Look at this lead crystal sphere that recently joined my art collection. It was made by Bob Stephan, a local glass artist (and my boss). Now, if I could only get a raise.

I have a game plan for my work. The dilemma was that by the time I finished a body of work and had it slided, I was already doing work I felt was better and a little different. Then I would feel reluctant to send out solicitation to galleries because I felt as though I was sending slides of work that was old news. What I have decided to do is to finish a body of work, slide it, and send it to galleries. All the new work I will sit on, not slide it or show it until I have dealt with the previous work. (am I making any sense?). Basically I will be marketing work that is resolved and hiding the stuff in development, (even though that's the work I'm excited about). Next year I will market the work I am doing this year, etc. etc...

Packing is a pain. Today I spent about three hours, after work, bubble wrapping, taping, cutting cardboard, and nursing large papercuts, only these weren't papercuts, these were CARDBOARD CUTS. It's worth all the trouble though, believe me, I have had paintings sent back to me with forklift size holes in them. I am very careful with my packing, but I have no control over a gallery's inability to repack my stuff and ship it back to me. I have always found packing paintings a delicate balance between packing tight, but not so tight as to end up with warped canvas. I hate loose canvas. I worked on wood for awhile because of this little hangup, but good lord, talk about heavy. One time I shipped a piece to a gallery in Baltimore and used styrofoam peanuts, which I packed around the edges. When I went to the opening, the painting was hung in the window and little balls of packing foam were all over the painting. They hadn't bothered to brush off the piece before they hung it up. I ended up picking the stuff off myself while others, wine in hand, stood behind me thinking I was a performance piece.

Thursday I put a show up at Lark books and people really went wild. You never know how your work is going to be received. This is the same stuff that was rejected by a gallery one block up, they said they couldn't sell "that type of work" wanted to play it safe this year. I find this funny because the paintings have only been up for two days, one sold instantly, and three others are on hold. The same morning that the show was installed I got a rejection letter from Pack Place Museum who is having a show about "New Work". This whole thing is a crap shoot, its impossible to gauge whether anyone is going to like the work or hate it. I don't think it would matter much except for the fact that I am accually trying to sell this stuff. I have to wear many hats, sales rep, marketing, artist, business owner, Americas next top model. Monday I am sending five collages to Ferrin Gallery. I have been sending images of my work to them for about two years, trying to generate some interest. Recently the owner was out this way visiting Penland and stopped by to look at some paintings first hand. Four of the pieces I am sending they have not seen yet, I really think they are going to like them.

I spent a week in St Louis at the GAS conference. GAS stands for GLASS ART SOCIETY. This was a working trip, but I stayed with my brother, his wife Alice, and their two very cute boys. It was a lot of fun being around them; the kids have so much energy. It's great to be an uncle because I can have all the fun of being around kids and then give them back when I get tired. I found an old Winnie the Pooh book that I began to read. I just love the artwork, the stories are so great; no wonder it's a classic. Children and their books have become a major influence in my work in the last couple of years. Lately that aspect of the work has grown more prevalent. I am striving to make paintings that evoke the beauty of old illustrations in great childrens' books. St Louis is a great town, barring the weather. There are so many beautiful old buildings, many of them abandoned, great old architectural details are all over the place. So many of the museums and zoos are free to the public. The Art Museum has a whole room full of Max Beckmann's; I spent a good amount of time studying his paintings which are truly great works of art. St Louis is a town that any artist could make a working home.

The collage angle is proving to be just what I needed to help me resolve the large scale work. First of all, I know what I am doing before I move to the canvas. I would find it nearly impossible to work on an oversize piece without having some idea of the direction I was going prior to beginning. Secondly, I feel like I have stumbled across a painting style that takes what I was doing with the grid paintings and moves them into a more narrative style of work. I feel a sense of freedom in this. You might think that working abstractly allows the artist to have breathing room, but I find it can be restrictive. The new paintings have a strong cut-paper feel which is turning out to be a unique quality, especially in oil.

The night before last I was sitting on the couch with my nightly glass of wine watching Bravo by myself because Shannon was at her Tuesday book club. I heard a knock on the window behind my head so I looked out and saw my neighbor whom I knew of but had never met. He is a reclusive man known to many in the neighbor by the eighteen year old Pinto he drives at a rate of 15 miles per hour up and down our little street. The Pinto is what he was knocking about because he had inavertantly left the thing in neutral with his two dogs inside while he ran into his house to grab something. The car rolled down the hill towards our house but was stopped by a large ditch and several trees. He asked me in a round about way to help him get his car out, so he could go to WalMart for some food. We spent about an hour pushing the car from every angle but it just would not budge. He is not a regular conversationalist so I filled in the cracks by asking him if he had been painting. This took him off guard because he wondered how I knew he was a painter. My boss the glass artist tried to buy one of his paintings once but the whole deal fell through when someone told the him he could get more money somewhere else. At work there was a photo of one of his paintings that mysteriously disapeared after the deal fell through.

After much wrestling under, over, and sideways, we got the bright idea to use a chain to pull the car out by hooking it up to my truck. We got the car out and he asked me if I wanted to see his new painting, which of course I jumped at the chance. We had to enter the house through a window. He yelled at his dogs in Russian and put them in a side room. Everything in the house looked very antique, stuff was piled in every corner of the shack which is heated by a fire place and I am willing to bet has no running water. He dashed out of the room for a minute and came back with the painting: a mountain scene on a small canvas. Every leaf was painted in full detail. Millions of little pointalistic-like dashes of paint made up the brightly colored scene. It had random figures walking down a road. The small painting contained the only color in the whole room which made for a stark contrast. I asked him how many he had produced and he said he had been working on this one for a year. I asked him if he had sold many and he said he only gets a third of the selling price, and that he lives a hard life. I believe he may be autistic, he doesn't communicate like most, he lives alone except for his dogs. He is a very interesting man.

How much of an effect does your environment play on the work that you make. I spent some time today looking at galleries I used to visit in Seattle when I lived out there. I love the direction painting is going on the west coast. Urban imagery has a dark feel that attracts me. I find it nearly impossible to work in that vein here in Asheville. I can only paint happy pictures that make the viewer want to vomit with joy. I have become Matisse when all I ever wanted was to be a blue Picasso. God forbid I should paint anything academic in Asheville, all the potters in town would form a posse, circle up the wagons and run me out of town. Why do I have to go onto the internet just to remind myself that minimalism accually did exist, I am not making this shit up.

I finished this painting and am a little reluctant to post an image because the photo I took of it is so bad, but it is the best I could do with my limited camera skills. The painting is 4ft by 5ft. I feel a liberation in working large because it allows me to dissolve into the image, which allows me to focus completely on paint and surface. I am really painting a non-objective piece because I worked out the image in collage before working it out on canvas. I have begun painting another large piece: a simplified waterfall. I am doing a little 3ft urban landscape and a boat floating in stylized water off a red dock. I love doing these simple playful scenes that act as a catalyst for complex paint application. This is where my hesitation comes into play, because the richest aspect of this painting, surface and paint application, is lost in the photo.

I have a love for art history that rivals my desire to paint. Its been on the back-burner for the last couple of years, due to time constraints and because I wanted to focus on other things besides art. Lately, that love has been rekindled. I am currently reading through THE AMERICAN ART BOOK like it's candy. I rented a Sister Wendy video on the story of painting, contemporary era. It is such a wonderful thing to have a nun explaining her love for Agnes Martin.

One artist I have fallen for in the last couple of years is Marsden Hartley. I am ashamed to say I don't know a thing about his life. I went to the museum of art in St Louis about two years ago and after hours of looking at everything from Van Gogh to Kiki Smith, I fell upon a small Hartley depicting a stylized cubistic waterfall and couldn't leave its side. I wanted to touch it. I looked at it for as long as I could without arousing suspicion that I was some psycho who was about to lash out and slash the thing (like someone did to a Da Vinci). It was a true masterpiece. I went back a year later and it was gone put away in a vault somewhere. I worked in a museum for three years and realized that they have so much more art than we see, only the tip of the iceberg is on display. (ooh a painting of an iceberg would be cool, note to self).

I look forward to reading about Hartley soon. Today in my studio I am going to be starting my own waterfall painting, which is another way to study an artist.

They say research is what you do when you don't know what you are doing. I come home from the library once a week with an armload of books. When you are painting paint, there is no use for formal research because you are doing it on canvas. Marks, scratches, shapes come from some hidden place in the back of my brain. Now that I am working on painting "something", I need to gather images for reference. I have, so far, come up with a way of painting simple scenes that look like nineteen fifties illustrations. I use this as an excuse to focus on material. I brought home my first piece last night. An abstract overlaid with a swooping scissor tail that has a yellow ochre branch behind it. Shannon responded "its nice, is it finished", so I smashed it over her head. No, really she was right, It needs just a little more work.