Art and Life and Music
It's been ages since I've updated this site, but now it's new and fresh and improved! You know that feeling where you're writing a blog post, and you have all these thoughts pouring out of you, and you're editing as you go and everything is coming together, and you're summarizing the past 2 years of music and art (since you're last blog post) and then suddenly *poof* …it's all gone? Yeah, well that happened. So, here I am, trying again, thinking to myself, why didn't I write the whole thing in a word processing document? When will I ever learn? I think the resulting post will be a little more concise. Let's see. Maybe you've been to my site and have noticed it's been redone. Or maybe you've never visited before, and it's just looks nice. Either way, there's an unmistakable shift in focus. It isn't that I'm focusing less on music, per se, but rather, I'm focusing more on art. Perhaps the two will align in perfect balance at some point. That is what I'm hoping for. My day job is as a buyer at a music store here in Chicago, and it's a lot of mental work. I love it. But it's a bit draining on my mental energy. So the quarantine afforded me a wonderful opportunity to focus on my watercolor painting and visual art as a whole. I developed tennis elbow in my left arm, in late April, making playing guitar a little bothersome, so I try to keep it up, but there was a period where I stopped playing to see if the rest would help me heal faster. It didn't, so I got back to it. I try to not forget about my guitar and my songwriting, but it's a discipline that does fade when you're not on top of it.
Meantime, I found lots of chances to make paintings for folks of their pets, and to take some fun online illustration classes to open up my creativity. You can see the results here.
Then, my dear friend Sue Fink and I collaborated on a project. I illustrated a video to a song she wrote as part of Jenny Bienemann's Haiku Milieu. We were both really happy with the result. It was the first time I'd ever done a project combining video with illustration, and I'm now working on a video for a songwriter fellow who saw Sue's video! More on that in a few weeks.
The other amazing news is that I'm back on track with my fantasy folk story concept album. I was quite discouraged after not being able to finish it and seeing it sit for so long. So I asked for help. I reached out to the illustrious John Abbey of King Size Studios, and he's agreed to come to the rescue. I'm excited to see what he comes up with to propel this project forward. Well, wow! That was much more concise. I guess because I smell food and I think it's almost time for dinner.