Closing a Door and Opening Another?

"Feel So Fine" springtime foal is now home and available for purchase.

For several years I've had my artwork in a very nice shop in the nearby small village of Central Lake. It started out as mainly a consignment shop for local artists and craftsmen, but over the years the shop has transitioned into more and more stocking commercially made very tasteful home decor and clothing.

I had good sales in this shop for quite a few years, but in the past 2-3 sales fell off considerably to almost nothing.

This past week the owner of the shop called to ask if I wanted to come get my artwork, and I readily agreed. It was something I had been intending to do for months but hadn't gotten around to. With sales so low and the shop no longer emphasizing local artists and craftsmen, it didn't make much sense to leave the art languishing in the recesses of a side room where many visitors didn't go.

Yesterday I picked up the original art, prints and the few note cards that were left. No one had told the young clerk, who was alone in the shop, that I might be coming in or where to find my art. It took her a long time to find it in their back room, and not all of it could be found in the whole shop! I had kept very careful records of what was in the shop and what had sold over the years so arrived with my own inventory list of what SHOULD have been there. 

If I had any regrets about leaving the shop they were quickly dispelled. Remembering that although the owner, an animal lover, had always expressed great admiration for my art, the woman she later hired to order the merchandise and approve the art and do the displays did not seem to share her enthusiasm. More than once I found original paintings of mine hidden behind lamps, and when I stopped in last year, I no longer had my own designated print rack; in fact my prints were nowhere out to be seen. Is it any wonder that none were selling? This was a big hint that it was time to go.

At this point my feelings are very mixed but mainly positive about this "loss" of gallery representation. Merry was very good to me over the years, and sales were good when I had given up other marketing outlets like art fairs and horse expos. In some years, the shop was my only source of income. 

Now that the art is home, some pieces will be available to show to honest to goodness local galleries where actual art buyers will be looking for their next purchase. That will be a better fit for me at this point, and that is my near term goal. 

That is the door I hope to open.

"Molly" A Dog Portrait

 

"Molly" pastel dog portrait

Looking through a pile of old portraits, I came across this one of Molly the Bichon Frise.

She was a charming little dog who loved her tennis ball, so of course it had to be included in the portrait. She lived in a house with green shag carpet, a perfect backdrop for her snowy white coat. 

When I delivered the portrait, her owner seemed a bit underwhelmed (never a good sign) and sure enough, a day or two later she called to say that the portrait was not quite right; it just didn't look like Molly. I dutifully retrieved the portrait and examined the reference photo closely, and to my embarrassment realized that I had gotten Molly's head too narrow and the ears not right. 

Making corrections on a pastel portrait is fairly easy, and in no time "Molly" was looking like her real self. This time the client's enthusiasm was more genuine when I delivered the corrected portrait, and she has since told me how much she loves it. 

Sometimes one can get too close to a work of art and fail to see the flaws. I have learned to avoid this by standing back often from the easel, checking it frequently against the reference photo and looking at the work in a mirror where mistakes are more obvious. No artist, however accomplished, is immune from this myopia, so I've learned to be aware and to not flog myself when it happens. 

Thank you for stopping by. 

"Cadence", A Driving Horse Pastel Portrait

 

"Cadence", a pastel portrait

Here is another in a series of old portraits to share with you. 

This is Cadence, a flashy Morab driving horse. The portrait was 11"x14" pastel on paper. I took the driving photos for this composite portrait at a local show but used the very nice head photo provided by the client. 

I am particularly pleased with how the eye turned out. Some day I'd like to do a larger version of Cadence with his owner/driver in a country landscape. Wouldn't that be lovely? 

At one time I had note cards available of this image. But after the horse's owner asked if I was going to split the sales of the note card with her, I decided it was time to retire the design. After figuring in the cost of producing the cards, I wasn't making much profit nor was I selling many. 

So it goes for a portrait artist. 

SOLD! My First Horse Art Sale

"The Dressage Clinic" 16x20 inch pastel, Sold

Pictured above is the very first work of art that I sold that wasn't a portrait. I'd been doing horse and pet portraits for years but had never managed to sell an original work of art before. 

This pastel painting came about by way of an exercise in a color drawing class in art school. I liked the exercise of exploring lost and found edges of objects and thought it would be fun to explore using horses as subject matter. Before that I had done a couple with deer in them and sail boats but dropped the technique until years later. 

After getting back into horses again and moving my horse to a new barn, I discovered dressage and a fellow boarder who was a dressage rider. One weekend, three of us from the barn went to a dressage clinic at Bay Harbor Equestrian Center outside of Petoskey, Michigan to observe. The clinic instructor was none other than Steffen Peters, a well known and accomplished professional dressage rider and Olympian. I took my camera and got a lot of pictures despite the poor lighting in the large indoor arena. 

From the best of those photos, The Dressage Clinic emerged. The process is a bit complicated to explain. It involves cut outs of horses and riders laid down on the paper and rubbed over with pastel dust along the edges. First, of course, you must arrange all the cut outs in a pleasing array of different sizes. After this stage was complete, I went on to add details to the figures with colored pencils, leaving some areas to be "lost" and some "found". 

For those of you who are not familiar with dressage, a dressage test consists of riding from letter to letter spaced out around the dressage arena. The letters tell the rider when to transition from walk to trot or to canter a 20 meter circle or whatever the test calls for. That is what the letters in the painting reference. 

This painting is far from my best work, even at that time, but it does mark a milestone in my advancement as a professional equine artist. I went on to create another better dressage clinic piece with a different color palette, but it would not photograph well, and I finally destroyed it. I haven't done any more since. 

Below is another pastel painting using the same technique. This one depicts a

foal playing. The title is Playtime, and this one also sold. 

"Playtime", 11x14 pastel, Sold

This is an excellent exercise in manipulating shapes, sizes, harmonious colors and lost and found edges. Maybe some day I will do another. 

PS A "lost" edge is one that disappears in the picture. Lost edges can be very important in a painting or drawing as they help to draw attention to the "found" edges and points of interest by deemphasizing other edges and areas. 

Old Horse Painting and Getting Back To Normal

"Bear", 11x14 pastel horse painting

It's been a long time since I last posted, and although I haven't quite gotten back to the easel yet, I thought I'd share this old portrait with you today for Throwback Thursday.

This is Bear. He was an Appaloosa gelding who belonged to a riding friend several years ago. I had the pleasure of painting his  portrait as a gift and am still reasonably happy with it. An artist is never completely satisfied with any finished painting, but that's another story.

The portrait was done in pastel, and what a fun time I had getting all that roaning to look natural and to match the markings on Bear's face and body. I haven't worked in pastel in a very long time now, not since I quit accepting portrait commissions, but I'm getting the urge to pick them up again.

That will be a lot easier now that my studio is finally all put back together after the long layup during the surgery recovery. During this past month, I sorted through all of my oil paints and separated them into warm and cool colors. Then I separated out duplicates and packed them in an old fishing tackle box that I'll use for painting outdoors.

The final step in getting the studio back together involved going through my art supply closet and rearranging it. In the process I found a few things that I'd forgotten I had and got rid of some other things no longer needed. All is arranged much better now, and my lifetime supply of old t shirts and pillowcases is organized in two boxes to be used as paint rags as needed. There was even left over space to put a few things away that had been kicking around the studio floor.

And, very lastly, my husband brought my drawing table back out of the attic to resume its old position folded up against the wall. I love that drawing table; so compact when it's folded and yet a large working surface when set up. It was the final piece to putting the studio back into full operating mode.

Meanwhile during the month, I went to physical therapy twice per week, did my exercises (mostly) faithfully and got caught up on various doctor appointments and the cat's vet appointments. I am now finished with PT and am looking forward to more free time to devote to catching up on so very many tasks that have gone undone for way too long. There are bird feeders to clean and set up and horse blankets to wash for the coming winter among many other tasks.

Homeward Bound on a trail ride

During the month of September, I was able to ride somewhat regularly and to fit in four trail rides. Oh, how glorious that was! Trail riding season is fast coming to an end, and it's time to plan for arena riding through the winter.

Speaking of which, can you believe that the Holidays are almost upon us?! Where has this year gone? It certainly has flown by.

Hard Choices

"Daisy" an old pastel portrait

It’s been a very difficult year. Not battling cancer difficult or losing a loved one difficult but difficult in other and multiple ways which combined together have become a mountain. 

First, of course, was the surgery to correct a crooked leg back in March which laid me up and off my feet (or TWO feet anyway) for far longer than expected; months longer in fact. It was difficult to be dependent on my husband for almost everything for nearly four months when I tend to be an independent, do-my-own-thing type of person. 

Also difficult was leaving the complete care and riding of my horse to one of my fellow boarders and not being able to see him for weeks at a time. It was hard to hear that he was “thriving” and “never looked better” under someone else’s care. Did that mean that I haven’t been a good horse mom all these years? 

Now that I’m back to riding him, his back is sore again. The vet says that either his saddle doesn’t fit him right or “it’s a rider problem”, neither of which I wanted to hear. I am now actively looking for a new saddle, a road that we’ve been down before with great difficulty. He is “hard to fit” it seems.

I also have to face the possibility that maybe I’m just too heavy for him at his age (29). So, what to do? Do I retire him even though he’s still rideable? Do I continue to ride him while I try to lose weight on a crash diet? Or, do I just not ride him until I can lose weight and let him lose the conditioning he gained over the winter? 

By far the most difficult thing has been to figure out over months of time that my online friends, some of whom I’ve known for years, weren’t really friends at all but more like acquaintances, at least in their minds. That one really rocked me to the core. How could I have misjudged so badly? 

I was once admonished that “to HAVE a friend, you have to BE a friend”. It’s always been very hard for me to trust people enough to let them close.  Now I’m left wondering how I could have failed so badly at being a friend, and where do I go from here? 

On the art front, things haven’t been much better. During my lay up I managed to start two new paintings, but when I ran into a road block with one of them, I totally lost momentum and haven’t been able to get it back since. It’s difficult to see the artwork of artist friends (or acquaintances) online who have advanced over the years while I have stagnated. The truth is that there are hundreds of horse artists in the world who are far better than I, and I keep wondering why I should bother continuing to paint when the chances of catching up to them are so slim, especially at my age. 

The truth is that I don’t have the passion to paint or the drive to create that so many other artists seem to have. Some do artwork every single day. I can go for months without doing any and don’t really miss it. I wonder, if I shouldn’t just give up on being a professional artist and just create for myself when I feel like it. Or, should I pack up all the art materials and equipment and sell it all? 

But then, who would I be? What would I do? 

So, here I am struggling to recuperate from a surgery that may not have solved a problem and dealing with issues which need to be resolved one way or another. 

Hard questions. Hard Choices. 

Prancing Foal Pastel Painting

"Feel So Fine" Pastel horse foal painting

It's Throwback Thursday on Facebook, so I thought I'd share this older pastel painting of a lively colt which is still available for sale. 

Bullet was a five week old Morgan colt just turned out with his mother on a late Spring morning. His youthful exuberance is expressed in this painting as he prances about in the lush Spring landscape. 

The painting is 12.5x14 inches and is available framed for the special price of $225. Please contact me if you're interested in putting this speedy Bullet on your living room wall. 

You may email me at karen@equineartist.com

Thankful Things

We're having another sunny day after several days of snow and wind, and it is much, much appreciated!

Speaking of things to be thankful for, our family has a lot to be thankful for on this joyful Monday morning. Last week my almost 95 year old mother was rushed to Emergency with an obstructed bowel. Since I'm the designated family member with medical powers of attorney, I spent much of two days on the phone with other family members, particularly my two sisters, and in consultation with her doctors. Together we elected to go ahead with the risky surgery despite Mother's frail condition and hope for the best. It really was her only option.

To our immense relief, she came through the surgery with flying colors and continues to do well in the ICU. Of course, she's not in the clear yet, but for now we are grateful for her progress.

Since I have nothing new to share (I've been working on tax reports when I haven't been on the phone), today's painting is an older one that I revised a year or so ago. It's very different from my usual artwork but is a technique that I learned in art school as an exercise in composition, lost and found edges, color use and you-name-it. I've done several of these over the years, and this is the latest. Whether I continue to explore this technique remains to be seen.

This is one of those paintings that needs to be seen in person to be appreciated. It just doesn't photograph all that well because the background is composed of multiple layers of color in pastel, and the camera tends to emphasize one color over others. Attempts to do color correction in Photoshop have had limited success. It really has that soft, subtle color and feeling of well-worn jeans and is just a fun piece with lots to look at. One day soon I need to frame it and take it to the gallery/shop that has some of my artwork.

So I thought I would tout "Dressage Clinic II" in my blog today and give it some well deserved attention. It is a mixed media (pastel, colored pencil) on paper, 16x20 inches and is for sale on my website . The reference photos were taken at a dressage clinic at Bay Harbor Equestrian Center about ten years ago, and the clinician was olympic medal winner Steffen Peters.

It Happens Every Time

Just when I think I'm caught up with all the urgent projects, jobs and obligations, something new and urgent pops up to send me back to Square One. So it was this week.

I had left for Thanksgiving vacation with all the bills paid, laundry done, financial matters under control and Bard just a whisker away from being finished. I had been concerned about the winter weather and all the driving we had to do, but the weather cooperated, even for our whirlwind one day trip from northern Michigan to southern Michigan to have Thanksgiving dinner with my mother in the nursing home (where meal portions are designed for Lilliputians).

Finally, I thought, Life was under control again.

But that was not to be. The week went something like this....

A planned trip to the barn was aborted when my car developed a squealing noise and the Check Engine light came on. I carefully did my errands in town and limped back home and called the garage to arrange an appointment.

I received a call from my mother's nursing home wanting me to sign some papers which were then faxed to me. She had recently been in the hospital for 2 and a half days, and they required her to sign new admission papers to the nursing home! What followed was several phone calls, some of them heated, requesting to know why this was required and questioning various parts of the papers. I didn't get satisfactory answers, so I called some local nursing homes to see what their policies were and found they were different. To make a long story short, it was frustrating, took a bunch of time out of my days and ended with me passing the buck to my brother-in-law who has power of attorney for my mother. It seems that I couldn't sign the papers for her after all! Sigh.

The biggest new urgent matter arrived in the form of an email on Monday morning requesting a print of a painting that I hadn't made into a print yet. The man wanted it for his daughter for Christmas. Trouble was, I didn't have a good photo of the painting and wasn't sure I could create a print that would print properly. But I was game to try since it was an image that I'd thought about turning into a print anyway, and What the Heck! It's Christmas season, and I sure could use some sales and a new print to take to the gallery.

I got right to work and was able to take a really good photo of the small painting and set about adjusting the colors and cleaning up all the boo boos that always show up in photos but aren't visible on the real artwork; things like dust spots on the lens and little smudges in the pastel that the camera always magnifies. By zooming way in and using the clone stamp tool with a small brush size in Photoshop, I went all around the outside edges of the horse and rider and tidied them up. The original is a small pastel that was done as a color study for a larger painting, so I hadn't been really careful about keeping edges sharp.

While I was at it, I better defined the mare and foal in the background and made some adjustments to the girl's clothing. All of that took me one whole day.

Then the real challenge came; getting the thing to print properly. After consulting my Photoshop book and another book on digital printing, I changed a color space setting and made a test print in a small version. It was amazingly close to the screen image! Hooray!!

Many test prints later, after trying various differences in settings in Photoshop and the printer driver and different sizes for the print, I finally had an image that I was happy with. That took me another whole day, with interruptions. The final step was to print out the image on the expensive fine art stock and then to make a few extras for the gallery and to sell online.

In the end, what started out to mess up my week of finishing Bard ended up to be a positive thing. I now have a new print to add to my collection; the first in several years! The above print will very shortly be available from my website. The title is "In My Dreams" and it was created for all the little girls who dream of galloping across wide fields on beautiful horses.

And in addition I got a big approval from my client for Bard's portrait which is always a major "Whew!!" moment. It just needs some final touches and it will be done.

On the other hand, we won't talk about how, in all the hubbub of the week, I forgot the farrier was coming today when I made the car appointment and consequently failed to meet her at the barn at the appointed time. But all's well that ends well. She couldn't make it anyway, and we connected later and arranged for another time.

You would think that after all these years of living I would have figured out that there's no such thing as being "all caught up". Something always comes along that demands your immediate attention just when you think you can finally concentrate on some pet activity that you have difficulty fitting into the schedule. It happens every time. And sometimes that's a good thing!

The End of a Long Dry Spell

Last week marked the end of a long dry spell. I sold a small pastel, the first original that I've sold in quite a long time.

I also finished the last of the taxes and sent them off to the respective accountants; both ours and my mother's. A huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders, and slowly I'm working my way back into the studio which is cluttered with new art supplies. Finishing the taxes was the last of the really big obligations still hanging over me, and I'm renewing my resolve to devote time to painting every day or at least for so many hours per week. The schedule which works best is yet to be determined so things may be a little unsettled at first, but once I begin painting, it will be far easier to keep the momentum going.

I've decided to work on my Belgian team painting first in order to get a feel for handling the brush and paints again before moving over to The Peppermint Kid. After a day or so of painting, it will need to sit and dry anyway, so that will work out well.

Above is the small pastel that sold last week, "Bullet In Motion". It will be a gift so I can't tell any details, but I'm happy that it's found a good home. It's actually a mixed media on suede matboard. I used charcoal, conte crayon and pastel on this wonderful surface.

"Piling On" on the Field of Art

To tell you the truth, 2007 was a difficult year. Nothing really tragic happened, but somehow I struggled through the whole year never quite understanding why until I did my annual year end assessment in January. That’s when I realized that one by one the setbacks and disappointments had piled on one another, never giving me a chance to recover in between.

2006 had been a difficult year, too. My 92 year old mother declined rapidly and had to be put in a nursing home. We three sisters had to clean out her apartment and dispose of her worldly possessions which felt like we were erasing what was left of our parents’ lives. My computer hard drive died and I was forced to upgrade the operating system on the new drive and upgrade all my software. I haven’t yet had the time to learn it all again and can’t yet properly print my reproductions and business cards.

Wisely, I made the decision in early 2007 to cut back on marketing and showing in order to build up new inventory of artwork, but that never happened. Starting in January the piling on began. I learned about a local equine art show that I wasn’t invited to enter. It seems there were politics involved, and the curator only invited her “friends”. Next, I lost my only gallery because I hadn’t provided him with anything new for quite a while. But the biggest blow to my ego and self esteem happened a few months later when I lost a portrait commission because I’d taken so long to get to it. It was mortifying; something that had never happened before.

The final piling on was like a three hundred pound linebacker landing on top of the heap. In fact, I wrote about it back in January, but it is still a sore issue. In July I was contacted by a licensing agent who was wildly enthusiastic about my art and made big promises about making me into the next Chris Cummings of the licensing world. It seems she knew far less about equine art licensing than she let on, and I was never able to pin her down as to which of my images I should send her for the big branding promotion she promised. I finally sent her some images and waited and waited. Finally she informed me that the images weren’t suitable and that I hadn’t sent enough to launch a branding campaign. A short time later she rudely cancelled the contract, by email no less, blaming me for her failures. After all the time I’d spent doing research on licensed horse images and my own sales records and planning out paintings for licensing, I was both humiliated and furious. Now I’m glad to be rid of her; a person I wouldn’t want to do business with anyway.

There were a number of other setbacks over the year but these are the major ones, all art related. Confidence in the quality of my art and in my ability to succeed as an artist was shaken at the beginning of the year and never had a chance to recover. Is it any wonder that I found it so difficult to paint in 2007? We artists are such sensitive souls that it doesn’t take much to throw us off track and shake our confidence.

So far the good news is that 2008 is perking along much better. The tax materials are now at the accountant’s and off my long To Do list. I ordered some new art supplies and new canvases and am really liking the looks of the Masterpiece Belgian linens. A new canvas is waiting for the Bard portrait, and by tomorrow my mother’s taxes should be done, and I will at long last be free to paint again. I can’t wait!!

The painting above is an old pastel dog portrait which has always been one of my favorites. I’d like to add some dog paintings to my portfolio again, and “Casey” is a reminder of that.

A Taxing Week

For over a week now I've been working on tax issues and tax reports, all very left brain activities for an artist with poor math skills. It might seem odd for such a person to be "bookkeeper" for a business, but trust me, that's better than leaving it all to my husband who absolutely hates paperwork and anything having to do with taxes. So, I took on the job in order to keep us out of debtor's prison or at least in economic solvency. And of course, I have to do it all for my art business, too.

Doing the annual art sales tax form was particularly challenging this year because I had to refund a portrait deposit last year on which I'd paid sales tax in 2006. Because I owed less in sales tax this year than the refund in sales tax would be, I spent the better part of two days trying to fill out the form in various ways to get the figures to come out "correctly". No dice! So, in desperation I called the state and was told that I would have to file an amended form for 2006 rather than include the refund on the 2007 form. I dutifully proceeded to do just that only to discover that the refund would only amount to $1.89 because of the discount I got that year for filing on time. I figured that the state would probably spend upwards of $50 to refund me that dollar eighty nine, and realized that cash strapped Michigan needed the money more than I do. I didn't file the amended report.

Don't you just love tax season?

So, after dutifully rushing to the post office to mail the tax reports by the deadline, I switched to Right Brain mode and did some work on the portrait of Bard. Earlier in the week I had toned the canvas a really nice neutral gray using Torrit Gray from Gamblin. It's a gray that Gamblin makes once a year from all the leftover pigment of that year's paint production. For those of you non artists, mixing all the colors together is one way of producing a very nice gray. Every batch of Torrit Gray, according to Gamblin, is slightly different because it's made up of different proportions of pigments.

By yesterday the canvas was dry, so I proceeded to enlarge the drawing and prepare to trace it onto the canvas. That's when I realized that the canvas was badly warped and wobbled on the desktop like a teeter totter. I could get a whole finger under one corner with room to spare! Not only was the whole frame warped out of alignment, but one of the stretcher bars was also warped. This would definitely not do since the canvas would be impossible to fit into a frame properly. And, of course, I didn't have another one of the same size which means that Bard will have to wait until I can get another canvas. But, I did decide to use this canvas for testing colors for Bard and such and went ahead and traced the drawing onto it.

By the time a new canvas arrives, I should be about done preparing our income tax stuff to send to the accountant, and then I can give Bard the concentration that he deserves and my right brain craves.

Don't you just love tax season?

I've attached a detail from one of my last pastel horse portraits just so I have some art to show you today.

Starting Over With a New Blog

Like newborn foals on the ground, springtime has always been a time of new life and renewed hope. Going with that theme, I've decided to create a "real" blog here and commit myself, through postings, to regular studio hours and to getting my life under better control. Out with the old and in with the new, so to speak.

For you see, my life had become unmanageable, my art career at a standstill and my horse unridden for weeks at a time. I won't bore you with a long list of reasons why, except to say that it all began about ten years ago with the beginning decline of my elderly parents' health and all that went with it: more time commitment, worry and stress. Foolishly, I chose this very time to move from a career as a horse portrait artist into one of a fine artist with all the marketing that went with it. Slowly the obligations, unfinished projects and general clutter piled up until the whole was overwhelming and paralyzing.

So, at the beginning of 2007 I began some heavy duty soul searching, the result of which was a decision to put the career on hold for a year or so. During that time the plan is to build up a new body of work to present to the world while at the same time eliminating all the clutter from my life.

So, here I am with a brand new blog and a commitment to "mend my ways". It's my intention to share with all of you, dear readers, the wonderful new creations from the studio and maybe even a few flops just to keep me humble.

Actually, this isn't my first blog. I've had one on my website for a couple of years now, but hardly anyone has found it. If you care to look and read, find it here. While you're there, have a look at my paintings and drawings to get a feel for what I do and who I am.

The painting at the top of this entry is one I created this past winter for an online member show sponsored by The Equine Art Guild. The theme of the show is "The Artist's Horse As Muse", and the painting depicts my horse, Scottie, and I as a young girl in a fantasy setting. The title is "In My Dreams". Be sure to visit this very special show and to read the artist's stories behind their paintings.

So, that's it for this first posting. Not very exciting, but I promise more artwork and insights into the life of a horse artist in the weeks and months ahead. Please feel free to post a comment and let me know what you think. 'Bye for now.