Creative Cogitation

Novem­ber 7, 2011 UPDATE: My Trees For Life Paint­ing did sell at this event along with many oth­ers.  The last tally I read said they had made more than 5,000 pounds for their char­ity.  Not bad. Not bad at all.

I gen­er­ally do not con­tribute paint­ings to black-tie char­i­ta­ble events. There are a num­ber of rea­sons why, but mostly it is because I do not feel char­i­ties in gen­eral play win-win with the artists who donate to their event. The artist gets noth­ing for their dona­tion of time, money, effort except a warm fuzzy and that is a lot to ask when a char­ity is ask­ing for a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of an artist’s poten­tial gross income.  (more…)

I have talked about being present when the muse decides to hand me her fire.  I am sure some of you have no idea what  I mean by that.

Mostly it means sit­ting my stu­dio, art­ing, even when I am really not in the mood. I am an artist, and I have some things I cre­ate with­out need­ing that blind­ing flash of inspi­ra­tion the annoy­ing lit­tle fairy pro­vides; I know basic rules of com­po­si­tion and color, I can come up with a plan, and I can whip out that dog por­trait or what­ever with no prob­lem. (more…)

I am a painter.  I am very com­fort­able with the media I chose to work in, which has been acrylic paint­ing over the last decade or so.  That does not mean I do not know how to paint with oils, water­col­ors etc. merely that I have set­tled down to a medium that makes me happy. (more…)

Do you have a muse?  Is it some­how sep­a­rate from you or part of you?

I fre­quently talk about parts of me as though they are some­how sep­a­rate crea­tures from me.

I have Lit­tle Retrieval Dude, a small gnome-like crea­ture for­ever bound to search­ing the dusty stacks that are the vast library of knowl­edge and trivia inside my head.  Some­times Lit­tle Retrieval Dude is on the ball and gets me the answer imme­di­ately. Some­times he tells me he’ll get back to me later, and he does; I will blurt out this ran­dom answer min­utes, hours or days after the fact.  I actu­ally visu­al­ize him resid­ing in this giant cylin­dri­cal place, with sto­ries and sto­ries of books; my lit­tle gnome end­lessly climbs stairs and lad­ders to get at the infor­ma­tion then reveals it to me in my mind’s eye-while simul­ta­ne­ously oper­at­ing my mouth.  (more…)

I have been insanely busy this year already.

First I would like to give a shout out to Two orga­ni­za­tions who have fea­tured me in the last month. Most recently I am the Fea­tured Artist at Artsyshark.com. Also ArtofDay.com included me in 18 Great Paint­ings, Illus­tra­tions, Draw­ings, Sculp­tures & Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy. Both fea­tured works from the Binary-Birds series, which is Art that proudly pro­claims your are a mem­ber of the Social Media Tribe. They are some­what geek-y, nerd-y, usu­ally humor­ous obser­va­tions of Social Media & other forms of elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Thanks to both of these web­sites for includ­ing me in their venues. 

Retweet by Jake Beck­man. An orange canary sings to four other yel­low ones who seem to be lis­ten­ing. The binary in the back­ground reads “Retweet.”

Right away I did a 4-day artshow in the 5th Ave shops dis­trict in Scotts­dale, AZ.  It was lovely weather to be out­side inter­act­ing with the pub­lic.  That was fol­lowed by Art­bridge Thurs­days, which is an event I reg­u­larly par­tic­i­pate in. This week I am tak­ing a week off because I am attend­ing in the SmArtist Tele­sum­mit. I find myself being ener­gized with lots of ideas about how to mar­ket my art bet­ter.  I am cur­rently lis­ten­ing to the ses­sion on Cor­po­rate Art Con­sul­tants while writ­ing this blog.  The same thing hap­pened last year, but I found it hard to sus­tain the emo­tion.  I am learn­ing some new stuff at the 2011 ses­sions, but I am reminded of all the balls I let roll away last year that I must pick up again.  I need to move my newlet­ter to mail chimp, I need to work on this blog a lot more often, I need to keep pro­duc­ing art while work­ing on my mar­ket­ing & sales.  It feels overwhelming. 

Still I guess I should enjoy my lit­tle vic­to­ries too.  I did get more adept as social media in 2010-I am dejakester on Twit­ter & Face­book and I have an art fan­page on Face­book too.  Binary-Birds came to light in 2010.  I did res­ur­rect my newslet­ter & blog in 2010.  I did have my NYC artshow in 2010.  I met all kinds of won­der­ful online Tweet­ies in 2010, includ­ing David San­dum who got me inter­ested in #twit­ter­ar­tex­hibit, which is hap­pen­ing in Moss Nor­way through the end of January. All good things I can build on. It looks like 2011 is off to a roar­ing start! Hope­fully I can sus­tain the momen­tum. )

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.