Gallery Visit

Yesterday evening, we stopped by the gallery Santa Barbara Art Studios. This is a very small, relatively new gallery in Santa Barbara's south eastern funk zone, surrounded by an automobile repair facility, tiny homes, and big industrial buildings and work yards. This was my first visit to the gallery.

They had a great exhibit of paintings by a local artist Benjamin Brode. He paints colorful landscapes in a nice impressionistic style. We had a chance to meet with the artist. Well worth the visit.

If this is the caliber of their showings, I will definitely be back.

Santa Barbara Visual Arts Alliance

As many local residents and knowledgeable visitors have found, Santa Barbara County, California, is an art lover’s paradise. It is thriving with painters, sculptors, printmakers, and assemblage artists – some world-renowned and others are just emerging. In addition, many galleries, studios, museums, and art events feature the work of both past and present local artists.

I am a co-founder and Steering Committee Member of a local non-profit organization known as Santa Barbara Visual Arts Alliance (SBVAA). It has been around since 2001, and has a mission to promote, locally, nationally, and internationally, the rich local visual arts resources.

Funded in part by Membership fees, it is supported also by a small grant from the Santa Barbara Community Events & Festivals Program, from funds provided by the City of Santa Barbara in partnership with the Santa Barbara County Arts Commission.

Today, its principle contribution is a website with a database recording much of the visual arts activities in the County of Santa Barbara. There are recorded most local visual arts related events, galleries, museums, art venues of all kinds, organization, and many individual artists, many with their own studios. Thousands of visitors to the area, as well locals, use the listings to plan their explorations of the local art scene.

The organization has until now been run by volunteers. For a long time I have acted as manager and moderator for the website, supported by outside contractors who do the actual online posting of the hundreds of emailed art stories that arrive each month.

For the last few days I have been taken away from my painting to write a grant solicitation to obtain funds to bring on board our very first employee, an Executive Director.

Today I Updated My Website

Today I updated my website by adding five small paintings I have recently completed. I also changed the the name of "Interesting People" section of my Portraits Galleries to "Family and Friends." This new name more correctly describes these galleries.

It takes a surprising amount of time to do these updates, even when cloning one web page from another.

ImageKind Print Gallery

I have just updated my ImageKind Gallery. ImageKind is a place where you may order framed and unframed prints of my recent art.

Todays update was to include a new Gallery of paintings of "Friends and Family." Also, I added the little "Sofia" painting to the "Interesting Strangers" Gallery.

Since they need very large files of each painting, it takes a while to upload the image files. The update process is slow.

Finished A Painting

After lunch today I delivered my new little 8 x 10 inch painting "Sofia" to The Art Fund for their upcoming "Wish You Were Here" fund raiser. It was still a little sticky and soft, but they understand and will protect it for a few days.

I am donating it. I look upon such donations as good PR. I was able to scan it so have good documentation for my files and for my website.

Making Progress

Yesterday afternoon I searched the internet for ideas on Blog Promotion. One lead took me to Feedburner. This useful site was full of ideas and I spent my usual blogging time adding their suggestions to this blogging site.

You will note that you may now more easily subscribe to this blog. When subscribed you maybe automatically notified of new additions and updates.

This morning I finished up "The Story Teller" painting. I decided it did not need another coat of medium. I stapeled my printed card (a business card sized label with basic personal contact data) on the bottom stretcher, and added my painting serial number.

A long time ago ( at least several years) when I was planning an open studio, I decided that I needed to number my paintings to set up some sort of records control. That day I just went around all the paintings in my storage area and hanging on my walls, and wrote a consecutive number on each. The numbers were just as they came starting from one.

Consequently all my early paintings bear numbers that are somewhat random and have no bearing to when they were painted. Any painting sold or given away earlier than that day was not numbered. Also, I missed all my shrink wrapped watercolors in various bins, plus a few other framed paintings.

Many of these paintings were added later and now appear on the list totally out of order. This not how I would do it again or recommend to others, but that is the way it is.

Most of my more recent paintings are in sequence of their creation. Though I still have several boxes in storage of sketches and charcoal renderings that are many years old and unnumbered.

Getting back to this morning's work, I signed and coated with medium the little 10 x 8 inch painting that I am planning to donate to the Art Fund next Monday. I will scan it before I take it in, so that I have a record image.

I decided to call the painting "Sophie." In searching for a name (for usually I do not know the person's name) I came across a useful website with Spanish girls and boys names. I wanted a "soft" feeling name to go with the wistful look of the girl in the painting.

Also, I began the wedding picture of "Marty and Diane." As I mentioned in Thursday's blog, I have selected the primary image, prepared the usual B&W high contrast image, and projected it onto a 16 x 20 inch canvas Thursday evening.

This morning I enhanced the graphite sketched image with dilute paint (a mix of burnt sienna, ultramarine, medium, and turps). Added a little tone to show the lighting on the faces. and roughed in an abstract background (pale blue and a more muddy color for the sky and distant ground level). I used medium in the mix so hopfully it will be dry enough by tomorrow to allow work into the faces.

Time For Another New Painting

My two paintings in progress are almost finished. "The Story Teller" was signed this morning, and given an all over coat of medium. It looks as though it will need another coat Sunday.

My as yet un-named small Art Fund donation painting is still very sticky and will need some minor touch up before signing off and coating with medium. Just heard this morning it has to go to the gallery Monday. It will be tight, but doable.

So it is time to select the next work.

We went to a wedding in San Diego about a month ago. A long time friend and a widower, married a lovely lady. I took a lot (over a hundred) of photographs at the wedding and am planning to develop a painting of them both. I liked the way the "Muni" two person painting came out and am thinking of another two person head and sholders painting.

So this afternoon I went through all the images and chose several that look good as raw material. There is one pose that looks particularly great, though the man's eyes are shut. So I searched out several other of his face images and will fill in the eyes as appropriate.

I put the basic pose image through Photoshop Elements, and cropped the image to approximately the painting format. And then I made a high contrast, sharpened, black & white image, and reduced it to approximately two inches tall. This I printed out on paper and will use tonight to project an outline onto a 16 x 20 inch blank canvas using my opaque projector.

Hopefully the canvas will be ready to begin painting tomorrow.