The Business of Art

Adventures In Social Media- 10 Sites I Use And One That I Don’t (At Least For Now)

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The-Recliners-#2-Polar-Bear600I was at 30,000 ft when the global economy melted down. I don’t think there’s a connection, but the truth is that everything was fine when I left for my late summer/early fall 2008 trip to Mongolia and by the time I landed about five weeks later in San Francisco everything, well, wasn’t. With a vengeance.

My plan had been to send out packets to galleries over the winter but, knowing there was likely to be a shakeout with some to many going out of business, that didn’t seem like a smart move. What to do? What to do? I needed to keep some career momentum going without spending a lot (read “any, if possible”) money.

Social media to the rescue. I had already started this blog, but decided to join Facebook and Twitter, then also added LinkedIn. I wasn’t sure how beneficial any or all of this would be, but they existed, they were free and it seemed to be a direction the online world was heading.
It’s been four years now. All the original sites are still going strong and others have come along, some of which I’ve tried and dropped, some of which I’ve added to the mix.

'Shrooms- iPhone photo processed with Camera Awesome using FX and a frame
‘Shrooms- iPhone photo processed with Camera Awesome using FX and a frame

I’ve been reviewing my social media choices in light of Instagram’s Terms of Service face plant earlier this week. I had downloaded the app some time ago, did one photo, Facebook bought them and I quit using it. Then I recently connected with a young journalist, Faine Greenwood, who works for the GlobalPost news site. They pay her to post photos and she uses Instagram to give them a little special visual omph. Hum, I thought. Maybe I ought to take another look, so I did. And was impressed by the social media aspect they had evolved while I was away.

I reinstalled the app and started to post some images and familiarize myself with how to best use them. Then came the announcement a few days ago of their new Terms of Service (TOS). Suffice to say they were completely unacceptable and outrageous. Life is too short to worry about what idiotic thing they/Facebook will do to try to monetize the site. They could just try charging their users and providing value, but that option seems to have completely escaped Zuckerberg. There’s plenty out there about it on the web, so a google of “Instagram TOS” will probably unearth far more links than you have any interest in reading. But do check it out. And see the note and link below.

Upshot was that I deleted my account and the apps. Now I wanted to find another photo tweaking app and also a way to use them on some kind of social media platform. This led me to….taking a look all the social media I use and what kind of synergy I can create between them because that is one of the truly powerful changes in the off-line vs. the online world- the connections that can be made (there’s a reason why it’s called the “web”).

I ended up downloading a photo effects app called Camera Awesome to both my iPad and iPhone. I love it, but it doesn’t have a social component. I had been hearing some good things about Flickr, which I’d also quit over a year ago because I was suspicious of how difficult they made it to delete an image. But I heard that it had been greatly improved across the board. And, of course, they are already owned by a mega tech company, Yahoo who has, so far, never stumbled into any of the mallet-headed mistakes that some of the others have. And they really can’t afford to make anyone unhappy at this point.

So I looked at Flickr and saw that they’ve added all kinds of image controls. I found that, in fact, my images from before had been “archived” not deleted. Argh. But this time when I deleted one, I got a message in red saying that it was truly gone. So clearly they made a needed change from the sneaky thing they were doing before.

Then I took another look at Tumblr, which had fallen by the blogging wayside for me due to time and not being really sure what benefit I was getting. Now, since it’s an image-centric platform with a lot of creative people using it, it’s the perfect place to post my Camera Awesome enhanced images, which currently includes both actual photos and images of my iPad art.

Note (12pm, Dec. 21): it appears that Instagram has gone back to its previous Terms of Service with all kinds of statements about how the new one didn’t really say what it clearly did and some other “dog ate my homework” excuses. I don’t regret deleting my account because I wanted them to know there was a consequence, even though I wasn’t even a minnow in their quite large pond. I might start there again. Stay tuned.

Mongol Horse- iPad drawing processed with Camera Awesome using a filter and frame
Mongol Horse- iPad drawing processed with Camera Awesome using a filter and frame

So here’s my current list of the social media sites I use, along with the benefits I feel I get from them.

1. WordPress blog– I chose WP over Google’s Blogger because it was much more sophisticated in how it does things, at least at the time, and I didn’t really want to be more involved with a big company like Google than necessary. Their support is quite good, both written and through email. I’ve been able to customize my choice of theme to my liking and the new media uploading and display function is a big improvement over what they had before. I faithfully blog twice a week, unless I simply cannot due to travel or illness. That frequency feels about right to me for what I blog about: Mongolia on Mondays and everything else on Fridays. It has become invaluable to me as a repository to link to for all kinds of content about what I do. Write it once, link to it forever. What’s not to like? https://foxstudio.wordpress.com/

2. Facebook– What can I say? It’s a love-hate relationship shared by tens of millions. I have valuable and valued connections that I wouldn’t have any other way, but the stuff they do behind the scenes drives me crazy. I’m hanging in for now, but if they really start to insert video ads with sound into my newsfeed and I can’t block them, then I’ll be open to picking up my toys and moving to another sandbox. In the meantime, Christine Lin, a writer for The Epoch Times, left a message through my public page a few weeks ago, requesting an interview. We spoke on the phone for an hour, which resulted in a 1500 word story, “American Artist Susan Fox Paints Genghis Khan’s Mongolia” that appeared in all their English language editions in both print and online versions. The latter included six images of my paintings.

This is the link to my public page. I reserve my private page for family and close friends. Please “Like” this page for all my art news: https://www.facebook.com/SusanFoxArt

3. Twitter– Clearly valuable. Clearly and equally has serious time-suck potential, but cannot be ignored if one is serious about social media. Answer? Auto-post from other sites I use and check in at least once a week to see what’s up. It’s the site that is most connected to all my other sites. I should probably look into one of the utilities that lets one queue up and schedule tweets. Ah, something to add on the app that is my bonus item below. https://twitter.com/s_fox

4. LinkedIn– Focused on professional networking, but has a lot of artists and other art professionals on it. Hadn’t been using it or going to it much except to post the latest book I was reading. Entries with links to my blog posts show up there automatically, so there is always fresh content, which is important on any social media site. I recently started to go through the suggested connection list and found an American journalist who had written part of her information in Mongolian cyrilic, which got my attention. Within a day or so after connecting, Allyson Seaborn, who is an editor for the UB Post, wrote to me asking if she could interview me for a feature, which we did via email. You must have an account to view my profile, but here’s the link to the LinkedIn home page. http://www.linkedin.com/home?trk=hb_tab_home_top

5. Pinterest– This was 2012’s social media darling and as a visual artist I had to check out a social media platform that was all about…images. I like it although I’m not sure what its best use will be for me yet. It’s definitely eye candy to visit and there are a lot of artists using it. It is also possible and quite easy to offer things for sale, like paintings and prints. This is the one that seems to be the most demanding as far as keeping the new content coming due to the high volume of pins. http://pinterest.com/foxstudio/

6. Tumblr– It’s a quick and easy to use blogging platform, much simpler than say, WordPress. It’s also very image-centric, but in a different way than Pinterest. I’ve seen very little of this kind of longer post. It could be a perfect way for someone to try out blogging since it’s very simple and straightforward to post text, images and video. There are a wide range of bloggers from artists like me to institutions like the American Museum of Natural History to typographers, photographers, book sellers, musicians and writers. As I said above, it’s the perfect platform for my “enhanced” images. http://www.tumblr.com/blog/beyondtheredwoodcurtain

7. Flickr– I’m back on the site after a long hiatus. I like what they’ve done about protecting user’s rights. You can reserve all rights or post under a Creative Commons license. They also have an agreement with Getty Images, under which Getty can invite you to sell image rights to them, so there is a potential, and attractive, revenue stream there. I will definitely be hoping to take advantage of that with some of the 60,000 images I’ve shot in seven trips to Mongolia, plus two trips to Kenya and some to Yellowstone. Heck, I’ve got great shots from right here in Humboldt County. http://www.flickr.com/photos/susanfoxart/

8. YouTube– I’m personally just not that into video, except for Mongol music videos and Henri, Le Chat Noir, but that clearly puts me in a minority position. I’ve got a lot of great footage from my last trip to Mongolia and would also like to post painting demos. All I need is that eighth day the Beatles sang about. But, like Twitter, YouTube is too popular to ignore and I don’t intend to. http://www.youtube.com/user/MsReynard?feature=mhee

9. Constant Contact– The days of mailing out “real” newsletters are over. Sites like Constant Contact are a BIG improvement. While not strictly “social media’, you can’t beat being able to send news directly to people who you know are interested in what you’re doing. And you know that because they choose to continue to get your newsletter. Opting out is only a click away. With snail mail, you never knew for sure if you were wasting time and postage. This one I do pay for since my newsletters are image-intensive, requiring me to pay for the necessary storage capacity. There are other good options out there like Mail Chimp, but Constant Contact was the first out the gate and they have given me no reason to go elsewhere.  http://www.constantcontact.com/index.jsp

UPDATE 1-15-13: 10. Google+- As you can see below, when I originally wrote this post, I wasn’t using Google+, but that has changed. It dawned on me that, having acquired over 1000 people who had liked what I had posted enough to put me in their circles, that Google+ isn’t about socializing for me, it’s feeding content about me and my work to all those people who have indicated an interest. So I don’t really look at the news feed much, if at all, but I post all my blog links and anything else I’ve been putting on other sites.

Some of you may have noticed that Google+ is missing. I have a presence there, but I find it pretty useless and only check it once or twice a month. I really dislike the interface, hardly anyone I know is on it and there seem to be a lot of people, including artists, who are using it purely for marketing, which is a bore. Google+ is not a threat to Facebook at this point.

So now having looked all these sites over, I’m going to make a graph of which ones are connected and which aren’t and see how best to create the optimum synergy between them. Then I can just kick back and, as the spider-in-chief, survey my wonderful web.

BONUS APP!- Priorities, the best organizing, list-making app for the Apple world that I’ve found. Good user interface, pretty colors, highly customizable, connects to iCal, the Apple calendar app. I plan to start using it to track my social media “schedule”. It syncs on all my devices…iPhone, iPad, MacBook Pro and iMac through their website. http://handcarvedcode.com/apps/priorities/

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.

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!

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.

Technical Difficulties: Aperture Down And Out

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My studio work area

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.

3 Things You Should Know About Marketing Your Art + Some Resources

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Fielwork is an important part of my work and it gives me great stories to tell, like getting to sketch this endangered Nene goose on the Big Island of Hawaii. People want to know how and why artists do what they do.

1. Ya gotta have a plan. A marketing plan. The process of creating one will tell you who your potential buyers are and how to reach them. It will also help you sort through all the options, opportunities and possibilities to figure out what makes the most sense for what you do and where you live.

All ready for North Coast Open Studios!

ACTION: Check out Art Biz Coach. Buy the book, take one of the classes, subscribe to her mailings. She knows what she’s talking about.

2. Time to stop whining about how you don’t want to spend time at the computer. Unless you have a Marketing Manager, it’s a hat you have to wear. And the ring you must toss it into is the internet. The good news is that doing so is, in fact, more a matter of time than money.

These days, at the very least, you must have (and use and update as needed):

– A website because you can’t be a professional artist without one and it makes your work globally available 24/7/365

– A Facebook “fan” page because there are over 800 million members who are potential fans

– A LinkedIn account because professional connections count. A lot.

– A newsletter using a service like Constant Contact, which will also be a place to maintain your mailing list. You don’t have a mailing list? See Action item no. !.

Also to put into the mix: a blog (I use WordPress. Lots of artists also use Blogger), Twitter, Google+

My work set-up. Since I use my iMac to view my images, it's also handy for doing quick marketing tasks when I take a break. But I make sure I get my painting time in every week.

ACTION: Come join fellow artist, Becky Joy, and I over at our new Facebook Page “Artist Marketing Tips That Really Work!”. We both use social media for our main marketing activities and we’ll be happy to answer your questions or find someone who can.

3. Believe in yourself. It’s a privilege to be an artist. It’s an amazing feeling of validation when someone buys your work. But you have to keep going- improving and learning no matter what. You need to be able to continue to grow as an artist and nurture your talent. And YOU CAN DO IT!

On location at Torrey Lake during a Susan K. Black Foundation workshop

ACTION: Take a workshop or a class, try a new media, work on something you’ve been stuck on (I’m going to be working on painting water).  I’ve been to the Susan K. Black Foundation annual workshop a number of times and can’t recommend it too highly.

Finally, a lot of people think that artists are magical creatures, kind of like unicorns, and what we do is the result of a gift we’re born with. There’s some truth in that, but working artists know that being the best artist you can be is WORK. The best work in the world.