I recently purchased a new book - 'Masters of American Illustration - 41 Illustrators and How They Worked'. I'm only part way through it, but it's fascinating.

One thing that has long struck me about the golden age of illustration is how much time and preparatory work most of them spent on each assignment. 

I’ve always shared this thought (or desire) about taking the time to let your best ideas bubble up to the surface. Allowing your initial ideas time to evolve is a mark of a mature artist. Art, at least representational art, really is a very cerebral activity, requiring full engagement of both hemispheres of the mind.

Inspiration and creativity are balanced with evaluation, planning and work ethic. Creative design executed with skillful intent. This is precisely why creating good art is so difficult. Most humans have a dominant hemisphere, left or right brain. As artists we are forced to develop both sides if we want to be the best we can, even though we may not really want to. This is indeed a big part of the struggle for an artist, and why so many fall short of their potential.

Add to that a modern day necessity to post our lives as open books on the public stage of social media, spend valuable time learning about keywords and hashtags, and you have yet another hurdle for a lot of us who are natural born introverts. This too must be overcome in order to accomplish anything in this business. It is perhaps one of the main reasons so many highly skilled artists fail to make it.

If you also want to have a relationship, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day.

In the days or yore, artists could be mysterious, spend the vast majority of their time creating (in relative peace), and were often revered for their elusiveness. The public was capable of holding a deep thought for more than a nanosecond. Everyone was not glued to their phone, you could capture the imagination without video, and hold it long enough for a person to fall in love with your painting.

The markets are bigger, more numerous and more accessible today, but there is so much noise that it’s difficult to get noticed, especially when doing something contemplative.  

Still I love the freedoms we enjoy today, and I’m thankful to make a living by my art. So I give a hearty thanks to all of you who have supported my journey. You make this most challenging and interesting life possible.

I just rebuilt my website. "Didn't he just do that earlier this year," you ask? Yes I did. I left FASO and went with another company, which turned out to be an expensive experiment in frustration. Due to virtually no customer service, I pulled up stakes and am now happily back with FASO. Any of you artists out there who need a website, learn from my mistake. Go with FASO, they are awesome!

A note about the new site. Please have a look, I've revised almost every page. And for those of you who might be thinking about prints for the upcoming holiday season, my new prints page is simpler to use than ever before.