Today, my art career began again in earnest

This morning before beginning work on/at my “day job” as Commercial Division Manager and Senior Estimator for Goldstar Mechanical Services Inc. (NC’s largest HVAC contractor by dollar volume at the present moment) for the first time in literally 25 years I put black acrylic paint to a nylon-bristle artist’s brush and slathered a pre-strecthed store-bought canvas with it in order to lay down the base color for what will become a three-panel triptyche set of theme-matched paintings done for my wife Kris because she wanted 1) to see if I was as good an artist as I had bragged unmercifully to her that I had been when I was much younger and 2) me to do something very original and very nice for our bedroom, something that symbolizes, well, what marriage means to us but which wouldn’t be offensive to a 5-year-old that goes to Sunday School regularly or their parents.

When I started “edging out” the three canvases, two tall and thin and one large boxy one, it felt like I had never quit painting. Why did I quit painting in the first place come to think of it? Oh, yes, life, that proverbial killer of artisitic dreams along with not getting the NY Times to review your what turns out to be only your NYC gallery showing back in the 70’s, life and Yes maybe even a bit of dread that I would enjoy it all over again, I’m just being honest as I always am/try to be now, folks, and it would consume me.

No, it’s not going to consume me even though I’ve rediscovered how much I truly enjoy doing it, I also enjoy making a decent living working for Goldstar and HVAC/heating/ventilation/air-conditioning/plumbing/mechanical trades has been my actual adult career these past twenty-five years and Yes – I do enjoy doing what I do for Goldstar, but my art a professional if part-time endeavor is firmly now “a go”.

Confessing publicly, I have/had planned to do this for at least 2-3 years now and just never got off the couch to make it happen, but for, and this is the confession part, for strictly “mercenary” reasons I had planned to do a series of sports-related-theme prints in time to get them online and hopefully selling during the curve of this year’s Christmas buying season – for the pure reason of wanting an extra part-time income which while iffy entailed very little risk and potentially very decent profits – but for various reasons which would seem like whining so I’m not going to list them here I won’t be able to do these sports-theme prints by Thanksgiving so c’est lie vie, next year, actually after first of the year, I’m still going to do them in the near future and post them to an online gallery which I’m going to create (I do design and build websites professionally for paying clients, too, remember), that will simply happen in the Economic Dead Zone of after-Christmas when everyone’s spent their disposable income for the next few months and when sales conversely will be few but what the hey’, at least I’ll be following through.

Actually, before then I plan on doing at least 15-20 original works of art, mostly watercolors, some acrylic, a couple of pieces of folk art sculpture, some limited edition photographs done with-out digital “enhancements”, maybe some conceptual art pieces as well, and will post them for sale on what will be my online art gallery “ZenMule.com”, which won’t be up until probably after first of the year but one never knows…I’ll explain what “ZenMule” means at a later time.

As I was laying down my base coat on the canvases this morning, I couldn’t help but “accidentally” create a beautiful (to me) Japanese-theme mountain landscape of a steep mountain valley shrouded in the fog of morning – which I was also surround by in real-life this morning as I did this outside on my back deck – before painting over it…yes, my talent is still there, if anything with slightly advanced age my hand is steadier and my eye more keen to details and my bank of memories much larger to draw from, so who knows, this just might fly and even if it doesn’t, at least I’ll have a ready-made stash of Christmas presents to give out to lucky friends and relatives next year, Grin!