Time goes by so quickly - catching up.

It is almost a week since I last blogged. There has never been time to sit down and write. Below I catch up with part of the week's highlights of the arts side of my life.


Monday:
This day it was necessary to change my painting hanging in Gallery 113. As I have written earlier, this gallery is a great selling venue for local artists since it is situated in Santa Barbara's high traffic tourist area. Members of the Santa Barbara Art Association may hang their paintings there for a Month at a nominal charge of $12 a painting.

I try to always have one of my paintings hanging their. Occasionally I even manage to sell a painting. On or about the first (or sometimes the last) Monday of each month each artist has to show up to pick up their hanging painting, recycle that painting for another month (for another $12), or exchange it for a new painting. This month (and most months) I exhanged the hanging painting ("Party Hat") for a new painting "Bella," show here.

Tuesday:

The Adult Education program in Santa Barbara is wonderful, with many opportunities for attending classes on almost any topic you may wish, for little or no expense. This quarter has about seventy classes on the visual arts. Some go on from quarter to quarter. Others are only for a single session.

For many many years a very dedicated artist, Jim Armstrong, has lead an advanced level art critique class. Some artists have been attending the critiques and showing their art for years. I have been going for several years. I have missed several weeks of this quarter, since I tend to go only when I am able to show some new work.

About a week ago, I took some paintings to Scott McClain, my paintings photographer, to obtain digital images of my two latest paintings "Annie" and "The Story Teller." At the same time, I wanted to show them at today's critique. I had arranged to pick them up early in the morning, before the class. Unfortunately when I arrive at Scott's studio, I found him still working on the images. He tolld me that the "Annie" image was fine, but the focus on "Story Teller" image was not good, and would have to be reshot.

I decided to take both paintings with me for the critique and to return "Story Teller" to him on Friday.

At the critique, the comments on the paintings were mostly very good. They (the whole class chips in with comments) felt the "Story Teller" would be better cropped in. I agree. If I were doing the painting over I would have cropped in by either reducing the canvas size, or making the image larger. But the painting is going to stay the way it is. For my print images I may crop in to make a stronger composition.

Also, I took along the three little pictures mentioned in earlier blogs, of my Grandchildren and the little painting of the "Muni & Ronnie Blitz." They felt that the "Taylor" composition was a little weak due to the green background that made the painting a little washed out. The "Muni" painting, like all my recent paintings, is unframed and has a wrap around of the image onto the painted sides. The group felt that the distortion this created when viewing the painting at an angle was not good, and recommended black edges for this particular canvas. Upon reviewing their comments, I agree, and have repainted the edges accordingly.

More on the following days events later.

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.

First Thursdays In Santa Barbara.

Yesterday was the first Thursday in September.

In downtown Santa Barbara each first Thursday evening of the month is a celebration of art and culture. That evening, participating galleries stay open from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. offering the public free access to art in a fun social environment. In addition, the main drag, State Street, comes alive with performances and interactive exhibits.


My wife and I, when ever possible. tour the area on this special Thursday by joining the crowds along State Street. Yesterday we parked behind the Art Museum and visited some six galleries, as well as several street events. There were about 30 events available to explore. But our hunger for dinner caused to limit our time.

Much of the fun is visiting with friends and acquaintances who are also out joining in the fun. After the recent hot weather, the evening was cool and brought out the sweaters and scarves for the women.

Santa Barbara's Gallery 113

Yesterday I spent most of the day sitting at our local collaborative gallery - Gallery 113. If you have a piece of art on show, you are supposed to sit for the equivalent of one day (11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.).

The Gallery is affiliated with the Santa Barbara Art Association, a 55 year old, 600 member organization where new members are juried twice a year. (Next week , as a Past President, I am assisting with the jurying of the latest batch of new member applicants. It is quite hard to become a member - I tried 5 times before I made it!)

If you are a member you are allowed to submit pieces once a month. The monthly gallery ingathering is unjuried. Essentially you are renting a piece of wall (for $12/month for each piece of artwork for the group part of the show).

There is a group show area, and seven various sized featured artist areas. The featured artist areas are offered on a sign up basis and cost more. But you have the freedom to arrange your solo show in your area pretty much as you wish.

The Gallery has been active for some 35+ years and is situated in a high tourist traffic area, right in the center of downtown Santa Barbara.

As a retired huckster, I enjoy sitting there and talking with the visitors. At this time of year there are a lot of tourists, and plenty of traffic.

I take along my computer and between the visitors, update my website and read a collection of downloaded articles that I accumulate on on a flash memory stick that I plug into the computer. Unfortunately there are no open WiFi connections. so I cannot browse the Internet.

Yesterday was pretty busy, but I managed to do quite a few thing. After I uploaded this morning, this blog is now linked from my website.