No Artistic rock left unturned.

In any endeavor, you need to have some idea of where you are striving to go. If you want to have fun and improve as a painter, that's a goal. As painting has gone from a hobby to teaching art, it has become a career for me. It has become my third act in a career that started in photo labs in the 1980s. This part of my career is by far the most satisfying stage. It has taken goal setting, hard work, and luck to get to this point and have an inkling of where it is going from here.

In today's post, let's look at goal setting. My personal feeling is that some reflection on what you want and setting some goals around that can be very helpful. It's helpful to write out your goals. Start with a statement of where you want to be in 3-5 years, then make a list of things you want to do to help achieve those goals. I do this once or twice a year and more often if there are big life changes or I feel the goal shifting.

Which brings up a point: always be flexible with your goals. We are always growing and changing as individuals. Our goals from last year may not be the same as they were when you wrote them down. That is no problem—adjust your goals. My current goals are to be part of more and bigger plein air events and to teach more workshops. I'd like to incorporate my love of travel into my work and have it pay for my travel. It's a good goal and an achievable goal, I believe. To that end, I do a lot of plein air painting on my own and participate in as many local events as possible. This is starting to pay off—I have been invited to be an ambassador and teach one-on-one plein air lessons at Forgotten Coast en Plein Air in March of 2027. Forgotten Coast is one of the biggest plein air festivals around. I'll be one of four ambassadors and will be teaching two private lessons a day and painting in the quickdraw. The twenty invited artists are all top-tier! I follow many of them on Facebook or have taken online workshops with them. I'm looking forward to watching these masters of plein air working during the festival. Maybe a goal for next year is to do the same thing at a festival outside of Florida.

Goals keep us moving forward and putting in the work on days when we might not want to, or like today, spending the morning doing administrative tasks instead of going right into my happy place (the studio). Goals are great, but also don't be a slave to them. Allow life to happen and interests to change as you grow. As artists, I think we need to be ever-evolving. Having goals helps when you have to decide between competing opportunities. When I have two things that come up on the same date or week(s), I ask myself which one will get me closer to my ultimate goal. Sometimes I have to turn down the immediate satisfaction for the choice that will get me closer to my goal.

How do you set goals? What are some of your artistic goals going forward?

This watercolor is one of my latest and is a fountain in my neighbor's yard that I saw during an afternoon walk with Snoopy.  I knew at first glance I wanted to paint it.

Keep Makin' Art!

Carl

In recent posts, I've talked about AI, the need to work from life—either through urban sketching or in a more formal drawing setting—and I've discussed my work process. Today, I'm going to tackle the subject of the muse. I often hear beginning painters talking about having to wait for the muse to strike for them to be able to paint. Some people call it inspiration, but it's a slippery slope. Yes, early on, it can feel like the only time you can paint well is when lightning strikes and the muse shows up.

When I first started painting, due to my work schedule and commute, I only had Sundays to paint. I got into the habit of getting up on Sunday, grabbing my coffee, and heading into the studio to work all day. What I discovered out of necessity was that the work is the muse. There are some great quotes out there, and I think Picasso said it best: "The muse exists, but she has to find you working." For me, that really is spot on.

There's a great quote in "Clear Seeing Place" from Brian Ruttenberg, the great American abstract painter, that says, “People often ask me what happens when I feel uninspired. The answer is nothing, because I don’t get inspired. Inspiration is unreliable. The only thing I can rely on is a work schedule. When I feel blocked, I keep painting because that’s my job. Day after day, I show up and hack away at the gigantic, slow-moving iceberg in my studio. When a piece breaks off, I get a painting.”

I think this is a great approach, but all of us, from time to time, get into the studio and don’t know what to do. Don’t know what to paint. Nothing feels right. It feels like you might even be doing yourself a disservice to paint. I understand that, and here are some tricks for those days when you feel like you don’t have it: clean the studio, organize your paint drawers, clean your brushes, sort through old paintings—anything to keep you moving in the studio. This is usually the jumpstart I need for an idea to creep into my skull and scream that it needs to be put down on paper. Once that happens, I’m off to the races.

In my journey, painting became a more and more important part of my life, and then I started teaching too. When you get to that level of expectation, people are counting on you. The idea of waiting for the muse simply doesn’t work anymore—you just have to get in there and do it. So if you’re stuck, if you’re having a writing block or a painting block, and you’re not sure what to do, my suggestions about getting into the studio will help. Other things you can do are get out into nature. Take a walk—a good 10-minute walk is usually all it takes to get the juices flowing. How about you? What do you do to jumpstart your art and get moving when you don’t feel like it? I’d love to know.

Below are some new paintings. It's a series that I am calling "Namaste Falls," a series of watercolors of women meditating near waterfalls. I find these paintings to be very peaceful; they're little 6 x 8" gems. I hope you like them. These will be some of the first pieces that I show in the July Artistic Souls Gallery Facebook auction. I am still finishing the paintings and will include a link to the auction in an email the week of the auctions. I hope you like them as much as I do.

Keep makin’ art!

Carl

Welcome to this week's blog post. Today, I'm going to dive in and talk about the elephant in the room and get it out of the way. That topic is Artificial Intelligence. AI is showing up in all parts of our lives and has taken off much faster than I imagined possible. First off, AI is not inherently evil, as I have heard some folks saying. As with most things, I think it all comes down to the user. It has the potential for great good and also some terrible stuff, depending on who is using it and for what purpose. I'm not sure I trust the human race with this kind of power. As a creative, I have some ethical problems with how it scrapes the internet and learns by ingesting just about every piece of art ever made. From the perspective of a human on Earth, I worry about the vast resources it is and will consume in terms of power and water.

As we break from the 10,000-foot view, let's look at how it impacts my life as an artist. There are now and will be people out there calling themselves artists who have never picked up a brush. The pie of available jobs and commissions will get sliced up even more than it is already, much like how people who knew nothing about photography using digital cameras took jobs from traditional photographers. I think change is part of life, and we have to keep up. Like many of my fellow artists, I feel since their work went into building the vast AI imaging engines, we have a right to use it. I think how we use it is the pertinent question. I think I have hit on a balanced approach that I am comfortable with.

I use it as a workflow tool. For this blog, for instance, when the post is written, I will use an AI engine to correct my spelling and grammar but keep the writing in my voice. It's about setting limits. I do use Midjourney (an AI platform) in my process early in the creative process. I will ingest photos I have taken and sketches I have made, along with text descriptions, to come up with a variety of compositions. I then fine-tune it several times until the idea I want to work with appears. At this point, armed with this reference picture like another reference picture I use, I paint the scene in my style by hand. My goal is not to create a finished piece in AI. Far from it, in fact, I'm just looking for something that inspires me. The speed with which I can revise and retry images greatly speeds up the front end of my process. The ability to combine a sketch, a photo, and a description and then refine the description gives me more time at the easel. Since I am working from all of my own material, I feel morally okay with this. That, coupled with the fact that it is here whether I like it or not, meant I had to adapt and learn how to use these new tools.

As I said, I survived something like this before. In the 1990s, when I was working in traditional photo labs, I went home at night and devoured books on Photoshop and practiced until the wee hours of the morning so that when an opportunity to join the digital department came up, I was ready. When I did get a digital camera, I was armed with everything I knew about analog photography and was ahead of many of my contemporaries. What I wasn't perhaps ready for was the new breed of photographer with less emphasis on technical skills but a lot of creativity. I also think AI will not make me a better artist. That requires time painting in the studio and the field. That will never change. Just as there is a strong movement to use film and analog cameras today, hand-painted art will always be prized. The joy of art is in the making, in pushing paint around on a canvas, and that will not change. That said, writers, painters, musicians, and filmmakers need to figure out how to work in this changing world. AI is here, and it is not going anywhere. Will it someday replace humanity? Well, only the future can reveal that. In the meantime, I have classes to teach and paintings to make.

Keep Makin' Art!

Carl

PS It felt really strange asking AI with its conversational tone to edit my thoughts about AI.  Perhaps I should reread the edit and make sure it has not completely changed my meaning.  I don't know it may have me on a watch list now...

For a change the past few weeks I have been going to open studio on Friday's at the New Studio in Jupiter FL to sharpen my figure and portrait practice.  Below are a few of the images from the sessions.