How did I get here?

I went to college and majored in Business. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with that degree, when I graduated, but I had a pretty good idea of what I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to be in sales. So in the ensuing seventeen years since I graduated from college, I have only spent 16 of them as a salesman, not including periods of unemployment.

Sales is my vocation. That is what I do for a living. But, I always wanted to be an artist. For as long as I can remember, although, I do remember a period of wanting to be a stuntman and can’t account for that in chronological in detail. Why doesn’t someone who wants to be an artist go to art school? Answer: Because he is pragmatic. That is a fancy way of saying practical. A practical person realizes that they can always draw stuff and goes to business school to have something useful to fall on. A dreamer goes to art school in spite of the unlikelihood of making a living and slim chance that they will ever produce work that someone will buy.

Somehow, even though it’s not what I set out to do, I ended up an artist who does quirky pieces of art in an oil pastel medium who sells them at art festivals. I can say for sure that he artist part was something that I aspired to, but the rest was quite random. It’s like I Knew that I wanted to be on the beach, but what beach and what washed up on the beach was an intersection o random events.

I do quirky pieces because the first job that I had after I graduated with an MBA was doing art with a silk screen company that did T-shirts. I was initially hired to build the business and do art sometimes, but an unforeseen tax liability on behalf of the owner soon had me cleaning silk screens, folding printed shirts and sometimes doing art. Every now and then, the full time artist on staff would do a line drawing of a specific, absurd, potential moment in time that seemed so random it always made me laugh and overwhelmingly clever. The theme of these pieces revolved around corn. I remember one having Ernie from the “My Three Sons” television show growing up to become a door to door corn salesman with a balding overweight bespectacled aged Ernie in a Hawaiian shirt holding up a peeled piece of corn. So I thank Mark Weber for pointing me in the direction of the absurd.

I had a friend come to visit who bought some oil pastels when we went to an art supply store. She forgot to take them with her and they sat around for two years before I decided to play with them. I didn’t like the line control and the way they smeared at first, but I accidentally scratched one of the pieces that I worked on and the color underneath it came through in such a brilliant manner. Thank you Anita for so much more than that.

I only knew that if you had some art, you should try to get into some galleries. How wrong was I? A gallery is a place to drink wine and eat cheese. If you want to sell art, you have to do something else. I was friends with a couple who were starting to do art festivals outside of my area. At the time I thought you would e just as likely to sell locally as you would in any other area. Derrick and Tanya Johnson introduced me to the Idea of art festivals. My Father and his craft festivals put gave me the hardware to be successful with, and Susan pushed me to be a part of a festival crowd that I could be successful with.

I thank you all