On The Move

You don't want to see what's below this photo and the rest of the room. Yet, anyway. I'm workin' on it. It's taken the last couple days to get this far, having had to unearth parts of the room not seen since 2005.

See, I tend to layer. That's my organization scheme. It can't be understood at all because it's simply chronologically stacked. I only know where things are because I put them there, not because they belong where they are. Drives my wife nuts.

Now, we're moving towards moving. I need to make my art room functional yet navigable. It has to look like someone might be able to get something accomplished in the space. So the shelves had to be consolidated, organized and nicely displayed. The desk on which my mini painting easel rests is almost bare too, which make me a bit nervous, but I think I'll be ok. The room echoes a bit too.

I also didn't have any of my paintings up on the wall until today. The albums visible on the shelves are all my painted pieces. I had the ones from this show still framed so I hung 12 of them. I've added Buy Now buttons on the previous blog posts featuring those paintings that are still available. PayPal lets me track inventory now so I can create individual buttons that will only let one purchase occur. It'll be easier and faster for people visiting this blog to buy ones they like.

Brian Clark bought 4 that had been in that dead rocker show and just received them today. He picked up Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Kurt Cobain. I don't name people who buy my work often, but Brian's just been so cool. His site helped me early on with getting going on this blog and his sarcastic comments on this blog caught my attention. Now on Twitter he's been very supportive and has shown his awesome taste in music. He loves "Fight Club", Mitch Hedburg and a bunch of other bits of human creativity that rock as well.

I directly asked him for his marketing advice recently and his answer will be in the form of a post about me! He wanted to wait until he got his paintings. So I'm looking forward to learning publicly what he would say to a guy like me. Wait, I'm a guy like me! Hehe, cool. I'll link to it, rest assured.

Or don't rest. Keep moving! I gotta go work more on my artroom while maintaining my inner

peace.

Don't Compromise Yourself [EC]

You're all you've got. Janis said so.

It all depends on one's authentic intent. If I were setting out to sell my work so that it could be used and reproduced in other contexts, then great. I've got nothing against doing art for graphic design. It's just that that isn't why I'm creating Vinyl Art.

Vinyl Art pieces are original portraits of musicians and entertainers handpainted with acrylic on vinyl recordings of the subject. Their purpose is to celebrate our shared love of music. Each one is a unique expression, a piece of me, that hopefully will connect people with the music and culture they love.

To that end, I've also on several occasions tied my art to charity, including this piece. It is painted on an album given to me in trade. For the albums I received in that trade, I've decided to give $100 of the $175 for a framed piece to a charity of the buyer's choice. I love this idea, getting to give to charity and linking my art with that act of humanity.

See, that's my ultimate goal: uplifting humanity, making the world a better place. This art is my contribution, my way that I best know to be creative, productive. I won't compromise my art or myself.

Peace.

Not Destined To Make Old Bones

I was watching the VH1 rockDoc about The Who and heard it put that way about Keith Moon. Of course there are a lot of people who've listed musicians who've "lived fast and died hard" or however it's put. And of course there are more than those I've included in mine. But these are the creative souls whose art impacted my sense of my culture the most. They had a raw passion for living Life. I don't mean to glorify their behavior, just to note, to list, in no particular order, those brilliant fires that went out "early":

Keith Moon

Jim Morrison

Jimi Hendrix

Janis Joplin

Sid Vicious

Kurt Cobain

Shannon Hoon

John Bonham

Nick Drake

Bradley Nowell

Layne Staley

Gram Parsons

It's musicians like these and the fans thereof that make me want to do what I do.

Peace.

Jammin' For Primitive Kool

Painting up a storm for the show. Don't have much to say today other than I'm curious why my blog ranking jumped so much yesterday. I wish readers would leave me comments. Let me know how you found me or start up a dialog. Something. Anything. Also, there are more examples in my online gallery if you want to:

CHECK OUT MY WEBSITE AT: http://www.vinylart.info/

For now back to painting! Woohoo!

The Kings

I'm starting to get some really good feedback from the exposure started by Josh Spear! It's exciting to have some genuine interest coming from online! Primitive Kool in San Diego, CA received the blues portraits and should have them up soon. Janis is off to SoCal as a commission. How do you think it turned out?

The Kings of Leon were excellent at the Marquee last night. Their "show" is getting more exciting and they rocked it! Such good music, so talented. Great venue too. I would highly recommend it for Phoenix area concert-goers. The only thing about the place is the perhaps overly high-strung security. It's about like the airport, just without the actual metal detector! I don't understand the need, just not the level to which they take it. Once inside though, it's sweet.

I haven't been to an overwhelming number of concerts. I only started going with my wife when she showed me bootlegs of Black Crowes shows she'd been to as a teenager. We've seen some pretty nice ones. We're making it a priority and like planning trips around shows. The best so far for me was seeing the Crowes reunite in Atlanta. We could see the tour bus from the window of our hotel room! Beautiful city and fun venue, The Tabernacle. We also just saw Marc Ford at the Rhythm Room here in Phoenix. A little dive club, we got to sit stage left right in front of him! Sweet merciful crap, that was incredible seeing him jam for like over 3 hours.

What's your most recent concert and how did it rank with others you've seen? I wish I had been around during the 60's to see some of the people I've painted:

CHECK OUT MY WEBSITE AT: WWW.VINYLART.INFO

Now where's that Otis Redding record...