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.

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.

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.

Mongol bokh (wrestling), Baga Gazriin Chuluu, July 2009

By experiencing hardship
You will become experienced
—–

There are thousands of owners for something done right
There is one owner for something done wrong
—-

Chinggis Khan statue, July 2009

If a person tries hard
Destiny will try hard
—-

From a little bit of laziness
Much laziness will come
—-

Young jockeys finish 7km race for 2 year old horses, August 2010

Talk little
Do much

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.

Juvenile vulture, Baga Gazriin Chuluu, July 2010

Species: Cinereous Vulture (Aegypius monachus)

Vulture nest, Ikh Nart, April 2005

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)

Adult and juvenile on nest, near Baga Hairhan Uul, July 2010

Conservation Status: Near Threatened (IUCN Red List)

Nest on the face of Zorgol Uul, July 2011

Habitat Preference: Mountains, rocky uplands, forests

Vulture on nest, Ikh Nart, April 2005

Best places to see cinereous vultures: Ikh Nartiin Chuluu Nature Reserve, Baga Gazriin Chuluu Nature Reserve, but common in many parts of the country.

Vulture at Baga Gazriin Chuluu, July 2009

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.

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.

Ikh Nartiin Chuluu argali ram, April 2005: This big old ram let me follow him around for about half an hour.

I’m starting the New Year with a new series on Mongolian wildlife. These will be short profiles with essential information and interesting links. First up is the animal which brought me to Mongolia in the first place, the argali, now one of my favorite subjects.

Species: Argali (Ovis ammon)

Weight, height and horn length: Argali are the world’s largest mountain sheep. A large ram can weigh as much as 375 lbs (65-170km). They stand from  3-4″ (90-120cm) at the shoulder. The horns can measure up to  65″ (165cm).

Argali rams, Gun-Galuut Nature Reserve, July 2009; I peeked over the ridge (after dragging my oxygen-starved body up a steep slope following my guide) and what should I see...a big group of argali rams, twelve in all.

Conservation Status: Near-threatened (IUCN Red List)

Argali rams, Baga Gazriin Chuluu, July 2009; Same trip as above, but this time the sheep were within sight of the road. I simply stood by the car and took lots of photos of these six beautiful boys

Habitat preference: mountains or large areas of rocky outcroppings in the desert steppe, some open desert; more recently found in mountain steppe (Gun-Galuut Nature Reserve)

Argali rams, Ikh Nartiin Chuluu, August 2010; In all my six trips to Mongolia, going out to see argali every time, this sighting was the jackpot....five rams less than 50 yards away and I had them to myself for at least an hour.

Best Places to see argali: Ikh Nartiin Chuluu Nature Reserve, Gun-Galuut Nature Reserve; They may also be seen at Baga Gazriin Chuluu and Ikh Gazriin Chuluu, both local reserves (no websites)

Argali ram, ewe and lamb, Ikh Nartiin Chuluu, July 2011; Typical sighting of argali up on the rocks.

Interesting facts:

-There are no argali in captivity, neither zoos or reserves. The only place to see them is in their native habitats.

- While the rams do fight it out during the annual rut for mating privileges, otherwise argali don’t have set herds or harems. Who is with who can change through the day. Rams mingle freely with ewes and lambs, form bachelor groups or wander around on their own.

- In July of 2009, I was in the right place and the right time to be the first person to ever photograph an argali swimming a river…the Kherlen Gol, which flows through Gun-Galuut Nature Reserve. It was known that they do it, but since almost all the research on them is done at Ikh Nartiin Chuluu, where there are no rivers, no one had ever actually seen, much less photographed, it.

(Created on my iPad using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro)