Old Country (Willie Nelson)

My portrait of the old, beloved country music dude Willie Nelson. I never thought his voice was much to be knocked out by (let's face it, he's right in there with Neil Young and Bob Dylan), but how cool can you get? He's "Willie Nelson" cool, OK?

Jimi Jam

Check this out: Jimi Hendrix! I finished this painting recently as a commission. I have to admit I never really got Jimi but his images are very iconic. I really like the way this painting turned out. I tried to make his clothes very wildly multi-colored and then the backlighting of the hair is also cool (at least I think so).

This is the second entry in my "Jam" series, the other one being "Jerry Jam". Probably not too hard to figure out who this guy is. Hint: he's dead now but apparently he was OK with the concept while he was alive.

Making Art Galleries Obsolete

Sometime in the middle of 2005 I started painting again. I've been making artwork for most of my life and I stumbled across a reason which drives me to keep making the stuff. I've found motivations in the past but now the whole exercise is much more interesting. And here's why:

eBay.

Seriously, folks, this is really the goose that laid the golden egg. Let me give you some background.

Traditionally, most artists never got a chance to get their stuff displayed. It's the typical economic arrangement where the middleman calls all the shots: the only way for an artist to get any exposure at all was to find a gallery to represent them. The gallery owner was the person who had to pay the expense of setting up a storefront, they had to pay for advertising, they spent their time organizing and staging little "hors d'ouvre" parties when a represented artist had something new to show.

In return, the artist gave up just about everything. Including the hope that their stuff would ever someday live on lots of walls all around the world.

This actually still goes on in lots of places but these days, but if you're shopping at one of these high-toned galleries, what are you actually buying for your $10,000? A name? Are you making an "investment" of some kind? You can always find a decent piece of artwork in one of these places, but why would you spend that much hard-earned cash on something you could buy directly from the artist at a tiny fraction of the cost?

This is because a funny thing started happening in the late 1990's. It was called "the Internet". I sold my very first painting in 1997 for $60 on a homegrown web site. If you're interested, there's a small view of that painting at the head of this article. It's a still life of a ukelele sitting in a little rocking chair. It's really not much of a painting but someone saw it, wrote me an e-mail, sent me a check and there I was one day, sending a painting off to somewhere in California.

There still wasn't a lot of volume in this until eBay came along. I remember very clearly reading about this new "phenomenon" sometime in the second half of 1999 and I signed up in December of that year. The first thing I listed sold for something like $60 or $70. Watercolor on paper of a dancer in a green dress. Easy stuff. It took me a half an hour to make and there I was, sending it off to someone in Chicago.

I was flabbergasted and I still am, even more so today than I ever was. Here I am, a self-taught, self-representing artist who is basically a complete nobody and in the last two years I have sold a grand total of 183 paintings. I've sent my things literally all over the world - all over the U.S. and Canada, the UK, Netherlands, France, Australia.

Question: why do I need an art gallery to represent me? Is there anything they can offer me? I invite anyone to make a case. I just don't see it.