DIY art residency

Great minds think alike. I just read Joanne Mattera's latest "Marketing Mondays" post ("Do It Yourself") and was very happy to see some the same thoughts that I've been having recently validated on her blog. The post is all about taking the DIY approach to getting the things you want to have happen with your work and art career: do your own solo shows, curate exhibitions online or in physical space, publish your own monograph, and the one that spoke the most to me at this time, create your own art residency, like sculptor Laura Moriarty did.

This past Sunday night, I was looking around the web for artist residency opportunities and kept coming up against time constraints and monetary obligations. I continued mulling over residency ideas long after I should have been asleep and slowly came around to the idea that I could create a residency in my own studio! I honestly don't know what took me so long to come up with this idea for myself, but I'm glad that I did.

So far, I've come up with a time frame of roughly two weeks full time (at least 8 hours per day in the studio) to be done in either March or April 2012. There are details to deal with, but, yeah, I think that this will be a good thing to do.

New BMG website

My Philadelphia gallery rep, Bridgette Mayer, has just debuted the gallery's new website. It has taken a while to get together, but is very nice and has a bunch of new features. Check it out : Bridgette Mayer Gallery

One of the new things to check out is this "studio visit" video featuring me going on about some stuff that I do: Tim McFarlane, Studio Visit, 2011

Digital musings

ecp 120511.1 (digital drawing)

ecp 120111.2 (digital drawing)

ecp 120711.2 (digital drawing)

Three drawings from an on-going series that I am developing paintings from. The titles reflect the file name in Photoshop, the date, and the order in which the drawing was done on that day. 

I'm on my computer a lot when I'm home and, of course, I get flashes of ideas that I want to explore. So, in addition to writing or sketching in my physical journals, from time-to-time I will also tap into available tech to experiment with. My habit has been to use Photoshop mainly for photo-editing. I rarely get the urge to see what else I might want to do with it, preferring to pursue my main painting and drawing explorations in the studio. 

One thing that I forget from time-to-time is that my studio is always with me 24-7 in my mind. Making art is as much a state of mind as it is physical. Like the saying goes, "Wherever you go, there you are", so wherever you are, so is your art. When I can't physically be in the studio (working, traveling, sick, whatever...) I'm continually turning creative thoughts over in my head. If I have been working on a painting, you can bet that before my next session in the studio I will have gone through several versions of it in my head. The painting will still turn out differently than anything I might think of, but engaging in that on-going thought process is always rewarding.