Here are some things that happened in 2010:

• Lost 34 lbs. in the first half of the year. Now well within normal body mass index.
• Kept the weight off through the second half of the year.
• Exercised quite a bit. Now in much better shape.
• Discovered that I am gluten-intolerant. A number of minor health problems have cleared up by switching to a paleodiet/primal/ancestral approach to eating.
• Completed graduate-level course requirements for board certification in behavior analysis. Got an A in each course. Yay, me.
• Kept my day job and have traveled a lot throughout the U.S.
• Stayed married (happily). Kept my son Brendan (Now 4 1/2 years old) alive and cared for.
• Stopped painting for about 6 months. Now back to it.
• Stopped updating this blog for about 6 months (other than site maintenance, deleting spam, and responding to comments). Now back to it.

There are two basic positions for painting—sitting and standing. For oil painting, I generally find it best to stand. It’s in the nature of painting that you stand in one position for long periods.

How do you stand comfortably for hours at a time? Millions of people in Western countries suffer from back pain, in large part because of poor posture. It’s important to avoid standing while painting in a manner that contributes to your own back problems.

Here are some basic principles to keep in mind:

• Slouching for long periods will eventually wreck your back.
• Standing up “straight,” with your back muscles at tension, is uncomfortable and you will stop doing it as soon as you are no longer paying attention.
• Instead, you’ll need to develop a standing position that keeps your head over your spine, your spine over your hips, and your hips over your heels. That keeps your body in alignment so that standing does not place undue pressure on your spine, back, hips, neck, or other parts of your body.

How do you do that? Stand up. Feet facing forward, about shoulder width apart or a little wider.

Now feel your hips. Many people in Western countries habitually tilt their hips backward. This leads to a rounded back and hunched shoulders. Instead, tilt your hips forward. Your waistline should be at an angle downward, so that the buckle of your belt (if you’re wearing a belt) is a bit lower than the back of the belt.

Don’t overdo it to the point that you feel tension in your lower back. The idea is that you are stacking your spine so that it bends correctly and is balanced directly over the hips.

Standing with your hips tilted forward tends to pull your shoulders back, but if you’re used to rolling them forward, make sure they are aligned backward. If you’re a woman, that means boobs up, ladies. This makes breathing easier by expanding your lung space. You should feel your spine align itself over your forward-tilted hips. This is a position in which your spine can be at rest while you are erect.

Your head should also be aligned straight, with your neck over your hips. Moving downward, your weight should be balanced over your heels, not your toes.

This is a comfortable standing position that can be maintained for long periods. If it’s not your habitual way of standing, then you’ll need to train your body to do it. The hard part is that painting takes so much focus that it’s very difficult to also concentrate on posture. One way to do that is to start painting in this position, and make sure that every few minutes you take a few steps back from the painting and look at your progress. That’s very good practice when painting anyway so that you don’t get tied up in fussy details. While you do that, attend to your  position and when you go back to painting, make sure that you’re standing correctly. Over time, you’ll catch yourself in the correct position without having assumed it consciously. Your back will thank you for it.

For more information, read Esther Gokhale’s excellent book 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back. Even if you don’t usually have a sore back, do yourself a favor and get a copy of this book. It’s that good.

Later on, we’ll talk about how to paint in a seated position without hurting yourself.

Caveat: I have no credentials that support giving health advice. Please don’t assume that I know what I am talking about. If you have any relevant health problems, consult a professional before doing anything I suggest.

I now have more time to devote to things like painting, drawing, and writing blog posts about painting and drawing. So in the next few weeks I’ll have fresh material here.

To anyone who’s been checking back occasionally or subscribing to this blog’s feed, thanks. I appreciate your patience and hope to come up with some good stuff to justify it. If you’re new here, please take a look around. I think there’s a lot of valuable material for artists on the site.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.