Well, it's been a good two months since my last article on this blog, even though I planned to write something every week. Heck, I'm supposed to be semi-retired, with a lot of time to write, yet somehow it never seems to happen as frequently as I would like. But I've been especially busy the last couple weeks, compiling a list of (almost) every painting or other image I've ever done. It hasn't been an easy job. My career began in 1983, so that's 36 years and counting, and as near as I can figure, about 570 paintings, not including tee shirt designs and digital art.
The first couple years I didn't even take photos of many of the paintings I did. It wasn't until 1986 that I got more diligent about photographing each painting. Of course, back then it was all either prints from negatives or slides. I have slides of most of my paintings from 1986 to around 2006, when I switched over to digital photos. In the late 1980s I bought a 4 X 5 camera, a larger format piece of equipment that produced 4 inch by 5 inch transparencies. And when we built our house in 1990, I set up a spot in the basement with good lighting to be my photo studio, where I could hang a painting on the wall, and shoot photos of it with both an SLR and the 4X5 camera using lights and tripod. That worked well for the size paintings I was doing in watercolor, but was a lot more difficult with bigger paintings, greater than 30 inches in one dimension. With paintings that size, I had them professionally shot, produing 8 X 10 inch transparencies, which were often good enough to be usable in making prints of my work.
But I needed to know when each piece was completed for this list, and I didn't always put the date on the slide or transparency. Up until 1994, I always put the year beneath my signature, so at least I could put the year completed on the list for those. And in 1994 I began to keep a detailed record of my work days in a calendar book. I'd put down how many hours I worked on a given painting each day, how many hours I spent developing ideas for paintings, my trips gathering reference material and going to art shows, etc. So from 1994 to 2010, I have a pretty complete record of each painting, how many hours I spent on it, when I completed it, and what size it was. Ah, if only I'd kept that up! For some reason I stopped keeping records like that after 2010. But...as I said, I started taking digital photos of each painting in 2007, and the digital photos have the information of when they were taken embedded in them; it comes up in the metadata in Photoshop Bridge when you click on the painting. So assuming I took the photo soon after completing the painting, that should tell me about when I finished each one. What the digital photo doesn't show, however, is the size of the painting...I have to guess on that or try to remember it.
So as you can imagine, it's been a real sleuthing job to get info on a lot of these paintings, but I'm getting there.
It has been a real stroll down memory lane going through all these painting images. On most, I can remember at least something about the problems and challenges I encountered while trying to depict what the painting shows. On all of them I can remember where the location in the background was or where I got the reference for the subject. I can remember some of the sales of big paintings that happened at art shows, which was always exciting. Or how successful the image was as a print, back in the limited edition print days.
And going through all the images has to make me wonder how significant it all has been--how big a splash I made in the wildlife art world, how many people I've touched with my work, whether or not my paintings will survive long after I die. If selling art is a measure of its significance, I've done pretty well; I've only painted a relative handful of paintings that didn't sell. Many also sold well as prints, and certainly I've had a lot of success with my work being reproduced on various products. I've had one foot in the "fine art" world and the other in the licensing world since about 1991 when I first signed a contract with a tee shirt company.
I think that artists come down in two camps, and sometimes the same artist will come down in both camps at various times. One is that the artist thinks he is really, really good, as good as any other artist. The other is that he's never going to be good enough. I've felt both ways. And looking back over all those paintings, I can easily see that there were plenty of times when I wasn't as good as I thought I was, and plenty of other times when I was better than I thought I was. There are early paintings that I'm just as proud of as anything I've ever done, and others where I wonder what I was thinking in believing that they were any good. I've always found it interesting that I can critique other artists' works and see all the things they did wrong or right, but sometimes can't critique my own the same way, until years later when I see the image with fresh eyes. I've always found it interesting when I visit a one of my collector's house and see some of my paintings after a number of years have passed. Sometimes it's a real shock that the painting was better than I ever remember it being, and other times I wish I could rip it down off the wall, but I have to say the times I'm pleasantly surprised happen more often than the times when I'm not.
I also find it interesting in seeing again the variety of subject matter I've done over the years. I tend to gravitate toward big game, cats, wolves and other canids, and fish. But I've done plenty of other critters, and some of those paintings have been my most successful--and fun. A painting of warthogs, or a baby hyena, for instance.
I guess I'm rather proud of what I've accomplished over the years. But I would be remiss if I didn't make note of the fact that my career has never been mine alone. My wife Mary has been with me the whole way, and indeed I could never have done much without her. She quit her nursing as soon as it became obvious that I could make a living painting, but only if she did all the things I wasn't good at or didn't have time for, and that includes nearly all the business end of it. Marketing, advertising, shipping, bookkeeping, invoicing, and talking on the phone or corresponding with everybody we have dealt with. She often took my paintings to art shows and sold them while I stayed home and painted more of them. We both spent long, long hours in the framing room in the basement, framing prints and originals for the shows or to send to galleries. Back in the 1980s and up until the late 1990s, we worked at anywhere from a dozen to nearly 3 dozen shows a year. We both went to all the major shows, but Mary often did smaller shows on her own. She even set up my work at a kiosk in a busy shopping mall one Christmas season, driving the 60 miles from home to the mall every morning and staying until it closed. That happened to be one of the coldest, iciest Decembers on record, and there were many days when I was worried sick about her driving under those conditions.
We often framed 30 to 40 prints for a show, working til after midnight in the week before the show, cutting mats and putting together frames, getting the work ready to show and sell. I would still be painting, trying to get just one more original completed, while Mary was frantically framing. We drove all over the country, from Seattle to New York to Florida to California; there was even one terrific show we did for several years in central Ontario. At the shows, Mary was the salesperson; I'd often paint small originals at the show just to draw people into our booth.
In a very real sense, I couldn't do the things she did; I was just not the kind of person that could talk to people and sell myself. So we made a great team, and still do. I often said that I was the factory worker and she was management. But it was more than that. We bounced ideas off each other, everything from how to market my work to what I should paint next. And she is also an excellent critic, who can point out problems that I don't see in the middle of painting. But even more than that, she has always believed in me; she says that the first time she saw my paintings she knew I was going to be a success. And that is perhaps the greatest gift of all she has given me, to have somebody really believe in you. It has made all the difference. I realized long ago that I paint more to please Mary, to make her proud of me, than for any other reason. Sure, I paint for lots of reasons. I paint because it gives me great satisfaction to accomplish something. Because I love wildlife and wild places and want to share that love. Because I also want to convince people that such critters and places are worth saving. Because I love the accolades I've gotten. Because painting has furnished us with a very good living. But I don't think I'd have had the ambition to excel without Mary. She expects me to excel, and I don't want to disappoint her.
It's often said that artists are driven to create. In my semi-retirement, people have asked me if it is difficult to not paint. They think that an artist never retires. But I've seen plenty of artists who SHOULD have retired, whose paintings suffered in their later years. Yes, I still love to paint and I still think I have paintings to paint and can still paint as well or better than ever. But no, it isn't bothering me to spend months not painting; there are plenty of other creative outlets for me, and plenty of other things to do.
So who knows what the future holds? But I know the past has been a blast!
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