Rutland Plumcot tweak - Changes afoot

RUTLAND PLUMCOT
24" x 24" Deep Gallery Wrap
Currently on display at Ritchcraft Gallery, Kelowna, B.C. Canada
$349
If you love it contact me to purchase.

I usually study analytics on my art in the early part of the year, but this year has been more organic. Everything is shifting for me with regards to emphasis and importance. For a long time now, my art has been a major focus for my life. I work long hours and take on many varied projects, but my personal life has been left by the wayside. That would be OK if it didn't bother me, but it does, so, this year I'm going to shift my focus to myself, and enjoy a more varied existence. I'm not getting any younger, so I need to start crossing things off my bucket list.

That having been said, I am not going to stop creating, but the focus will shift from trying to satisfy all the different factions in my art world, to satisfying myself. The shot gun approach has served me well, and made me a very versatile artist, but as I near retirement age I want to work on projects that have been on my personal list for many years.

During the past five years I have mainly been a daily painter, producing or tweaking a painting a day and selling them through various channels to cover expenses. I have created over 1,000 paintings, which was beyond my wildest dreams when I plunged back into the art world in 2010. I have blogged almost every day since January 2013 and taken on many challenges including nine rounds of 30 paintings in 30 days, experimenting in oil, acrylic, watercolor, ink, drawing, digital art, sculpture, mixed media and digital photography. I've entered and won many juried competitions and gained some prestigious feathers in my cap, such as creating a public sculpture for my local town and becoming one of only 10 non First Nation artists to exhibit at our airport. It's been a blast.

As my art and my lifestyle is changing so will my blog. I'm not going to disappear, but you may only see one blog or newsletter a week, or month, or you may see several posts in one day addressing various aspects of my life, who knows! Blogging every day for over 3 years has kept me focused and on track, but it has also been too structured for my creative process. I need room to breathe, experiment and play, so no more boxes. I am going to let it all flow freely.

In the spirit of change, this painting has changed as well. Painted in 2015 for the Rutland Centennary, the call was for paintings showing parts of local history. This painting celebrated the founding father's brilliant entrepreneurship when he started to irrigate and plant fruit trees, to the extent that he had a Plumcot named after him. Originally the painting also included a pot of jam and a bowl of ripe Plumcots, but in a couple of tweaks I removed them and replaced them with more blossom. For this tweak I also changed the background from green to a more generic grey.

This painting now fulfills my latest goal of working in a painting until it becomes something I would love to hang in my own home.