Oh hello there. I’m trying something new. A weekly update on what’s new and what’s going on. Just an informal thing.
There’s actually kind of a lot of stuff happening. Most excitingly, I closed the sale of a couple of paintings this week, That Question is Funny Because it has Changed and History With the Continuum. Shoutout to Artisan Shipping Company for excellent shipping service, if you need to move large paintings up or down the Eastern Seaboard they are a great option. History With the Continuum is a 52 x 56” paining and it would have required building a wooden crate and using Less than TruckLoad (LTL) service from a regular shipping company.
Additionally, I signed a contract with iCanvas to license some of my work. I’m pretty interested to see if this goes anywhere. At the very least, they are inspiring me to actually get better photos of a lot of my older work because for years I was just using my iPhone to take pictures of the paintings and the resolution wasn’t high enough for iCanvas’s purposes. I got a fancy Canon 90D a couple years ago and I’ve got a bunch of lenses and speed lights etc and I actually know how to use all this shit, it’s just time intensive. The results have been really great so far though. When I look at my original iPhone 7+ or iPhone XS images next to the 90D images with proper studio lighting, it’s really pretty striking. The iPhone blasts out the saturation and really doesn’t do a good job with fine detail.
I’ve been updating Artwork Archive as I get new photos, which is what my website draws from, so you can see some of the results. I’ve recently updated these pieces:
Here are some samples of the differences:
So Actually That Is Cool, image taken with my iPhone XS
So Actually That Is Cool, image taken with my Canon 90D
Entanglement 70 (king of the dust bunnies), image on the left taken in 2013 with a Canon Rebel T4i, image on the right taken in 2023 with a Canon 90D. I’m actually pretty impressed with the T4i image, and I think I should have kept using the Rebel instead of switching to the iPhone. To be honest, Apple got me with their marketing when the iPhone 7 came out. Now I’m much more interested in keeping my iPhone for four or five years and spending the money on real camera gear instead of a phone upgrade. I got the 90D because we have a bunch of EF lenses and the 90D, already a few years old when I bought it, seems like it’s going to be the last mid-level camera that will support that lens system without adapters.
I got rejected from Cambridge Art Association’s “Blue” show. The juror was Abigail Ogilvy of Abigail Ogilvy Gallery. They just moved in next door to Bromfield after several years in the basement across the courtyard in the Boston Gallery Zone aka SoWa. They are one of my favorite galleries, but the affection is 100% unidirectional, I don’t think they have any interest at all in me or my work, so I’m not surprised at the rejection. It’s been a while now since I’ve gotten into a CAA show.
I’m planing on entering some work this week in a show at a sort of pop-up gallery called Gallery Twist in Lexington. I’ve been rejected by them before, so I know they at least have some standards.
I’m finding myself a bit lonely here on the internet as of late. I stopped using Facebook probably a decade ago and Instagram a few years ago. Facebook I never really liked but Instagram was tough to give up because I did have a good following and it’s nice to get those likes, but I just can’t get behind the idea of giving free content to Meta, a company that I think has really done a lot to spread misinformation in the name of profit, undermine democracy, and has even enabled genocide on at least one occasion. I was on Twitter for a bit there, and I was even starting to like it, but that’s all gone now. Mastodon is fine, and you can follow me there (I think) @blayk@mastodon.social. You could be my third or fourth follower! Been thinking about getting back into Pinterest. Anyone still use Pinterest?
The major thing that happened in my personal life this week is that I have basically recovered from pneumonia. The kids brought COVID and Flu home from daycare this last month or so and I got both and then my respiratory system was like, hey, everyone, come on in! It’s not fun being really sick and also still having to get up in the middle of the night to jog a fussy infant back to sleep or wake up and get the kids ready for daycare and out the door while sucking down cough drops. I was sick for four weeks, not counting COVID, which wasn’t very bad. Flu sucked, and then it just got worse until finally L. made me go get checked out at one of those urgent care facilities. Got a chest x-ray, they said, “definitely pneumonia” and gave me a couple prescriptions for antibiotics. I started feeling better the next day. It’s good to feel healthy.
Ok! This has gone longer than I expected. I’m going to try to do this again next week. In the comments below, tell me what camera you like to use, where you get your social media fix, the name of a gallery you think is cool, or just an honest reaction to this post. Thanks for reading.