I have been spending so much time learning about blogging and social networking, I have been neglecting the production of art. I am trying to understand why I have gotten into this new time-consuming activity.

I am reminded of what happened to my husband during the late 1980s. Prior to the advent of personal computers in the work-place, managers had support people_secretaries, receptionists, assistants. When a manager was given his very own desktop computer, he was suddenly expected to compose on it (no more need to dictate) and that composing required typing (no more typists). It did not matter that this highly-paid executive had never learned touch typing. He was expected to hunt and peck his way through a proposal or report while still completing all the work he was hired for.

Now, my husband types 28 wpm. I know because in 1992, we bought our first personal home computer and I got a book and program to teach him to touch type. He worked at night for six weeks trying to retrain his fingers to touch type rather than hunt and peck with his forefingers. At the end of six weeks, I tested him and he typed by touch 28 wpm. He typed 29 wpm hunting and pecking. Touch typing made him a nervous wreck and his typing was filled with mistakes. He gave up and to this day continues to hunt and peck at 28-29 wpm. He also does his own filing. So, instead of paying a typist $9-10 per hour to type, they pay my husband a manager's salary to hunt and peck and do other clerical work.

So now, I'll get back to myself. In 1989, I began working full time as a painter. Having no gallery affiliation, I knew I would need to market myself. I took an expensive, week-long marketing workshop with Sue Viders. We received a huge notebook of handouts with lots of instruction and samples of every form an artist would need to do business. We were told to research what was selling, In 1989, the top selling art was landscape. We should follow home fashions and what color schemes were popular and add those to our palette. The main advice I remember was that an artist must determine how many hours a week she had to devote to her business (making art and marketing art) and then spend equal amounts of time on each. If you had 40 hours, you would spend 20 making art and 20 marketing art. If you had 4 hours, you would spend 2 hours on each. You get the picture.

I have tried very hard over the years to be creative in marketing. I have sold through my studio and at fairs. I have been represented in a traditional gallery and in co-op galleries. I have donated art to good causes and done demos to get my name out there. Now, I have migrated into online marketing using an art-hosting site, facebook, twitter, and blogging. Still, I feel a bit like my husband. I keep thinking that all this time I spend doing something I am not great at (marketing) takes me away from what I should be doing (confronting my easel in the studio and producing something fine).

I know I am not alone in this pining for the time when artists produced art and galleries took care of the business of selling that art. I realize that only a few artists today have such an arrangement with galleries. I am just glad I live in a time when people all over the world can click a button and see my latest output and every so often, I am notified that someone loved a piece enough to purchase it.

So, I'm off to begin a new project.

_ MountainWoman Silver and MountainWoman Silver Speaks, 2009

On my blog site (http://oksilver.wordpress.com), I have posted a long blog called How Did Silver Become Mountain Woman? In my Wordpress blog header is this image. These mountains are near Coyote, New Mexico. I took artistic liberty in adding the cattle and watering hole which are near Oklahoma City. In my blog, I also included another mural I painted of the Rio Chama west of Abiquii, New Mexcio and east of Ghost Ranch. Living in Oklahoma with only small mountains, I needed something to feed my soul, so I painted these to surround myself with mountain views. I hope you will check out the blog site.

I spent four years in a university where art professors believed in grounding a student in basics like drawing, design, and color. My first two years began each day with a two-hour drawing class five days a week. The rest of each day and the weekend, we carried around sketchbooks filling them with images wherever we happened to be. Those two years also included classes in design, anatomy, and art history. We were not allowed to take a painting class until our junior year. For the last two years, I took numerous painting and sculpture classes but the instruction always followed classical, traditional guidelines. We were told if we wanted to paint in a wild, expressionistic manner, we could do so after we graduated.

In the first 10 years after college, I painted representational portraits, still lifes, and landscapes while holding down a fulltime day job in something totally unrelated to art. I did charcoal and pastel portraits at festivals. I longed to be a fulltime artist earning my living at what I loved. I entered shows, got into some, was rejected from many, sold a few paintings, but mostly, my art earnings were from portraits. As I was drawing and painting as realistically as possible, my work while competent, did not stand out from paintings by other artists who painted in a similar style.

Like many women artists, I always felt I needed more training. Through the years I used my vacations to attend week-long workshops with John Howard Sanden, Albert Handell, and Daniel Greene, hoping to improve my portrait-painting abilities. In addition, I studied sewing and free-motion embroidery techniques for three years with a wonderful quilt artist, Georgia Bailey (died 2007). My most recent workshop was a week with Carrie Brown learning how to paint and decorate papers to include in collages.

One day in the 1980s, sick of the portrait I was working on, I picked up a fat chunk of charcoal and using the side of the chunk, I made a big curvy mark on a drawing pad on my easel. Thirty minutes later, I had finished my first expressionistic piece. I continued to do commissioned portraits, but from then on, I was making these strange, symbolistic paintings which I hid away for fear of ridicule from anyone who saw them. I found myself doodling on notepads or scraps of paper during meetings, while waiting to see a doctor, even in church. Curiously, when I opened a real sketch pad, I would revert to my earlier training trying to render a likeness of someone or something. On these scraps, I freely distorted what I saw or drew from my own imagination. Some of these doodles became finished, symbolistic paintings usually containing a central figure and usually expressing some emotion I was experiencing at the time.

Years went by with divorce, relocation, change of job; the stash of paintings grew but remained hidden. I continued doing portraits in my spare time. 1988 was a momentous year for me. I grew to trust a man I was dating and one day, showed him about 20 of these symbolistic paintings. He asked questions about the symbolism, how I was feeling when I painted certain images, and why had I never shown this work to anyone. At that point, I had the courage to look at his face. He actually had tears in his eyes. There is nothing like validation from someone whose opinion you value and trust. This man told me he wanted to be a part of the development of the art I was doing. In 1989, he became my "patron of the arts" giving me the opportunity to work as an artist full time and explore the kind of art I wanted to do.

In the last 20 years, I've painted, I've created art quilts, and I've completed a year of graphic design training using computer programs like Photoshop, Freehand, and Illustrator. Now things have come together and I find I am integrating everything I've learned into the pieces I create. I've become a mixed-media artist. I paint on fabric for quilts and I sew on painted canvases. I applique objects to my canvases and paper as well as to quilts. I work out designs using computer programs and I still doodle on scraps of paper.

Making quilts for 10 years has been a powerful influence on the way I work. I use even bolder colors now in my paintings and I have learned to really enjoy "process" instead of hurrying to finish. The years pass regardless of how you fill them. Mine have been a fantastic tapestry full of color and drama.

_ Mountain Woman Silver, 2009