The Artist

I Get International And Local Media Coverage!

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Times-Standard article, November 23, 2012

In one of those little incidents of sychronicity that come along every once in awhile, I’ve just had three articles about me, my art and Mongolia appear in three publications in less than a week.

It started with a Facebook message on November 3 from a editor for The Epoch Times, a Chinese-American news website and print publication which is published in 35 countries and 18 languages and is dedicated to providing uncensored news to the Chinese people. The editor, Christine Lin, found me through my Facebook public page after she had a problem using the contact form on my website (which is now working fine as far as I know). One lesson from this is that it pays to have multiple ways for people to contact you if you are an artist. We did a one hour phone interview which resulted in a 1500 word article that included six images of my art. You can read “American Artist Susan Fox Paints Genghis Khan’s Mongola” here.

The next contact came through LInkedIn. I was looking through the list of possible contacts the site provides based on who your current connections are. One of them was Allyson Seaborn, who writes for the UB Post, the leading English-language newspaper in Mongolia. What caught my eye at first, though, was that some of her page was in Mongolian cyrillic. I sent her a connect invitation, she accepted and then a day or so later sent me a message asking if I’d be willing to be the subject of one of her regular expat (expatriate) columns. I told her that I don’t live in Mongolia, but she felt that I have traveled there extensively enough (7 trips so far) and that being an artist would be interesting to their readers. In this case, she sent me a short list of questions about me, my work and my activities in Mongolia. There was also a list of set questions that every subject of the series answers. You can read “Susan Fox- There is no other place like the Land of Blue Skies” here.

The third article, for our local newspaper the Times-Standard, had been on my To Do list since I had come home from Mongolia in late September. In this case it was something I wrote myself, which was mildly edited, and submitted with a zip file of images, but I had no idea that it would appear yesterday. You can read “Local painter takes art expedition to Mongolia” here.

My iPad Sketches Are In A New Book!

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I got an email last year from one of the authors of a book called “Visual Notes”, first published in 1984. He and his co-author were updating it to include images created digitally. He found my blog post about my iPad sketching and asked permission to use some of them in the new edition. Of course, I said “Yes!”

The new book is out and is available on here on Amazon. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but have browsed through it and it looks really good. I’m very, very proud to have my iPad sketches included in a book that also includes “visual notes” by people such as choreographer Merce Cunningham and architect Michael Graves.

Here are a few of the seven sketches that are in the book:

"Pot-bellied Pig, Oakland Zoo"- I did this one in about 15 seconds and almost hit "Don't Save", but this was the one that caught the author's eye.
"Flamingos, Oakland Zoo"- My own favorite from that day at the zoo.
"Roosevelt Elk Bull, Redwood National Park"- I sat in the car and sketched this big guy who also had a large harem of cows.

Best Juried Show Rejection Letter EVER!

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Checking You Out 12x12" - Now, really. How could they resist this face?

Rejection hurts, no doubt about it. You slave away and do the best piece of art you can and, clunk, it doesn’t get in. I’ve certainly gotten my share of rejection letters since I first started to enter juried shows in 2002. There are two shows that I’ve entered at least six or seven times each and still have not gotten in.

But I don’t make excuses. I don’t blame the judges. I don’t tell myself “It’s all subjective”. And I don’t scream and throw things (although that might be kind of fun). Until recently I assumed that my work simply wasn’t good enough yet. That still may be true, but I work hard to view my paintings objectively and at this point I feel that I know when I’ve nailed it. Only so many pieces will be accepted and only so many in a given genre, media and size. Sometimes your piece is just the odd one out.

So, if I don’t get in, it means that….I didn’t get in.

Which brings us to my latest rejection. I entered Salon International, the top-notch Greenhouse Gallery of Fine Art show, for the first time last year and had two of my three entries accepted! What a rush! And they were animal subjects (against which there can be definite bias in the mainstream art world) and both Mongolia subjects. So I got in on my terms with my subject matter of choice.

Guess what? I won’t have anything in the show this year. Bummer. But wait, here’s relevant excerpts from the rejection letter that went out to all of us. I was so impressed by it that I wrote to the gallery owner thanking him and asking if I could use it for a blog post, for which he graciously gave permission.

This is a perfect primer for any artist who wants to enter the juried show arena. Notice that it’s not about you personally, it’s the merit of your work only that is being judged. Read carefully how they define “artistic excellence”. There’s your checklist.

Dear Artist,

We congratulate you for having the courage to “throw your hat in the ring” of competition and for submitting one or more entries to Salon International 2012!

Salon International 2012 will be a spectacular exhibit of 434 paintings selected from 1,112 entries representing 44 states plus DC in the USA and 18 additional countries. As this event is open to all oil painters of traditional representational subject matter worldwide, the entries represent an extremely wide range of artistic skill and ability. In selecting paintings for the exhibit the jury was looking for over-all artistic excellence. In determining the presence of artistic excellence the following components were considered heavily: composition / design, focal point, use of color, paint manipulation, unification, originality, creativity, feeling, and choice of subject matter. When a painting is not selected for exhibit it does not necessarily mean that the jury does not like or respect it. As with any competition, a line has to be drawn. Where that line falls is always, at least partially, determined by space limitations.

The 1,112 total entries this year reflect a 9 1/2% decrease from last year. The over-all strength of the entries was greatly increased, resulting in more paintings being included in the exhibit than ever before, with a grand total of 434. Obviously, we can’t continue to increase the size of the exhibit every year. This means that we will have to become even more selective in the jury process. It means that wonderful paintings will be competing with other wonderful paintings. What does this mean for you? It means that each year the bar of artistic excellence is raised higher, the competition among artists becomes even greater, the awards are more meaningful and Salon International becomes more prestigious and more respected!

The major goal of Salon International is to both encourage and challenge artists worldwide to continuously strive for artistic excellence. If your entry was not accepted for this exhibit it should not be taken as a defeat but should be considered simply as a challenge to continue that constant stretch for a higher level of artistic skill and excellence. We encourage each one of you to continue to accept the challenges along the path which leads to the rewards of excellence and to continue to “throw your hat in the ring” of competition. Competitions are a healthy component of the growth process, creating opportunities to set and achieve goals, setting forth examples to follow, and rewarding excellence.

A list of accepted artist names and images for the Salon International 2012 exhibit can be viewed online at http://si.greenhousegallery.com. The entire Salon International 2012 exhibit can be viewed on line at http://www.greenhousegallery.com beginning on or possibly before April 14th. The awards will also be posted on this web site beginning April 14th .

We appreciate your participation in Salon International 2012 and your part in helping to make it a success. We have every intention to continue to build this event into one of the most prestigious and highly respected juried exhibits in the world. We welcome you to continue to participate in this exciting journey!

Very sincerely,

Will I enter again next year? Does paint dry?

Have You Heard Of Pinterest?

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Pinterest is the newest social media service hit and one that has the potential to be very useful to visual artists. It’s currently available by invitation only, but you can request one at their homepage, or this article on Mashable offers a few other suggestions.

They’ve gone from 1.2 million users in August to over 4 million at this point. And that’s without being open to the public.

It’s a virtual “pin board” to which images are posted. You can create “boards” on any topic you wish, such as “Susan Fox’s Paintings” or “Outrageous Desserts” or whatever. Other members can comment on your pins and (and this is part of what makes it intriguing as an art marketing option) “re-pin” your image to one of their own boards, from which their followers can re-pin it and…..

It’s totally visual. It’s easy and non-technical to use, at least I think so. You can post prices, so it has potential as a selling site for art. (How to do so is included in a bonus feature that is part of the Mashable article linked to above). It could almost be a substitute for a website if all an artist wanted was a place to display lots of their work.

The interface is clean and attractive and shows off art nicely. Pins can also be re-posted on Twitter and Facebook. There’s a line of icons under your profile information that includes links to your website, Twitter, Facebook and an RSS feed.

It’s easy to pin to with a “Pin It” bookmarklet that sits in your browser Toolbar. It’s easy to upload images from one’s computer. It’s easy for people to “re-pin” or share what you’ve posted. My Mongolian bactrian camel painting was re-pinned within minutes after I posted it, so there’s potential for lots of eyeballs and for an image to go viral.

Here’s my “pin” page: http://pinterest.com/foxstudio/pins/ and here are my “boards”: http://pinterest.com/foxstudio/. I’m trying a variety of boards, hoping that if I have interesting images in a number of categories, it will draw people in to check out my art, too, and also become a follower. It was really easy to add new boards, rearrange their order and move images between them.

On the main site, there is already an “Art” category, also “Photography” and “Film, Music and Books” categories. You assign your boards to one of these pre-existing categories, but can easily change which one at any time.

If you want to find out more about how to use Pinterest and to see if it would be useful to you as an artist, Mashable has a handy beginner’s guide.

This is still a really new option and early artist adopters are going to have to feel their way to see how it can best be used. If you’re already on Pinterest, let me know what you think of it!

New Website And A Very Special Endorsement

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We've had a friend from New Zealand visiting for the past couple of days, which is why this post is a little late. He wanted to see redwoods, but he also got an eyeful of our local Roosevelt elk, including this big bull who was grazing right next to the road in Prairie Creek State Park.

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.

Redwoods in Prairie Creek State Park. When I was a kid I though everyone got to go camping in places like this.

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!

California Art Club Symposium Day One

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Kim Lordier demonstrates how to create a larger pastel landscape from a smaller plein air study

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.

Portrait demo from live model by David Gallup

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.

Off To San Francisco To The California Art Club’s Winter Symposium!

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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!

GoDaddy Has Censored Me Because I Support The SOPA Strike

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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.

Now Available For Viewing: “My Mongolia: Paintings of the Land of Chinggis Khan”

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Saikhan Eej 18x14" oil Inquire

Tomorrow night is the opening reception for my solo show at Plaza Design, 211 G St., in Old Town, Eureka! I’ll be there from 6-9pm wearing a traditional Mongol del and boots.

And for those of you who can’t seen the show in person, I’ve created a new Page on my blog and posted most of the paintings there. Just click the show title at the top.