Art Business

 Art is not just fun things like making art, but involves a lot of other things that have nothing to do with the rest of life.  They just have to be done.  But that's part of why I started this blog.

Years ago I decided to start a website, mostly so I could own my name before anyone else did. Plus, it became an easy way for people to look me up and see what kind of art I make.  And my art is different from what a lot of people do- subjects, style, medium, etc.  All this has worked to some extent.  I would not be surprised if some opportunities came out of it. Last week it got a bit more complicated.  Started with a phone call from the host company, trying to get me to add more security.  What about the security I paid for months ago?  They looked into their records and decided I had indeed paid for it, but it was not there.  Getting this resolved took quite a while.  Turns out my site is what they called a "legacy site", up for a long time and very old.   Their tech people didn't know how to handle it.  The good news is that they were able to add the security to my domain.  The bad news is that the whole website disappeared.  Got calls offering expertise in helping me build a new one, but the samples shown were much less than what I had, not done by a web pro.  Plus, I didn't know what had been there because I couldn't access it anymore. 

Then finally yesterday the site came back, more or less.  The home page comes up now, but the banner giving the address and all my links to the other pages were not shown.   However they were there.  I moved my cursor into the blank area where they had been, and clicked, and found all those pages, so at least I know what was on my site.  Still this has to be corrected, and I'll be calling them soon to figure out what is going on.

But I have another deadline to deal with of an art nature.  (lots of medical things to deal with as well, but that's not the subject of this blog)  I bought some mat board on the way home from one of my last radiation treatments, and set it aside.  You see, I knew there was a tenants show coming up in the Studio building, and I knew what I planned to show, and had some frames I could repurpose, but I would definitely need to cut some new window mats to the right size, and some new backing boards and linen tape wouldn't hurt.  Today I dealt with the window mats.  I brought my new pieces of mat board, and the three framed works I planned to switch out to my Studio, which is where I keep all my framing materials, including my mat cutting machine.  

Actually this is something I made myself, out of some scrap wood, a hand held bevel cutter, a metal straight edge, and some clamps.  A pencil, an x-acto knife, and my metal 40 inch measuring stick make up the rest of the device. I keep all but the ruler (in my car) up at the Studio, and the frames at home.  But today it was all at the Studio and the old framing shop was back in existence.  

As is my procedure, first I cut the mat board pieces to the proper size and set them aside.  On the backside of each, I used the ruler and drew the lines that represented where the window would be.  Keeping that back up, insert each into my device, line up each window border with the metal edge, and use the bevel cutter to cut the beveled windows out.   And that's all there is to it.  I completed the three mats I plan for this show, which will go up sometime next month, which is just a few weeks away.  If need be, I have the old backing boards, and an old spare roll of linen tape, but I will see if I can get new ones before then if I can.  Meanwhile, as I did this I listed to random choices from my pop/rock set, first the live album (one disc version) from the Dream Syndicate (written about in detail back in April, 2020) and when that ended, a compilation from the English Beat, which I wrote about back in January, 2023.  I didn't think anything of it, but I guess one could say that both might have been popular with college radio back in the 80's, but on my show I was playing only traditional blues, and that's how I liked it.