Isalos Fine Art

I'm reporting to you live from the Winter Festival... just a quick update before I get back to festing. The Healthy Island Project organized the festival, the first ever, so we'd have something going on in January, and I suppose to celebrate winter rather than sit around complaining about it. It began last night with a chili cook-off at the Community Center, which coincided with some line dancing, and then a bonfire outside by the skating rink. It was just cold enough to skate, but by this morning, temperatures were soaring into the forties. I don't know if I should be disappointed that it isn't more wintery for the festival, or if I should just appreciate the nice weather. I'll just appreciate the weather, I guess, although we kind-of committed to staying open and sticking around, as part of the festival, so we're stuck inside.

Our contribution, aside from just being our usual, wonderful selves and being open, is to set out coffee and cookies and other goodies, as we like to do from time to time. We also thought the kids might like to make paper snowflakes, so we've got a snowflake-cutting station set-up. We're almost into our fourth hour, and the visitor count so far is... lets see, uh... one. John Steed, on his way to work at the Opera House (where they're showing "Narnia") stopped in for the treats, but declined the snowflake workshop.

We've been  having fun though, drinking way too much coffee and filling our windows with snowflakes so that the gallery now looks a bit like an Elementary School. Tonight there's a couple of bands playing  at the Opera House. We'll take the seats out so there will be plenty of room to dance, and it ought to be a good time.

More statistics:

Potlucks this week: 1

Cars seen today on Main St. with out-of-state plates: 2

Paper snowflakes hanging in our  window so far: 11

Current outside temperature: 48 degrees F. 

Comments about my comparison of Michelangelo's Pieta to a painting of a dog collar: 0

Price of all Winter Festival events: free

Wow, more visitors just coming in, bringing the total up to 3. 

Despite my anxiety about social events taking-over my life, I had a good time at the potluck last night. I had the privlege of seeing someone’s beautiful home, eating some truly great food, and talking  with people (some who are practically neighbors) who I’d never met before. And despite our usual resolve to not be the last to leave, well, we were the last to leave, so I guess we must have been having fun.

Someone asked me who reads my blog, and I could only answer that I didn’t know. “A few people locally,” I said,  since friends occasionally make some reference to something I wrote about. “Maybe a customer or two,” I continued, since I sometimes get feedback to the art I post on here or write about. Beyond that, though, I had to admit that I didn’t know, and that I really didn’t worry about it.

Maybe because we were at a Chamber of Commerce event, the intent of the question was to find how writing a blog helps my business. I’ve seen this thread come up repeatedly on the Wet Canvas forum. Artists consider keeping a blog because they feel it gives them exposure. Maybe they’re part of a network, like eblogger, and it brings random people to their blog, and their website. I’ve skimmed through these blog sites, but my experience usually ends-up a bit like pointing the remote at the television, hoping that out of the nine zillion channels, there might be something you want to watch.

Occasionally though, I find something truly interesting, something that isn’t just a glorified on-line advertisement. Some people (it appears to me) seem to have started with the question “what can I sell on-line?” and turned to art rather than being an artist first, and then trying to find a way to market it. For most of these artists, my suspicion is that their blogs are not responisble for a lot of business.

For some artists though, the mere practice of writing in a blog, or even just posting new artwork, is reward enough. I’ve often felt that my favorite artists, my favorite writers, are as committed to the process as they are the end product. Art is as much a way of life as it is a living. A blog, especially if it is frequently-tended, is a perfect way to express this process.

A few such blogs have held my interest over time, so that I check-in with them fairly frequently. One is Duane Keiser’s “A Painting a Day” in which he posts the postcard-size paintings he does every day. Most of his small paintings focus on the quiet details of day to day existence, expressing universal truths (in my humble opinion) through subtle glimpses.

I don’t know much about Keiser, but when he posts paintings of candies or other food during the holidays, I imagine him with his family, going off to find some time alone so he can paint. Whether he’s painting landscape-influenced details from New Mexico, the quality of light on his windowsill, or a matchbook, it all begins to have an honest, narrative quality. He never includes verbal descriptions in his daily blog, so these paintings take on a voice of their own. Recently, when he posted “Muddy,” a painting of a dog collar with  its tags, still buckled in the circle it had previously made around the dog’s neck, it made me smile, until I remembered returning from the vet for the last time, carrying the vacant collar my dog had worn.

Maybe the strong feeling the painting inspired was caused largely by association, an association that I hope isn’t universal (but of course, it is) but still, it made me feel something, which is not a statement I could make about most art that I see. This one hit me right in the gut, about as strongly and unexpectedly as Michelangelo’s Pieta hit me when I stood before it in the Vatican. In the simplest terms, Pieta is about a mother losing her son (okay, I know, it’s Mary and Jesus, but that was academic to me when I saw it). I know, I’m comparing a painting of a dog collar (which I don’t even know if I’m interpreting correctly) with a sculpture of the son of God. So be it.

If there’s a point to this, I think it is that Duane Keiser arrived at that painting through his daily process of making art, which is tied-into his daily blog. Without that daily process, he may never have arrived at that painting. So all marketing and business aside (and Keiser does a very good business from his blog) the process- the blog, is its own reward, which I think I explained not very well at dinner last night by saying “I don’t worry about who reads it; I just do it because I want to.”

Thanks for all the emails and phone calls; I should have reported that the storm has passed and everything is fine here; we even have electricity. We kind of liked the glow of lamp and candlelight, as well as the absence of pre-recorded sounds and sights to keep us entertained. Admittedly, I don't mind a break from the computer every once in awhile as well. The morning after the storm, the skies were amazingly clear, and even today, it's so warm out that you hate to spend too much time indoors. This actually threatens our productivity; we need some occasional lousy weather so we'll stay put and get some work done... but not so lousy that we have to go out and experience first-hand the thrill of wind and waves.

Stonington Harbor this morning. R Daugherty photo 

Another thing that cuts into our productivity is that it is potluck and meeting season. Tonight is our third potluck in a row. Earlier in the week, we were beset with meetings... and some of the meetings are potlucks, so half-way through the day you start wondering what to bring. We've actually had a few visitors to the gallery lately, and amazingly, they seem to be under the impression that there's hardly any people around here, that it's remote and that we must have a difficult time entertaining ourselves. This is not the case. I'm feeling like I need to go somewhere else for a break, and so we can get some of our own work done. On the other hand, I'm kind of hungry, and we've got a pot luck to get to.

It's been blowing today, and I thought I'd fire-off this blog before the electricity goes off again. We had the wind right out of the Southeast- blowing straight in to the harbor. This morning the weather report predicted gusts up to 60 mph. This afternoon they'd upped it to 75. Fortunately, it's not too cold, with the temperature hovering around forty. Next door, the vinyl siding was peeling off the Town Hall (I knew there had to be a practical reason to not like the stuff) and I had to take our sign down when it became partially detached and started banging against the building.

The real action though, was in the harbor. Skiffs were torn loose from the dock, while others were rescued and hauled out of the water. We walked and drove around the waterfront, joining fishermen who sat in idling pick-up trucks watching the harbor with a mix of excitement and anxiety for the welfare of their boats. By late afternoon, at least one lobster boat had sunk, kept barely afloat by the air pocket in its bow. Keep in mind that this is a protected harbor, home to a large fishing fleet, with several islands between us and the open ocean.

Rebecca took quite a few pictures, but it is difficult to really capture the feel of the storm in a static image. Her digital camera was another casualty of the storm, incapacitated after numerous drenchings by rogue waves breaking over the seawall. And by late afternoon, when the waves were biggest, she resorted to film. After the electricity came back on, and the camera spent a little time in the toaster oven, it's almost back to normal. 

My, how time flies.

Traffic through the gallery lately isn't exactly in the 'stampede' category. There have been a few artists, and I guess we shouldn't really mention the UPS or FedEx guys, since they were making deliveries. This makes it easy, when we have a stunning, warm and sunny day, to put the "we're outta here" sign up on the door and take off to have some fun. We had such a day last week, and found ourselves over on Mount Desert Island. It's only an hour and a half away (by car) but the last time I was there... well, it was in a different century. We went to the beach, walked in the sand, looked at a few boats and basically did the things tourists do. For the most part, the gallery scene was more closed-down than we are here. We looked into a few windows where the closed signs gave New York phone numbers. One gallery was open one day a week, and we were there at the right time. I felt sort of sorry for those gallery people, stuck there on the nicest day of the year (so far) but it was nice to look at some art.

We watched the sun set from the Bass Harbor Head Lighthouse. Here's probably one of the few times you'll see a picture of a lighthouse on this website:

                Rebecca Daugherty photo 

Over the weekend I went down to Massachusetts, where I saw the Winslow Homer show at the Clark Institute in Williamstown. I enjoyed the show, but it was a lot of driving to see the ten oil paintings and handful of watercolors. The exhibit included engravings from a number of newspapers as well, which was interesting, but could have been viewed just as well in a book. Admittedly, I've become so accustomed to looking at art from the couch with my feet up on the coffee table, that angling for a gander in a crowded museum makes any art more of a challenge to appreciate.

Stopping off at the Williams College art museum was an added bonus, and a refreshing look at some modern and contemporary art. My favorite painting of the weekend though, was the one I saw when I got home. Rebecca had stayed here to keep the gallery open while she worked on her newest painting. It's still in the tweaking phase, and will probably be going off to another gallery, so I can't show it here just yet. Instead, I'll treat you to a photo of Wendell with Farrell Ruppert's forged-steel sculpture,  Intension.