All my life I wanted to be an artist. Well, let’s correct that. All my life, I was an artist in heart and soul and occasionally that manifested into a minor work of art.
It is tough coming up with any great work of art. Even the old Masters often redid a piece over and over again til it was just right…or right enough to pass for a great work of art.
What’s so hard about great art, fine art? You have to be in a good frame of mind to create something good. You have to be in a beautiful frame of mind to create something beautiful…which was the aim of my youthful inclinations and into adulthood. Of course we could get into a huge discussion about what beauty is, but for me at that time in the past, it was what might approach the level of a clear colorful or a field full of day lilies or lavender.
Then, if you are in the good frame of mind, you need your oils or watercolors to be the right temperatures, the brushes to be the right ones in the right condition and you need to be left alone with your music or silence or view or memories for just the right amount of time.
The artist, you or me, need to keep all this going for an hour or a week before the paint dries or get it going again after one layer dries. You need to stop painting before you add too much. You need to keep painting before you leave it too undone.
Then, you need to be able to allow that one thing, some fleeting bubble of a thought to enter in when the muse appears, or reject it altogether because it takes you off into a direction you cannot go. It’s tough putting it all together and getting something beautiful that can be called art or fine art.
Never mind the difficulty in narrowing the subject down to one, choosing the exact right color palette, getting the right sized canvass, having the proper easel, disposing of your waste properly, wearing a mask, or using all non toxic materials. So, in between having all those things together, I make greeting card and some fun.
But, creating cards is just fun. I use whatever medium is ready, whatever I am one with that moment, I use my love of jokes and words and twists and puns, I put them altogether.
The last two years (come May) I will have spent hundreds of hours creating all sorts of cards. People say I have a funky mind in that I allow all sorts of styles. I put most of my attempts up for sale because I have found that just because I don’t like it, doesn’t mean there isn’t some one who will like it enough to buy it.
I sell my 5300 plus cards amongst almost a million other cards at the site, and I only make a pittance on each card, but it’s lots of fun and it gives me a chance to put my best art and jokes and creativity in the hands of people all over the world. Knowing I make people smile feels good and I hope that people will not forget to send cards by snail mail because that’s something they can put their hands on ten years from now and remember you.