Why I Paint and What is My Intention in Painting?: The Simple yet Complex Act of Creativity

Why Paint? A Simple Question with so Many Answers: The simplest answer is the intense joy of creating something from nothing. Imagine a place that you see in a dream, it's beautiful, you don't want to leave but you wake up and it's gone; painting allows the artist to capture that place and when it becomes real there is nothing like the feeling.

Another feeling is when there is no specific, concrete image but instead a feeling or an idea that you have that becomes a form, something you can choose to explain or leave as its own voice. There is an absence of any stresses and distractions and the mind and body find a sync that I've never found doing anything else.

What would you like the viewer to see or experience?: The Many Goals of Creating: The pure enjoyment of being creative is tempered with the discipline of getting it right. The ability to see and capture reality too perfectly or to say something without over explaining it.

Artists are navigators, we bring our viewers in and show them what we see or feel. We allow them a glimpse of our expression and than we relinquish all control as the viewer makes the image or the journey their own.

For me, that is the highest complement, when someone gets your cue within an image and brings their own feelings and memories to make the painting their own. The artist has created a living image that evokes emotion or feelings and it is no longer a two dimensional image, it is a tool that evokes emotion, brings thought, soothes or frightens.

Frightens is an odd verb to attribute to painting but some of my paintings come from a place of depression or discomfort, I would rather a person feel frightened or uncomfortable rather than feel nothing. 

I want my feeling and intent in creating to become something that the viewer feels and understands in their own terms. To paint and evoke an emotion is like speaking in a different language than anyone else and having a stranger understand your language. That is the magic of creating art.

My next Installment will be on subject matter: Why do I paint the two special aspects of nature and how it became my style and intent.

My First Blog and Marketing Artwork-So Many Things to Learn

How do you start blogging about art? How do you explain a process that you have been so involved with for so many years it feels like second nature. I would venture to guess that you would blog about the change from conventional art, painting and pastels to the

Creation of art through the computer and the marketing of art through the internet.  I recently launched my website, www.artbygordon.com,  something I had been talking about for many years and I was so happy to finally complete a task-I tend to procrastinate and I have so many different ideas for writing, poetry, art and photography, half the time I write them down and they never get completed. Starting to blog was something that has been on my list for a long time as well.

So the process starts with a website that is by all counts awkard-inconsistencies in fonts,

Lack of search engine keywords which is just as well for now as I  am trying to clean up the site and perfect the appearance before I start spreading the word. I have learned more in the last few days of working with the HTML code and editing the Meta tags and it seems every time I think I get the idea I learn something else. I don’t believe you spread the  word or market artwork by just spreading it to friends, I believe it’s a start as word of mouth is important but how do you spread the site to people that want to buy art or even learn more about you as an artist. I have learned that launching the site is such a small step in marketing and the information I am picking up will be instrumental in how I market and show my artwork. Some ideas on the horizon are an interactive gallery, a poetry blog and a photography page and I know that when doing all of these processes I will learn more from the process itself.

I have been on a bit of a break from painting which I think makes it a good time to market what I have already created but more than selling art and marketing the art is learning about the process of marketing. I will venture more into the social media aspect and actually learn more about the people that would want to buy art. I will, in the near

Future, have an art show whether it be online or at a festival and I will blog and tweet and post with the idea of seeing where I get the most interest. I tought myself to paint and believe that is how I learn the best. Doing web marketing is just another growth process

And over the next few months I will describe the options I’ve learned about social media,

Google tools and the process of what I hope will eventually be effective self marketing of my painting, photography and writing. I am excited about the prospect and hope to gain followers with interest. I guess we’ll just have to see.