Julie T. Chapman - ArtBlog

…with demand for your work?

If so, this email I recently received might be just the thing:

Dear Sir and madam
Allow me to introduce ourselves: We are the Oil Painting Studio.
We would like to offer our painting and giclee prints services to you.
In our studio we have 30 highly skilled professional artists with over 12 years of
experience creating paintings for our international clientele. We have worked
creatively worldwide with a large number of commercial enterprises, professional artists and galleries in Europe
and America. They all praise our professional high quality of production and artistic
workmanship. Many of our clients use our works for their business and art displays…
We safely and professionally pack and ship your paintings through FedEx or
DHL. Please send us an email today describing what is your desired topic to be painted, and some indication of
the approximate size. In return we will send you a pricelist. The Shipping cost is
based on your location and the size and dimensions of the painting or paintings required.
I hope that we will have a chance to cooperation and be good friends!
We are Looking forward to hearing from you.

Best Regards
The Oil Painting Studio

Aside from the entertaining English (I didn’t know you could have “me” as the antecedent to “ourselves”), I’ve been laboring under the quaint notion that original art should come from the artist’s inspiration and passion for the material - not subject to mail-order mass-merchandising assembly-line production. Or is that just so…last century?

…that popped into my email recently.

The first is that the Autumn issue of the Wildlife Art Journal has now been posted. (The 5 questions I asked my good friend, British sculptor Simon Gudgeon, are part of the issue). By the way, I forgot to announce it in my November Artzine, but you can also find the 5 Questions/5 Answers that Andrew Denman asks me in the autumn issue as well.

The other note is that North Light / F+W Media is offering a seminar on photographing your artwork this Tuesday, November  17. For those of you who find the topic intimidating, or have always gone elsewhere to have your work photographed, this may be a quick and fairly inexpensive way to learn about how to do it yourself. (I talk about this in some of my workshops as well).

…or go home.

At a recent workshop, a young artist asked me what she should paint to get into a gallery in Jackson Hole. I was perplexed by the question; she was asking specifically whether she should paint a bison, or a bear, or something else.

Her question really needed answers in several different dimensions, so here goes:

1. First, you gotta paint what you love if your work is to be exciting to both you and collectors. As we’ve talked about in this blog just recently, animal artists tend to be completely bonkers about animals, which is A Good Thing. I’m so inspired by my reference material every time I go through and look at all the beautiful horses, the big bison, the lithe cats, the pouncing coyotes, the corvids with chutzpah and the swans with grace, that I can hardly choose what to paint next.
2. Secondly, doing one painting of a particular subject to get into one particular gallery almost certainly would not work. Galleries want to see a body of work with some consistency in style, showing knowledge of your subject. (They also want to know that you’ll be a good business partner with them - so be sure you know how to handle framing, consignments, collectors, shipping, paperwork, etc etc etc).
3. If - like this artist - you’re very early in your career and still not sure what or how you want to paint, then take the time to develop and grow your skills. Compare your work to the best; be self-critical.
4. And finally, we come back to something we’ve touched on before in this blog: have a vision, have something you really want to say about the subject matter, and pursue that with passion.

For some reason I’m in the mood to write about this. So - my top tech tools:

• Adobe Lightroom: if you’ve been to a recent workshop of mine you know that I absolutely, positively cannot imagine living without this tool. It is the be-all end-all for cataloging, organizing, and applying darkroom functions to my tens of thousands of digital photos. I have LR 2.x; I notice the 3.0 beta is now available.
• Adobe Photoshop: essential for final edits in cropping, color-correcting, resizing, and exporting images into at least a dozen different formats, not to mention messing around with (moving, resizing, etc.) image elements when I’m playing with a composition.
• Email: I can’t imagine living without a fairly powerful email tool! MS Outlook allows html-formatted emails, so I can create my Artzines in nice table arrangements with pretty fonts, pix, etc. Now that I live on a Mac, I’m limping along with Apple Mail, which (sadly) lacks the power and functionality of Outlook. Looking forward to when Apple mail isn’t so limited…
• yousendit.com: this is my tool of choice for uploading large image files to send to galleries, magazines, my licensing agent, etc.
• Web design: I do my own web design - formerly with Frontpage, now with Dreamweaver. Not for the faint of heart; if you’re not technically inclined, go to one of the providers of full web designs for artists, or of template-based websites.
• Macbook Pro: this beautiful machine goes everywhere with me - workshops, photo safaris, etc.
• External hard drives: I have 4 right now - a 500 GB portable that’s powered by USB and pretty much lives attached to my laptop; two 500-GB Gtech practically bulletproof things; and a new 1 TB drive. All my photos are backed up in at least 3 different places, hence the need for lots of drives.
• Large LCD display: my reference photos are displayed on a 27″ monitor next to my easel. (I *wish* I had the $$$$ to afford a nice big Apple Cinema display! someday…)
• And of course…my pro digital camera and lenses - my bread-and-butter field tools.

This leaves aside things like word processors, desktop publishing tools, and spreadsheets - but I figure those are ubiquitous enough that they don’t need mention.

Anyone else? chime in!