dad and this other guy. The rest of the week, I tend to get up between 6:30 and 7.

Since I haven’t been painting much lately (it’s been a month since my last piece!) that I have decided that on the days I don’t work out, I should get up at the same time and paint instead of sleep in. Sleep is nice, but if I can spend an hour painting before getting ready for work, that’s better than not painting at all. I feel like any effort is better than none.

I had one canvas that I had already transferred a drawing to, but it was the same subject as last time, with a different view. I didn’t want to do the same thing two times in a row with it being so long since I had painted, so I dug through my reference photos to find something different, and found two pieces to transfer to canvas, since that was all I had time for today.

I shot the reference photo way back sometime last year at the old H.G. Hill shopping center on Charlotte Pike(?) in Nashville right before it was demolished to make way for a new shopping center. It used to be a Bank of America. They tore it down and built a new office building and moved BoA to the other side of the parking lot.

This next shot is the same building, from a different angle. You can see the famous golden arches in the distance. Yep, there’s a Mickey D’s next door. I wonder about the legality of including the McDonald’s logo in a painting. I’ve included logos in paintings before, but that was about 10 years ago, and based on a photo I took in a ski town in Italy.

I did this about a month ago, and posted a small in-progress shot of it, and never got around to posting it once it dried. So here it is.

It’s an office building (for some reason I had thought it was a hotel) on West End Avenue in Nashville near Centennial Park. There is an Outback Steakhouse above the parking garage, almost at ground level (it’s on a hill). I love the lines and drama of the architecture. I really think this would work really well as a large canvas since there is so much going on in terms of the lines, perspective, and the areas of light and dark and reflections in the windows.

This is the last thing I painted, so yeah, I really need to get back into the studio. However, my freelance design work is starting to pick up, so I’m really thankful for that.

Anyway, let me know what you think! I’ve got a lot of other paintings planned out, but it will be a couple of weeks before I can get to them. Maybe I need to just go rent a cabin for a week and hole up and paint nonstop!