In the distance, glittering with mirages,
Things come together and drift apart.
And, as the dark brown horses run,
a gentle flame brushes their stirrups.
In the eyes of one used to the steppe,
the edge of heaven appears nearby.
In the action of the horses, used to distance,
It seems their homeland stretches straight ahead.
Above, a kite is circling,
Taking the measure of the broad steppe.
And so. tired out below,
I rest upon a hill. I crane my neck back.
It’s live! My new website is up and running! I built it on a newish application called Sandvox, which I highly recommend. Nice choices for templates, WYSIWYG interface, fast publishing of updates and good communication from the company, which is based in San Francisco. I think that artists who are looking for something beyond the cookie-cutter fine art template sites ought to check out this product. It also looks like they are very receptive to suggestions for improvements and features, so there may be an opportunity to nudge them in the direction of doing things that would make their product even more attractive to artists.
I love the control I now have and, while I do pay for web-hosting, the existence of my site is not dependent on anyone else, a lesson I’ve just learned from my experience with GoDaddy after they cut off my access for 24 hours, which just coincidentally happened to coincide with the Strike Against SOPA. The fine art template sites all seem to charge for their services and besides really disliking their pedestrian template choices, who needs a monthly fee just to have a website?
Sandvox costs $79.99, ok, 80 bucks. I just downloaded the latest upgrade, which was free. You can also download a free trial version to test drive it.
In other news, I recently received this endorsement from Todd Wilkinson, the Editor of Wildlife Art Journal:
“What catches my eye with Susan Fox’s work, inspired by her travels to Mongolia, is her aesthetic, her craving for adventure, her way of naturalistic interpretation that reads, visually, like a beautifully-illustrated field journal. Susan’s paintings in oil speak of exotic people, animals and outposts set in a distant mythical corner of the world—an ancient kingdom synonymous with Genghis Khan, yet today a modern country surprisingly still unexplored by Western artists. Fox may be the only American animal artist who has devoted so much to Mongolia’s mountains, deserts and steppes. And that’s precisely why her work is more than decoration; it sparks conversations.
I salute art that tells stories—that upon each encounter with a painting or sculpture you realize there’s another narrative layer waiting to be explored. This involves something that goes beyond the technical virtuosity of an artist or the way light falls upon a piece; it gets, instead, to the reason why some art possesses soul. Whether she is interpreting traditional Mongolian horse culture, celebrating Argali (bighorn) sheep, or taking us off to the East African savannah (yet another destination on Fox’s map of travel), we know we’ve been on a journey to someplace special. Susan Fox endeavors to set herself apart and it shows.”
Todd Wilkinson, Editor, Wildlife Art Journal
THANKS, TODD!
I want to finish covering the Symposium while the fantastic information I got yesterday is still fresh in my mind. Mongolia Monday will return next week.
Day Two started with an amazing talk on “Creativity and Authenticity” by painter Joseph Paquet, who studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York and was mentored by artist John P. Osborne. Although he considers Osborne as his greatest influence, he also cited George Inness, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, George Bellows and Russian painter Isaac Levitan as inspirations.
He then did a demo painting “out of his head” with no reference, observing in answer to a question that “When you paint out of your head, you find out what you don’t know. It’s staring you right in the face.”
I spent a good part of his 90 minute talk frantically taking notes since his topic is an extremely important one…the necessity of finding our own voice as artists. As he pointed out, there is a lot of derivative work out there today, partly due to an almost unprecedented availability of ateliers and teachers for people to study with.
Too many artists think that their goal is to find out how the teacher does the work, believing if they do the same things that that is what will make them successful. In reality, it only makes them a second-rate version of their teacher.
Joseph also spoke about what he sees in the art world today, saying that there has been a shift from what he calls “heart” to ideas and that too many artists aren’t willing to risk expressing what they love, but instead only try to be clever, which is ultimately unsatisfying. He gave the example of Jeff Koons, one of the most financially successful artists in history, whose work is clever, but really nothing more, and who, for himself, collects artists like Bouguereau.
If you have an opportunity to go hear Joseph Paquet speak, I highly recommend that you do so. If you live in the St. Paul, Minnesota area, you can take his classes. He also teaches workshops at various locations around the country.
Joseph made many extremely pithy comments and I would like to share my favorites with you:
-Everyone has a story.
-Don’t drink your own kool-aid.
-Craft is the language of what we do.
-The true master is the perpetual student. (Preceded this by saying that if someone tells you they are a master, they aren’t.)
-Go up against what you don’t know how to do
-Great art is intimate
-The American idea that making money=success is a load of shit. (applause)
-The hardest thing is to say something profound in common language.
-Surround yourself with people who are truthful.
-If you don’t love the damn apple, don’t paint the apple (possibly the most important thing he said all day.)
-Stay sensitive.
-Talking about art students: Student: Teach me how to paint a tree. Joseph: Which tree? They’re all different. (applause)
-The world doesn’t need 300 Richard Schmids.
– There is a crappy period between when you find your skills and when you find your voice. (Boy, did that one resonate with me personally since that period took me almost ten years.)
– Originality and authenticity is a choice.
After howling wind and rain last night, today was bright and sunny! I arrived at the Fort Mason Conference Center for the California Art Club’s Winter Art Symposium at 8 am and almost immediately ran into two artist friends, Kathy O’Leary, who also lives in Humboldt County, and ZeeZee Mott, who lives just to the north in Marin County.
The morning program started off with a panel discussion between CAC President Peter Adams, Eric Rhoads from Streamline Publishing and Thomas Reynolds, owner of a gallery of the same name. The topic at hand was “Creating the Future”, which led to a lively discussion of how representational painting got where it is today and how it will move into the future. Educating the public and the next generation about art were high on the list. It made me feel good about the fact that I am now teaching drawing.
Then Eric Rhoads, whose company, Streamline, publishes Fine Art Connoisseur and Plein Air magazine gave an information intensive, fast-moving presentation on “How To Transform Your Art Career”. I’ll be writing up some of what I learned from him in a future post, but he covered everything from deciding what you want out of your art career to mistakes artists make in advertising to landing an art gallery.
After the lunch break, we all spent the afternoon cycling between three excellent painting demos, offered by Nancy Seamons Crookston (a portrait in oil), David Gallup (three quick studies in oil) and one of my classmates from my art school days, Kim Lordier (landscape in pastel).
Not only was it fun to meet up with Kim again after all these years (we were at the Academy of Art in the Illustration Dept. in the late 1980s), but I also finally met an artist who did animal illustration before he turned to plein air painting and taught a class in animal drawing just a year or so after I graduated, so I had missed my chance to study with Paul Kratter. It was a treat to get to talk with him, both about animal art and the “old days” at the Academy.
BTW- The two images used to illustrate this post were shot with my new iPhone 4S. Since I’ve signed on for iCloud, everything is automatically uploaded via Photostream when the iPhone in on wifi. Photostream then automatically downloads the images to all my devices, including the MacBook Pro I’m writing this post on. Pretty darn cool.
I’ve been a member of the California Art Club for almost ten years, but since it’s based in Pasadena and I’m in northern California I haven’t been able to go to any events till now. So I’m really looking forward to this weekend at Fort Mason, which is located right on San Francisco Bay.
There will be a panel discussion, demos and lots of opportunities to meet and network fellow CAC members. I plan to do a little live blogging if possible, so stay tuned!
UPDATE 9:30 AM THURSDAY: Well, well, what a surprise….went to my GoDaddy account about an hour ago and had no problem accessing my old website there, just “coincidentally” after the end of the 24 hour SOPA strike. I had last checked it around 9 pm last night and was still locked out. GoDaddy is in the news today because they have FINALLY come out against SOPA/PIPA. But my experience tells another story. Wonder what they’ll pull the next time. I won’t be around to find out because my new Sandvox-built, Namecheap-hosted site went live yesterday afternoon. This morning I stripped the old site bare. Yesterday I deleted the clunky, visually cluttered “albums”. The whole GoDaddy website-building operation is a kludge, badly implemented, and I’m so glad to be done with it, even without the last little gotcha, not to mention their inane sexist advertising and their elephant-killing SOB of a CEO. And no, I did not return the call from Mr. Director of Network Abuse (WTF?) because I have no reason to believe anything he might have said.
And why, you might reasonably ask, did I ever use them in the first place if they were so awful? Because, at the time, they were the least objectionable of the very few options available for artists who want to build their own sites and I have another artist colleague who had managed to put together a quite decent-looking site using them. What was not obvious is what a mess the interface is, to the point of being a terrible timesuck. I didn’t know about Sandvox and it may not have existed. At least it never showed up in my Google searches. I’ll be reviewing Sandvox in a future post.
UPDATE 5:20 PM: Just listened to a phone message from 10 am that I missed because I was otherwise occupied from a guy at GoDaddy who described himself as the “Director of Network Abuse” calling to say that it “had come to his attention” that I had posted about “issues I was having with my account” on my Blogspot blog (my blog is on WordPress). Would I please call him so he can see what he can do to “help”? Yo, Mr. Director, how about if you’d called to tell me that I can now get to my site and, oh gee, we’re really sorry you had a problem. But no, I just went there and I still cannot access it. But it doesn’t really matter because my new site went live about two hours ago. Check it out! www.foxstudio.biz
Want to know what the world will be like if SOPA passes? I just found out. After posting on my website’s home page yesterday that I would be blacking it out today in support of the Strike Against SOPA. I went to my account this morning to do so and found that I cannot launch my site, which is how one accesses it to make changes. Which means that I cannot black it out or make any other changes.
I also have two other domains registered, but that do not have live sites. My access to those has been blocked also.
I moved my domains and my web hosting to Namecheap when it became known that GoDaddy was supporting SOPA. They publicly backed off, but I doubt that anyone really believes that they had changed their mind.
Yesterday I could access my site to make changes. This morning, the day of the strike, I cannot. Coincidence? Highly unlikely.
However….I had already rebuilt my site using Sandvox. We just haven’t had time to do the conversion. We’re in progress on that right now. As soon as the new site is live and I have access to the old GoDaddy version again, if I ever do, I’ll be striping all the content from it and also deleting my albums, which contain images of my work and travels. I had already redone those in Picasa.
So. F— you, GoDaddy. I’m posting about what you have done to me in every place and comment thread I can find.
By experiencing hardship
You will become experienced
—–
There are thousands of owners for something done right
There is one owner for something done wrong
—-
If a person tries hard
Destiny will try hard
—-
From a little bit of laziness
Much laziness will come
—-
Talk little
Do much
UPDATE!- 5pm- Aperture came up this morning and then the connection to the Library hard drive dropped again. This time David swapped out the power supply, which made no difference. Then, because the next step was drastic, re-building the entire Vault, and with no reason to believe it would make a difference, he put the original Library drive back on. And it worked. All day without a hiccup. At this point he thinks that somehow a read-write error got onto the hard drive, but somehow it’s not there now. Go figure. The good news is that I got a good afternoon’s work in at the easel. The Vault drive will be re-built over the weekend. Just in case.
We were almost certain that the problem was due to something in Lion since the problem showed up the first time I used Aperture after the upgrade and because of what happened when I installed it on my MacBook (see below). And it might be, but no idea what it would be. Thus once again demonstrating why correlation is not necessarily causation.
Original post from 10am this morning:
We’re still in the midst of dealing with this “situation”, but it’s ugly. The first morning I came into the studio to get to work after the holidays seemed to go fine. Until toward the end of the day I clicked on an image in Aperture to change the view mode and suddenly things went crazy. One image was half blues and magentas. Some had vanished. Uh oh. Call Tech Support, which happens to be my husband, who has been in IT (Information Technology) since 1964. Without Aperture, I literally cannot do my work. Did I say this was ugly?
That was two weeks ago. Despite changing out the external hard drive which has my Aperture Library on it (he had a third drive on hand just in case; four+ hours to copy the Library to it), multiple calls to the hard drive company (good support and helpful) and swapping out the Firewire cables for USB cables, just to hit the highlights, yesterday afternoon the Library simply vanished from the Desktop after successfully, we thought, addressing the problem. And work was done for the day and until we can get this fixed. Stay tuned.
Fortunately, all my images are backed up to a duplicate hard drive and also to an external Vault drive, which is kept in the detached garage. So I’m not hyperventilating with stress and terror that I’m going to somehow lose over 60,000 images that I absolutely depend on for my work. But this sucks, big time.
We did everything right. We thought. David recommended holding off on upgrading to Lion when it came out because there’s always something and he knows how mission-critical Aperture is for me. So we waited some months.
Finally, we agreed that I should go ahead and install Lion on my MacBook, which I did. And it was fine, except that the MacBook now could not see the Terastation server drives. Just. Great. And expensive. There were no workarounds, though he was given some to try by various colleagues. So we now have new server drives. And all was rainbows and unicorns.
We let another couple of months go by. I checked all the forums I could find and didn’t see anything that suggested people were running into problems with Aperture after upgrading to Lion. So David finally said to go ahead. It went fine, Aperture came up and functioned correctly. Right up until it didn’t.
So, having exhausted the other possibilities, we are left thinking that the problem is something that has happened because of Lion, but we don’t know what yet. The IMac seems much slower to come up now than before and it takes a long time for it to see the Wacom tablet and the mouse upon start-up.
Species: Cinereous Vulture (Aegypius monachus)
Weight, length: Cinereous vultures are the largest eurasian bird of prey and one of the largest flying birds. They are 98–120 cm (39–47 in) long with a 2.5–3.1 m (8.2–10 ft) wingspan and weigh 7–14 kg (15–31 lb)
Conservation Status: Near Threatened (IUCN Red List)
Habitat Preference: Mountains, rocky uplands, forests
Best places to see cinereous vultures: Ikh Nartiin Chuluu Nature Reserve, Baga Gazriin Chuluu Nature Reserve, but common in many parts of the country.
Interesting facts:
-They are also known as the European black vulture due to the very dark color of the juveniles. The adult’s head plumage gets lighter as the bird ages.
– It has recently been established through the identification of wing-tagged birds, that a number of juvenile birds from Ikh Nart are migrating to South Korea during the winter. They are showing up at feeding stations.
– It is more common for the species to nest in trees in western parts of its range, but in Mongolia nests on cliffs are more often seen. At Ikh Nart the birds nest in some of the elm trees and a bird was recently photographed on a nest built in a larch tree in the northern mountains.
Susan Fox, American Artist 