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I haven’t posted in a long time. But I haven’t been doing nothin’. Lemme ’splain.

First, I decided to convert my office into my studio. No easy feat. I have boxes packed and bookshelves emptied, I’ve got to paint them black to match the decor in the room they’re being transplanted into.

I’ve got a metric crap-ton of old paperwork I need to spend an hour shredding. Like the paperwork from our first house we bought back in 2001. I think I’m WAY over the time limit/need for those papers. Etc.

It’s spring in California, so I’ve also been catching up on yard work in my spare time. And there’s a lot of it. When it stops raining, I’ll get on the rest of it.

I also purged a ton of old computer stuff and temporarily turned my office back into a PC fix-it place to help out a friend. If my job ever goes tits up, first thing I’m doing is fixing computers for money. I’m awesomely good at it but I just can’t stand charging people for something that’s so easy and that I love to do. I could if I had to, though.

But, on to art – I’m still taking care of my artsy side by reading 4 art books:

• The Artist’s Life
• The War of Art
• Art and Fear
• The Creative Habit

I also watched about 5 documentaries about art and artists on Netflix (on-demand). I don’t remember what they’re called, but the artists in Manhattan – ugh. What a load of fucking crap. They all complained that they weren’t making money, and I’m not surprised: stuck with the mentality that real art is for love only, not money; that your fans will find you, not the other way around; that you must never give in to “evil” corporations (seriously, are they all fucking retarded?); that you MUST get into a NY gallery or you’re nothing…

Basically, the documentaries I watched were 100% opposite of what I actually believe about art. No, it doesn’t always have to be a scathing assessment of our modern lives in order to be good. No, squiggly ink lines that happen to look like things don’t magically become a thesis on the human condition. No, your shit doesn’t sell not because the art world is snooty, it’s precisely because YOU are snooty.

I guess my pragmatic, geeky side has taken over what I think of art. I think art is something you make intentionally, except when you don’t. I think art is an idea, but can also be just a fucking apple in a fucking cup. So fucking what? Art can be something you find attractive. Art can be new horizons. Art can be the tried and true. Art is whatever the fuck you want to paint.

Either way, you’re not a pro unless you can paint all the time and can sell it. 80% of success is showing up. Most of the artists in the documentaries barely showed up. Or were total asshats when the did show up. Or had attitudes like primadonnas.

I guess I’m not a NY art scene kinda guy.

I think Hazel Dooney has it right – do your own thing, do the guerilla marketing, be true to yourself, show and sell your work, show up even when it’s hard, and be you. Always be you. Don’t let “them” tell you that you’re wrong for being you. Fuck “them.” Fuck them right in their tight little cornholes. Technology has changed the world. Adapt or go extinct.

Okay, off the pedestal for now.

“you could do anything

you could do anything

you could do anything

you could do anything”

So goes the lyrics from Nirvana’s “Blew,” a great song from the Bleach album.

And so spot-on.

Forgive me as I pontificate.

I’ve been waxing nostalgic a bit lately. As I come back from a business trip and, once again, play “fix it” guy for a whole host of stuff in the corporate supply chain world, I get stressed out and no time for play makes Stevie a dull boy. Or so it’s said. But the important thing, and there IS an important thing, fucker, is that I haven’t had time to finish cleaning my office and turning it into the studio it needs to be.

For you regular followers. And there are exactly ZERO of you, so I’m speaking to myself here, which is par for the course, I never got to finish cleaning out the office. Which I need to do. I heard that the area rug I wanted to use, one that’s stuffed neatly into the rafters of the garage, was never properly cleansed of dog shit. Yes, you read that right. So I need time to steam-clean that puppy because I don’t need oil paints embedded into the Berber, thank you very fucking much.

And I can’t do that while the kids sleep. And work’s been, well, WORK. I’m earning that motherfucking paycheck, I gotta say. And it kinda sucks. I liked having little to do, knowing the gameplan fully in advance, and executing on what’s easy for me but hard for most chumps. I’m feeling a little arrogant tonight, fuck off if you don’t like it.

But I found this cool site where the blog owner has a geographic area selected and you do Google Street View and you paint a random scene somewhere in that geographic area. Pretty tits, huh? Well, yeah, I thought so, too – glad you’re along for the ride, Skippy.

As I was playing with this thing, I started finding all the old places where I used to live. Very nice stroll down memory lane. I really, haphazardly, lazily realized that I really miss New Hampshire. The yards are big, the streets are narrow. The green is so goddamned green. For reference, I’m literally 20′ from my neighbors. Actually, I’m about 12′ from one neighbor on one side. That’s California for ya. I grew up where I was probably 100′ from the nearest neighbor. I couldn’t even *see* the nearest neighbor through the trees. The people across the street were probably about 1000′ feet away or so.

And here I am, just about sitting my cornhole right atop the neighbors. And I really hate it. I REALLY hate it. My wife says that California is a sinking ship. I’m inclined to agree. Only we’re upside down on the mortgage, thanks to irresponsible lending and irresponsible borrowers. Where’s my motherfucking bailout?  Whatever. I don’t really want that. I want my house value to go back up to a reasonable level. 40% drop in value sucks dog nuts. Especially through no fault of my own. The strong Libertarian bent in me really gets fired up about other people fucking me like that. So I’ll shut the yap now.

The POINT of all this rambling, ya see, is that I CAN do anything. I can also find every fucking excuse in the book to rationalize NOT doing anything, too. I’m too smart for my own good, it seems. I’d love to quit my day job and plow full-on into the dark unknown faster ‘n uncle’s day in a whorehouse, but that’s a huge step and scary. And I’m not the kind of person to stop suckling at the corporate teat so readily. Mmm, corpo-milk!

But I know I can do it. I know I can get myself on a painting routine. I know I can get better. I know I can sell enough to live off of it. I know I can leave the cubicle nation. I know I can find a way. I know I can get back to the East Coast and sustain myself. I know I can. because I can do anything. I can do anything. I can do anything. I can do anything.

If you wouldn’t mind I would like it blew
If you wouldn’t mind I would like it loose
If you wouldn’t care I would like to leave
If you wouldn’t mind I would like to breathe

Is there another reason for your stain
Could you believe him when you discussed his stain?
Here is another word that rhymes with shame

You could do anything

(trivia: I sometimes use “stain” as my online identity. Because I think it’s funny. But I heard it here first.)

• “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.” – Stephen King

Same deal with being a painter. Or chef. Or programmer. Or sniveling media darling.

If you want to do it, do it. And when you’re not doing it, learn more about it any way you can.

• “You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.” – Dr. Seuss (Ted Geisel)
• “Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those, who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear, which is inherent in the human condition.” – Graham Greene

Traveling for work. Won’t be able to post any updates. Well, I could post some updates but they’d be meaningless. Well, not really *meaningless,* per se, you know. But I won’t be able to paint for a week. I suppose that’s what I’m saying. I can’t actually paint. And I’ve got a couple of prepared canvases and a b&w value study that, come hell or high water, I’m turning into a finished piece. Damn it all.

Though I’m 100% confident I’ll hit the due date of Jan 31 for the surprise portrait.

I did manage to get most of my office cleaned out, now I’ve got to move the furniture around, repurpose a couple of things, and get an old area rug out of the garage (and steam-clean it), and situate my easel in a good spot in the office. An added benefit is that all my music is in my office, and my monitor is a nice 19″ flat panel (wide screen) so I can use it for reference work.

I got 4 “day light” fluorescent lights in here and it’s bright. Could be brighter, but I’m probably just getting anal retentive about the lighting.

On the bright side (I crack myself up), I did dig out my old Northwood PC (my previous one to the current powerhouse, my quad-core QX9650-based machine, which, admittedly, is aging by modern standards but does all I need and then some), found another Core 2 Duo machine I’d been meaning to put Ubuntu on, and found a really old Pentium III-based machine (no case, though). Don’t know what to do with THAT – though I’m sure it works and I’ve got a 6GB hard drive hanging around for it.

The computer graveyard, for those keeping tally, is down to a remarkable 3 – count ‘em, THREE – PCs, and they all actually work. I don’t even have enough spare parts layin’ about to build another PC. That’s probably the first time in 15 years. Good thing, too, because I need the space for my art stuff. Because I’m really giving up on the career in IT and going back to my first calling – painting.

Okay, I was going to paint tonight but I realized my last self-portrait hadn’t been sprayed with fixative and I didn’t want to lose the under-drawing… so it’s been sprayed and is in the garage drying for the night. Back to painting tomorrow!

Sometimes an idea gets in my head and it will consume me until I unleash it. Until I feed it. Until I soothe the savage beast.

It’s me, of course.

I’ve got lots of ideas. I just don’t write them down. Today, I wrote them down. They’ve left me alone for a while so I think they’re basking in that sweet glow of satisfaction. But the test will be actually painting them. Yes, actually painting them, no matter how awful they come out, and posting the results right here. Shame, world. World, shame. Now that you’re introduced, here’s some prelims to set your peepers to:

This is Not a Stop Sign

Concept: oblique angle photo taken of a stop sign on a really sunny day at noon, with only blue sky showing. Sign is sun bleached and sort of washed out. The sky is vivid noon-day blue. The text and title of the piece is “This is Not a Stop Sign.” Because it isn’t. It’s a painting of a stop sign.

The writing will be white with some dark blue (maybe ivory black) shadowing, selectively, to highlight the letters against the background, as needed.

You Mustn't Say It

“You Mustn’t Say It” is one of those “why the hell did you take a picture of THAT?” pictures I took a while ago. Found it the other day and thought the vibrant colors on this Fisher Price toy would make a great painting against a white, possibly slightly faded background. Why do I take pictures like this? I could tell you, but I mustn’t say it.

I Thought It Was Me

I was watching some of David Lynch’s early works, most notably Alphabet when I was struck with this image in my head. The drawing doesn’t do it justice, but I had to get it down before the inspiration left. So here it is. There will be a broken outline of a skull in white on a solid red background, with me from a photo of me that I’m thinking of, where my arm is around my wife. Only my arm won’t be around my wife and my face will be half black and half white, on a vertical center.

Frustration

“Frustration” is a piece I’ve been laboring over in my mind for a few days now. An experiment in Cyan/Magenta/Yellow and a little graphic design bit. I want this to be the largest canvas I have (probably a 24″ x 30″ canvas board). I might even go out to JoAnn Fabrics and use a 50% off coupon this weekend so I can paint this on a stretched canvas. I’m excited about this one.

The background will be a vivid red, mixed from Cobalt Blue (Cyan) and Rose Madder (Magenta). The stripes will be white. The stripes will have a left-side drop shadow done in pure magenta pigment. I’m considering coloring in the interstitial shapes but, as I went over the painting in my head (I’ve already painted it in my head, you see), I decided that might distract and detract. I’m waffling and it’s oil paint, so I have room to experiment and scrape accordingly.

The lower right-hand blocks will be a play on a corporate logo, abstracted sufficiently. It will also invoke the test pattern you see printed on most commercially printed items (like potato chip bags).

These Are Days
I haven’t abandoned “These Are Days,” I’m just letting it dry a bit more. I don’t want the dark blue/purple mixing with the orange too much or I’ll get a lot of mud. I also want to be able to lay on the lights really thickly, and I’ve found that if the underpainting is a little too wet that I end up wasting a lot of paint. Not a problem on the smaller, 5″ x 7″ paintings, but an issue as I work on larger canvases.

Taking a couple days off
I’m trying to keep up the painting as much as possible (or at least the preliminary work for paintings), and I’m shooting for 3 days/week minimum, preferably 4, no more than 5. I have other commitments and I have other things I’m doing (like documentaries and movies that inspire me – like the David Lynch short films, and books that inspire – I’m reading Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, which is pretty good).

I’d love to do it but I’m too chicken shit. Or is it “too busy?” Or “too lazy?” Or is my early potty training bringing on early-stage psychosis? Mommy.

http://jeffhayesfinearts.blogspot.com/

http://www.dailyartpainters.com/

http://duanekeiser.blogspot.com/

http://carolmarine.blogspot.com/

http://makingamark.blogspot.com/2006/09/stickability-factor.html

http://reviews.ebay.com/Painting-A-Day_W0QQugidZ10000000001813827

http://www.squidoo.com/paintingaday

I got a new sight-size book. It’s about sight-size drawing from casts, which I can’t afford, which I saw on Amazon from some people that didn’t understand the specifics of the sight-size method so they recommended this book.[asa]0980045401[/asa]

It’s a good book, not much on the reading, though. It’s also not QUITE what I thought it would be – I had some people that are doing the Bargue Plates,

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Wellllll…

Okay, the book is good. I recommend it. I need to get off my butt and get to my garage and get it cleaned out and the studio set back up so I can draw again. And I need to find some good places to get casts to do drawings from. I’ll re-review, I suppose, when I get that.

I whole-heartedly recommend Tony Ryder’s book,  The Artists Guide to Figure Drawing, because that book is so amazing. HE is so amazing. I only wish I had taken that path earlier in my life instead of being the practical lout that I am.

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Anyway, finding a good plaster cast is difficult, unless you’re rich. Darren Rousar used a Discobolos cast that seems to retail for nearly $400. Cough!

No, not a new site, more like a relaunch. You see, about 8 months ago, my hosting company borked up my “hustedportraits.com” domain and it was going to some third party, so I reconfigured everything to my other domain, stevehusted.com. However, that’s just a site I wanted to use to ramble about non-art things, and I wanted clarity and continuity of purpose in my art blog…

So I was in a quandary: do I reconfigure hustedportraits.com or do I try to figure out something else? A few weeks after the snafu, which was inconvenient because it happened to coincide with my daughter’s birth and nobody could see all the nice pictures I took, which supremely annoyed me, they got hustedportraits.com back. Whoopsie, our bad! Well, too little, too late. I’m going to let that domain expire, I’m sure some domain squatter will sit on it for a while in hopes that they snatched up real estate they can hawk back at inflated margins. No such luck, sorry, guys.

I decided to put my mind to it this week and I came up with a solution: subdomains. Turns out my host, HostGator (they’re really good other than that snafu), updated their CPanel installation and it’s all snazzy now. So I was browsing around my available options and I had a flash of brilliance: why not just make subdomains?

So I made my gallery point to gallery.stevehusted.com, I made my non-art/Linux/music blog into regular ‘ol stevehusted.com, and I created artist.stevehusted.com, which is what you see now.

I think I like this solution – it simplifies things for me and doesn’t require me to reestablish on a new domain. It DOES give me a fresh Wordpress installation, which I think I’d like to customize more, but not as much as the Tarski theme on the main site (which lost its customizations after upgrading this last time, but it was worth it – it’s a solid theme).

Now I’ll need to redouble my efforts at getting this thing going. I was going to do it in 2005, but my son was born and I spent time with him, and also got 27 credits in a graphic design program at AIU. Then, in 2006, I was going to do more but I got busy with my new job… then in 2007 I went on sabbatical from work, then in 2008 my daughter was born AND I did a very, very busy rotation into factory planning at Intel.

Phew!

Now, however, I think I’m finally settled down with no big work things happening, no school for at least a year (gearing up for the MBA because art is more business than painting/drawing – more on that later), no more kids on the way, so I’m kicking myself in the butt to get this going. I have a couple hundred article topics I’ve readied plus all the goodies that I think of all the time.

My next step is to get my art articles moved over here from the main Wordpress blog, which shouldn’t be too hard because the style and the content are separate so it should be as simply as copy/paste/delete the old.

Ya’ll ready for this?

Not sure why, but a lot of people seem to like this picture. The school assignment was to use Photoshop (I used The Gimp) to colorize a portion of a black and white photo, and then to superimpose another picture on top.

I chose an old man in a hat superimposed with a carnation for a couple of reasons: my grandfather had recently passed and there were carnations at the funeral. Being the first time that someone died that I actually cared about, I was moved to pay tribute in whatever way I could (the image is NOT of my actual grandfather).