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Hiatus

24 June 2010 in personal by David | 4 comments

This site is cur­rently on hia­tus. Please feel free to look around at posts. I’ll also tend to respond to com­ments or emails.

I’ll be back when I have more time. Until then, keep smear­ing col­ored mud on flat surfaces.

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The vision thing

20 February 2010 in personal by David | 18 comments

In order to paint or draw, an artist pretty much needs to be able to see.

Over the past cou­ple of years, I’ve been expe­ri­enc­ing what I con­sid­ered to be nor­mal age-related declines in vision (I’m 46). I’ve had more and more trou­ble read­ing small text. When read­ing for too long, my vision locked into that dis­tance and I became unable to focus on greater dis­tances for sev­eral min­utes. My dis­tance vision became notice­ably less acute (road signs were harder to read, for exam­ple). I couldn’t see as well in low light. I began mak­ing plans to visit an ophthalmologist—something I should have done much earlier.

About a 6 weeks ago, after doing some research, I began tak­ing vit­a­min D sup­ple­ments in rel­a­tively high doses (6,000 iu per day) in gel­cap form (solid pills have not been shown to increase serum blood lev­els of vit­a­min D). I did this because I’d read about research on reduc­tion of can­cer and dia­betes in peo­ple tak­ing sim­i­lar dosages.

Well, I still don’t have can­cer or dia­betes (as far as I know). Yay for me. The unex­pected effect, how­ever, is that my vision has dra­mat­i­cally improved. I can read smaller text with­out strain. My vision no longer gets blurry when I read for too long. My dis­tance vision is more acute. My night vision has improved. I don’t have the 20/15 vision I had when I was 25, but my eyes cer­tainly work a lot bet­ter. It appears that the reduced flex­i­bil­ity of the corneas that hap­pens with age has been to some degree reversed.

I can’t be cer­tain that vit­a­min D is the cause of the improve­ment, as I made other dietary improve­ments at about the same time (cut­ting out almost all processed foods, refined sugar, and wheat, for exam­ple). I’m also unwill­ing to stop tak­ing vit­a­min D for a month or so to see if my vision declines. But I think the most likely expla­na­tion is the vit­a­min D. I’m pretty pleased.

I’m not a doc­tor and you should not take med­ical advice from me. If you were to do this, the results would prob­a­bly be dif­fer­ent from mine, but I thought I would pass this on.

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Momentum

25 November 2009 in personal by David | No comments

Writer Steven Press­field has a post on his blog on main­tain­ing momen­tum. He’s a pro­po­nent of the value of work­ing every day.

Momen­tum equals power

Momen­tum pro­duces another crit­i­cal pay­off. As we work day after day with focus and inten­sity, energy starts to con­cen­trate around us. That energy acts like a pow­er­ful elec­tro­mag­netic field, draw­ing to us all kinds of prov­i­den­tial aid and assis­tance. Ideas come. Insights accu­mu­late. We even get help from out­side sources—friends with money, col­leagues with con­tacts. Serendip­i­tous meet­ings pro­duce happy out­comes, seem­ingly ran­dom occur­rences bring unex­pected allies and lucky connections.

When Paul said, “Start the next one tomor­row,” what he meant was, “Don’t mess with your momentum.”

Paul knew that the inter­val between the com­ple­tion of Project L and the com­mence­ment of Project M is a power moment for Resis­tance. Resis­tance loves that moment because it can jump all over us with its arse­nal of pro­cras­ti­na­tion, self-doubt, inde­ci­sive­ness and self-befuddlement. It can par­a­lyze us.

The time to decide on Project M is while we’re in the mid­dle of Project L. We should know what we’re going to do next. Oth­er­wise we’re sit­ting ducks for Resistance.

This is exactly how it works for me. If I am work­ing on a paint­ing and can do some kind of work on it every day, then the momen­tum car­ries me through. If I stop, there’s a lot of effort involved in get­ting started again.

Go read the whole thing.

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Spam, spam, spam, spam

11 November 2009 in personal by David | 2 comments

I get more than 23 spam com­ments here for each legit­i­mate one. Spam fil­ters catch most of them, but occa­sion­ally one slips through and I have to delete it man­u­ally. And once in awhile, a legit­i­mate com­ment gets tagged as spam, so I have to res­cue it. (Some­times I miss those and they get deleted. If I did that to one of yours I apologize.)

Oh, how I hate those parasites.

In case you’re not aware, com­ment spam is valu­able because Google and other search engines rank sites based on how many other sites link to them. Google tends to fil­ter out any site that’s just a bunch of crappy links, so just mak­ing sites solely for that pur­pose is a waste of time. But a link in a com­ment from a site Google con­sid­ers legit­i­mate (this site has a Google page rank of 4 out of 10, which is not too bad for a blog with a lim­ited audi­ence) does count. Enough such links, spread out over the inter­net, gets a site onto the first page of Google search rank­ings and decreases the cost of pur­chas­ing ads.

That’s worth money, so scum­bags write pro­grams to scour the inter­net, find­ing sites where auto­mated com­ments can be entered. They are often writ­ten to look kind of like a generic nice com­ment, such as “Excel­lent points. Keep up the good work!” with hid­den links. If you write a real com­ment that looks generic like that, it’s likely to end up in the spam filter.

Sigh. Sorry for the non-art post, but it’s kind of frustrating.

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Blogversary

9 July 2009 in personal by David | 3 comments

The first post here was July 2006. Post­ing has become inter­mit­tent, but I still find it worth­while to keep going. Here’s to another year.

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Commission agreement

9 May 2009 in art business, personal by David | 3 comments

I recently nego­ti­ated a com­mis­sion to cre­ate a paint­ing. I thought post­ing a copy might be use­ful. The name of the cus­tomer was changed to pro­tect privacy.

Com­mis­sion agreement

  1. This is an agree­ment between John Smith (“John”) and David Rourke (“David”).
  2. David will cre­ate a paint­ing accord­ing to sub­ject mat­ter and com­po­si­tion cho­sen by John.
  3. The paint­ing will be approx­i­mately ____ x ____ inches in size. It will be com­pleted in oil paint using professional-quality mate­ri­als and methods.
  4. David will com­plete the paint­ing, to the best of his abil­ity, within three months.
  5. John will pay David a total of _____________________ dol­lars (not includ­ing applic­a­ble sales tax) for the paint­ing. Pay­ment is due as follows:
    1. One third of the total price upon com­ple­tion of this agree­ment. David will then cre­ate one or more pre­lim­i­nary com­po­si­tion draw­ings for review and approval by John.
    2. One third of the total price upon approval of the final com­po­si­tion draw­ing by John. David will then pre­pare the can­vas and com­plete the paint­ing within a mutu­ally agree­able time frame.
    3. One third of the total price upon deliv­ery of the com­pleted painting.
  6. Pay­ment is not refund­able. How­ever, John can end this agree­ment at any time with notice in writ­ing to David.
  7. Fram­ing is not included in the price.
  8. Although John will own the paint­ing and has the right to dis­play it as he sees fit, David retains copy­right of the image. This agree­ment pro­vides John with autho­riza­tion to use pho­tographs of the paint­ing for per­sonal, non-commercial use. Any other use of any image of the paint­ing or por­tion or deriv­a­tive thereof requires prior autho­riza­tion in writ­ing from David.
  9. David will deliver the com­pleted paint­ing to John when it is suf­fi­ciently dry for hang­ing. It is rec­om­mended that the paint­ing receive a coat of pro­tec­tive var­nish approx­i­mately six months after com­ple­tion. Upon request, David will var­nish the paint­ing at no addi­tional cost.

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Working on the guts of this site

24 April 2009 in personal by David | No comments

I’m work­ing on some changes to the under­ly­ing tech­ni­cal struc­ture of this site. So far, I have switched the data­base from MySQL ver­sion 4 to ver­sion 5. That seems to have gone sur­pris­ingly well so far (given my lim­ited tech­ni­cal skills), and the site is load­ing much more quickly.

Next, I will attempt to clean a bunch of old, unused tables out of the data­base. That may cause some prob­lems with the blog and I may have to restore from backups.

I apol­o­gize for any prob­lems over the next cou­ple of days. I’ve been avoid­ing this for a long time, but it really has to be done if this site is to work the way it’s sup­posed to. Please let me know if you have any prob­lems with the site.

Thanks.

Updates

24 April 2009: So far, so good. The blog is run­ning a lot faster now. I’ve recov­ered some recent com­ments that were in the data­base, but had become invis­i­ble. The archives page is now dis­play­ing prop­erly. All the posts and other stuff seem to work correctly.

2 May 2009: Still work­ing fine (he writes while super­sti­tiously knock­ing wood to ban­ish the aveng­ing spir­its of tempted fate). I wish I’d done this a long time ago, as it was much eas­ier than I thought it would be.

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I haven’t deleted or turned off comments

16 April 2009 in personal by David | No comments

Rather, I am expe­ri­enc­ing tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties. My apolo­gies to any­one who may have tried to post comments.

Update

24 April 2009: This prob­lem seems to be resolved. The miss­ing com­ments have been restored.

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Keep working until it’s done

10 April 2009 in art technique, painting, personal by David | 5 comments

Keep work­ing on a paint­ing until you’re sure it’s fin­ished. Then come back again a few days later and work on it some more if you real­ize it’s not as good as you thought it was.

That seems like a “duh” kind of state­ment, but it’s incon­sis­tent with lots of art book advice. We are told that it takes two to make a paint­ing: an artist to do the work, and some­one else to hit him (or her) on the head before it gets ruined. Fresh­ness and spon­tane­ity above all, we are told. Never over­work the paint.

That advice was a prob­lem for me until I real­ized what a crock it is. My prob­lem isn’t a lack of freshness—it’s that I am so often tempted to stop too soon. I get parts of the paint­ing to look really good and the rest basi­cally not too bad, so I want to stop rather than put in the extra hours needed to get the hard parts exactly right. That whole “fresh­ness” canard is an excuse for laziness—something seen in the work of many a mar­ginal painter of approx­i­mate smears.

If you really want the paint­ing to look like you got every part of it right the first time (i.e., “fresh”), then do what Sar­gent did and con­tin­u­ally scrape off any­thing that didn’t come out exactly right and paint it again. And again. And again, until it is cor­rect in it’s cal­cu­lated appear­ance of per­fect spon­tane­ity. Even if you have to paint it 100 times.

If a look of fresh­ness is not what you’re after (it’s not some­thing I’m all that inter­ested in, myself) then just keep paint­ing until there isn’t any­thing you know how to do that will make it bet­ter.* If you’re not will­ing to keep at it until the dif­fi­cult parts look right, then you’re not seri­ous about painting.

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*Or you real­ize that this paint­ing is just a dog and trash it. You should allow your­self to do that only very rarely, however.

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Silverpointilism

27 March 2009 in personal by David | No comments

Awful art pun. Couldn’t resist.

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“Feeling Creative”">“Feeling Creative”

31 January 2009 in personal by David | No comments

Mer­lin Mann on the work involved in being an artist:

But, let’s be hon­est. This is a tough idea to sell to folks with “real jobs” who are just look­ing for a divert­ing bit of cre­ative tourism or who find them­selves yearn­ing for a nos­tal­gic amble past a mostly-abandoned ado­les­cent arts hobby. Peo­ple who want to learn how to feel cre­ative. To feel suc­cess­ful. To feel like an artist. Not that there’s any­thing wrong with that.

My sense, though, is that for most peo­ple who repeat­edly do (and sell) cre­ative work, this all seems a bit like want­ing to feel like a world-class ath­lete. Because “feel­ing cre­ative” pro­duces great work in approx­i­mately the same way that “feel­ing like a doc­tor” makes you a gifted tho­racic surgeon.

He’s hit­ting what I hope has been an endur­ing theme here. Regard­less of tal­ent, if you don’t show up and put in the hours, you don’t get good, and the paint­ings don’t get painted.

Read the whole thing.

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Argh

27 January 2009 in personal by David | 2 comments

I hate the idea of hav­ing to write an artist state­ment, but it has become nec­es­sary. I find it very hard not to sound either pompous or banal (or both). Here’s my cur­rent ver­sion. Any sug­ges­tions for improvement?

David Rourke | Artist Statement

“This is an occu­pa­tion known as paint­ing, which calls for imag­i­na­tion, and skill of hand, in order to dis­cover things not seen, hid­ing them­selves under the shadow of nat­ural objects, and to fix them with the hand, pre­sent­ing to plain sight what does not actu­ally exist. And it justly deserves to be enthroned next to the­ory, and to be crowned with poetry.”
—Cen­nino d’Andrea Cen­nini, circa 1400 A.D.

What

My paint­ings are about sim­ple things care­fully observed. When I’m plan­ning a paint­ing, I often just walk around my house, look­ing for an object—a pair of blue jeans, a paper bag, a dress bor­rowed from my wife—that feels like it might be the right sub­ject of a paint­ing. I then plan the com­po­si­tion around it.

How

I work directly from life. Real­ist paint­ing is less about the mechan­ics of ren­der­ing than it is about learn­ing to accu­rately observe light, form, and color. Each paint­ing is an exer­cise in let­ting go of preconceptions.

Why

I’m deeply aware that I’m par­tic­i­pat­ing in a tra­di­tion of crafts­man­ship that goes back well over 600 years. There’s no point, how­ever, in re-making what oth­ers have done, so the core of the thing is to respect the craft while express­ing my own self. The bal­ance between those goals is end­lessly engaging.

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Recovery

31 December 2008 in personal by David | No comments

You may have noticed that this site has been down for more than a week. I won’t bore you with the details—suffice it to say that the data­base got messed up to the point where my mea­ger tech­ni­cal skills were inad­e­quate to cor­rect the prob­lem. I got some pro­fes­sional help from the excel­lent Neil Matthews, aka WP Dude. Thanks to his exper­tise, the site is now back up, although not all func­tions are restored yet. I am hope­ful that this will never hap­pen again, and I apol­o­gize for any inconvenience.

If you ever need some­one to set up, migrate, fix, or oth­er­wise work on a Word­Press site, I strongly sug­gest you check with Neil first.

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SNAFU">SNAFU

10 December 2008 in personal by David | No comments

I thought I had it all worked out, but appar­ently not. I cre­ated a new install of Word­Press, for var­i­ous tech­ni­cal rea­sons, and redi­rected to that site. Unfor­tu­nately, the migra­tion of data to the new ver­sion just didn’t work the way it was sup­posed to. Miss­ing fea­tures, miss­ing images, messed up database…bleh.

So for now we are back at the old ver­sion of the site, which seems to be work­ing just like it always was. I apol­o­gize for any prob­lems you may have had here in the last few days. I will test much more exten­sively before I try any­thing like that again.

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New Gallery

25 November 2008 in David's work, personal by David | No comments

I now have a new gallery, inde­pen­dent of this blog, to dis­play my work. It’s not entirely fin­ished, but close enough to check out. Please let me know what you think—especially if there’s any­thing there that’s con­fus­ing, ugly, or could be improved in any way. If it dis­plays poorly in your browser, please drop me an email.

I made it myself, using my mad cod­ing skillz, such as they are. In case you’re inter­ested in geeky stuff, it’s run­ning on the Joomla con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem, using the Hive­mind tem­plate from Rock​et​theme​.com and the excel­lent Phoca gallery extenstion.

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