As the year ends

I realized making blog posts is not a habit of mine. Go ahead, click on "Next Blog" and see when the last day a post was made. I'm not alone. We all have good intentions. Most of us fail. This blog was supposed to be a recap of my artistic ventures. I just don't think about posting every time I paint or have a creative thought. More than likely I'll videotape my antics and post to my YouTube Channel. Hey, I enjoy writing, it's just with work and things, this is not my default method to communicate online. Part of me thinks "who cares anyway?" Most don't.

I did recently complete a pastel painting. Of course, Blogger doesn't allow uploads from your local drive, and I didn't take a picture with my Android phone and it resides nowhere else online, so at this exact moment I can't post it. Ugh.

I do have some goals set for next year. No it's not buying Eric Rhodes Artist Boot Camp DVD, but it does sound interesting. And I do have the money. But I have to ask myself, how serious do I take myself with respect to art? Shit, I just started a new full time job. This is my focus. Three years to retirement...I hope. Then I can paint all I want...I hope. If I'm lucky, I'll double my blog posts from this year. And that's good enough for me.

The first painting of 2013 ends with a sale

As the year comes to a close I was wondering how many pieces of art I created this year. I don't keep very good records by month/year but I do have a pretty good idea. Sure, I can go through the dozens....185 to be exact...paintings that pile up in my studio and I'll remember what I did this year.

I had goals for my art, many were hit, some not. Art is not my sole source of income. Thank God, because I would epitomize the starving artist label. Again, I don't create art solely for making money. It's nice, believe me, when someone purchases one of my pieces. Two galleries I exhibited in closed, so I lost local exposure. I've done nothing to get new gallery representation. But, that's okay.

So what about the art? Let's start with a piece, two to be exact, that just sold to a buyer in New Jersey. He happens to be an artist too, and saw my bit on YouTube. First the plein air video. I did it during Christmas break 2012, about a year ago.


I liked the scene enough that I decided to make a bigger version back in the studio. That video is here.

24x36" Oil "December Chill" sits framed on my dining room wall. The cool thing about this one is the scene is literally less than a mile from my house. Sometimes I drive around for hours looking for a place to paint plein air. This was the painting that started out my 2013.

Europe

I was lucky enough to go on a two week European vacation this September with my wife. It was one of the best trips I've ever been on. Paris; Cinque Terre, Venice, Florence, and Rome. So many sights. So much art. And so many photos. I think I took about 1500 pix. Here's a small sample.

Europe is so much different than the US in that they save buildings. No tear-downs and build a new subdivision or some high rise office building or another strip mall. Just real cool, superbly built, architecturally stimulating, and in many cases, dramatic buildings. Oh, they're really old.

Open Canvas 2013

So long between posts. So what? Art. Created live at Open Canvas. All I could manage is a quick video showing what I did. Enjoy.

Door County Plein Air

Dodging rain drops, Saturday morning the skies cleared long enough for many dozens of artists to descend on Fish Creek in Door County Wisconsin for their annual quick paint plein air event. Two hours of frenzied painting culminated with about 70 pieces of "amateur" art along with 40 works from the invited artist list. Here's a couple of pieces, starting with my own. In my mind, this one didn't work, but my number one goal was to have fun. Hope to be back next year.

Michael Pintar, artist

Gray day is a perfect day to paint outside

It's a couple days after Christmas. I'm still looking for a job. It's gray outside. I haven't seriously painted in several weeks. Hello...brain...tell this body to get off it's butt and do something...like paint.

So I know I have to paint more from life. But, it's winter. It's cold. It's ugly out. Isn't it? As a matter of fact, I love snow. It's the cold that I really could live without. I enjoy a big snowstorm. And when the snow is wet and sticks to everything, it's really a beautiful sight. Guess what it did just before Christmas? It snowed. Wet snow. It hasn't melted down and there's a painting waiting for me somewhere.

Okay, make a decision: I'm going to go paint outside. Ya know, plein air style. And I know just where I'm going to go because I scoped this spot out earlier yesterday, a whopping mile from my house. The resulting plein air trip produced a nice little study of snow, trees and a winding creek with fallen trees. It was a beautiful scene. The study has got me thinking about a full size studio version.

But for now, here's the video I put together as I trampled through a field on a perfect neutral gray day to do a little painting.

Digital Crash

What a cluster: Hard drive on my laptop died with no chance for data recovery. I should say, the cost to take the drive to a clean room with a 50/50 chance of total recovery would cost more than the laptop is worth. But what is the data worth? More than that piece of crap Seagate drive that went belly up after just two years. To make it really bad, my lazy back-up two months ago didn't get all my data. So, 2 years worth of reference photos, family vacations, special moments, etc....gone. Forever. All my high rez photos of artwork are gone. Of the pieces that sold, it's not a big deal, but it's still a shitty deal. No one else to blame but myself. And that sucks.

NOTE TO SELF- purchase some sort of cloud-based backup package and/or become very regular in backing up your computer.