Start Again

Deer "Cast" Drawing
14" x 12"
Charcoal, Conte and Compressed Charcoal
Casey Klahn

"You have to start, over and over again."

Willem de Kooning. de Kooning, An American Master, Mark Stevens, Annalyn Swan.

Here is artist blogger Chris Ashley's view and review of de Kooning at the MoMA.


A new start for me is taking place at art *setter, where I have posted some images and an essay.

art *setter. person or institution whose tastes, talent, knowledge or ideas, has an influence on art.

Terrific & Terrible: Technical Tidbits

IT Guys

In reviewing this month of posting daily, one thing that looms large is the technical train that runs this blogging adventure. I have experienced both the terrific and the terrible with daily posting, and here are some of the events that have colored my month.

Technology Terrific.

One awesome thing was being street juried into the new and very high quality site, art *setter. I was asked to present an essay for their premier, and provided Artist, Know Thyself. I am noodling the idea of writing a SP book about the Artist's Traits series, and this was my opportunity to begin the final write of these essays.

Twitter. Now it seems that artist bloggers are getting the idea that Twitter can be a useful tool and is low impact on one's time if you do it right.

There has been increased readership here and at Twitter. I have met a number of new people, including many artists. New commentors have "de-lurked" to add their two cents here.

My sometimes poor citizenship around my artbog chums' blogs has been better during this month of posting. Recent sytem problems have curtailed that, unfortunately. Sorry to all of you who I usually visit more.

I discovered, by accident of course, how to biggie size the photos in my posts. That was a goal of my template switch, which has only been realized with the added power of big images. This blog is image centric, but not that busy compared to many websites. These bigger images should still load reasonably quickly, and I think they are batter at representing what I'm posting. I haven't tried them on artwork, yet, so we'll see how that goes.

Photobucket has been a peach of a tool. I can get animated gifs, and use them for free and on their server, too. My favorite is the axe smack down with the *pro* wrestlers. Also, some videos are available to post, which is where I found the street chalkers in Florence about a month ago.

Terrible Techno Gaffs.

I have discovered some chinks in the home system. My router is seeing it's final days of service. It works intermitantly and that means that I can't get on the internet when I want. The worst symptom, so far, has been the inability to get Twitter searches to work, and I often lose connectivity at Twitter altogether.

I have begun the De Kooning book club with Alyson Stanfield, et al., at Twitter. I couldn't get on the club page (which is accessed by doing a search query at Twitter) for about 3 days. No search query worked, although I did get on there once the other day. My router? My PC? The server at Twitter?

After downloading the Tweetdeck utility, and a day of fretting and cleaning up my PC, I am finally hooked up with my book club. Woo Hoo!

The Washington State Art Bloggers post has been updated to include new or omitted bloggers. Also access that information via a button on the right hand margin of this blog.

art *setter

My profile at art *setter.

The new web presence art *setter has gone live. My article, Artist, Know Thyself, has been published there. The artist as navel gazer? Not so much! It is the artist as a risk taker that we dissect.

art *setter is a global community website for people who are interested in contemporary art.

On another global note, some artists whose work I admire:

Zul Albani
Malaysia
Ujwala Prabhu
Bangladesh

Nordic Start

We used to call an early start up the mountain an "Alpine Start." And, conversely, the late start was the "Nordic Start." I am in bad need of some Nordic starts, after the active holiday weekend. Yesterday's studio day was fruitful, but I was all in before evening, that's for sure.

The hot post this week was Sue Smith's music video post of singer Leonard Cohen. I was gobsmacked at the performance, and it was a great pick-me-up. This video system could go viral, IMO. I am now a fan of myplay, but the available media is still a bit thin.

This is post # 16 of 30 for my month of posts project. So far, I am learning more about content and what pleases me (and readers!) the most. Worth trying, artist bloggers. Hint: write some posts a few days in advance.

I want to introduce you to artsetter, a social and commercial community supporting art , collectors and artists. The video introduction and layout of this site are outstanding. The launch date is still to be determined.

Anyway, I am in the studio as much as possible so as to have a cohesive show this September in Sausalito. I need to figure out how to work longer days, so I feel some Alpine Starts coming up...