Category Archives: Marketing

Uncharted Waters #1 NY Times Bestseller List

Dateline: April 1, 2021, Bradenton, FL.

With the pending release of Uncharted Waters, I am pleased to announce my scheduled appearances on Good Morning America, Jimmy Kimmel and The Tonight Show, with Jimmy Fallon. Dates when those will air are still being discussed. Further appearances will be sent out as more are scheduled.

I am eternally grateful to everyone who helped make this endeavor the success that it has been. The hours of toil and frustration have proved to be well worth it. After a brief respite I plan on starting my next book. “What I Learned From My Father.”

Just to reflect for a moment on my Dad, one of his favorite days of the year was April Fools Day. Time and again throughout the day he would pop out with things that would catch my brothers and I totally off guard. By the end of the day, we were ready to respond to whatever he threw our way. “April Fools Day!”

Signs, Signs, Everywhere Signs

sign

Once the landscaping is done, the sign will go up.

Signs of Spring are everywhere. While the forsythia are not in bloom yet, they do have buds on them and that’s always a good sign. I have a cardinal among my guests at the bird feeder. Which I think is a very good sign as well, for a multitude of reasons. But the best sign of all is mine. It’s now complete and waiting for the hardscape work to be completed before it can be installed. I got the call last week that it was all ready and I just had to go and see how it looked. I’m very happy with the result. If you are wondering what the significance of the five colored lines are, beyond color for it’s own sake, since it’s more than three, the primaries and more than four, the CMYK for the print media types, it’s a musical staff. So stylized as it is and maybe not immediately apparent, it’s still there and it makes me smile.

Spring!Of course we can’t talk about Spring without mentioning flowers. Joe and Maryanne, my brother and sister-in-law, sent me tulips a couple of weeks ago. They were just beautiful and well, what happens when you send flowers to a painter? After they have a brief stay in the living room, off they go into the studio. It’s inevitable. So while I do have a painting in progress, it was set aside to capture these lovely bursts of color. Tulips are so graceful and simple in their beauty I don’t think there’s a painter out there that hasn’t taken a shot at painting them at least once. I must say these ones were particularly well behaved. Flowers, behaving you ask? Yes, tulips have a tendency to move as your painting them. First you have your quick sketch to figure out how everything will fit on your canvas and then you dive into your paints. Only to find the blossoms have moved. No, no no, the pink one was up here and the orange one, oh well. It’s almost like plein air painting – do not chase the light they say. Well, I guess it’s do not chase the tulips either!

Finally, I’m settling in on an opening date for the gallery. Unless something unanticipated happens, my target date is Memorial Day weekend, May 25 – 27, opening at 10:00. On that same note, I am getting great help with my marketing plan from Nancy Fox http://nancyfoxprojects.com/ in New Jersey. If you have an event you need help with, or you need a marketing plan, this is the woman to call. As the date of the opening approaches I’ll be providing more details so stay tuned.

By the way, if you’d like to receive a notice of the gallery opening in the mail, and you’re not sure I have your mailing address, please drop me a line and I’ll be sure to include you.

Never Satisfied

Beacon Hill Art Walk 2011

In some respects it’s a good thing to never be satisfied, always striving to be better, thinking your work is never good enough, as long as you never give up. I use to paint much more quickly. I worked at slowing myself down. Now, even though I start to lose patience with myself, it has improved my paintings so I keep getting slower, seeing more and more that I want to do with a painting. I suppose it has more to do with not knowing what I didn’t know when I’d whip out a painting in no time.

It reminds me of my mother and I with our reading. My mother could get through several hundred pages in no time. I, on the other hand would plod along forever. The difference was that I could remember what I’d read for years and years, while my mother would forget what she’d read until she picked up the same book again and got halfway through it a second time. I always wished I could read as quickly as she, and she always wished she could retain what she read as I did.

The idea of painting slowly or quickly is a bit different. Being of the impressionist flavor, I still paint more quickly than someone of the more classical approach with underpainting but I believe I’m getting to a happy medium (no pun intended). The level of detail I include has grown yet, by using palette knives, it keeps the impressionist flavor. I no longer shy away from difficult subjects but they don’t always make it to the front lines either. It is more about pushing forward and growing as an artist and in turn as a person. Not giving up, never giving up, that’s the key.