Good News Abounds!

If anything, today’s weather is worse than yesterday’s. It’s cloudy, a stiff wind is blowing, a drizzly rain is falling, and the temperature is a chilly 56 degrees F as opposed to yesterday’s high of 66! Even so, I prefer this weather to last week’s heat and high humidity. It’s a good chance to catch up on indoor chores without the misery of constant sweating and clammy floors and furniture.

At the height of last week’s heat, I was visited by a newly found saddle fitter who evaluated my saddle and my horse and declared that he could take my saddle apart, narrow the tree and restuff it to fit my horse better. Since it’s a quality saddle in good condition and needs only these minor adjustments, I won’t have to go saddle shopping again! The long and short of it is that this culminated a long-time goal of mine to “do something” about a saddle that I knew was a little too wide for my horse but that is comfortable for me and that I love. Thanks to a Chronicle of The Horse online forum, I was able to find a saddle fitter in Michigan who was highly recommended by other dressage riders. If the fit turns out well, I’ll share his name.

The other thing I accomplished over the past week was to finish weeding the flower beds, plant the wax begonias and install edging blocks along the front of the old garage flower bed. That made a huge improvement in its looks and helps to hold the water in, since one end of the bed is higher than lawn level. All of my new perennials that survived the winter are doing spectacularly, and the foxgloves are now blooming in lovely hues of magenta and cream. I’m going to wait until next year to move plants around after evaluating their different growing characteristics and bloom times. This year I’ll install more edging blocks along the long fence bed and dig out more sections between shrubs which will make mowing the lawn easier for my husband.

In about ten days, Horse Shows By The Bay will begin its expanded three week series of shows in Acme, and I’m hoping to get over there to shoot at least a couple of times. There will be an all-afternoon series of polo matches that are must-sees as well.

In honor of HSBB, I’m thinking of starting a new painting or drawing using one of my images from past shows. There are so many good ones to choose from that it will be difficult to make a choice! Should it be hunters, jumpers, dressage, ponies or a general horse show scene? Or, perhaps I’ll start my planned series of horse show dogs.

There is more good news that Mural Mosaic’s The Horse Gift will be displayed at this year’s Calgary Stampede. That’s the mural I did a panel for last year, so if you’re up that way and going to take in the Stampede, be sure to search out the mural. You can’t miss it; it’s 22 feet high! So far, the mural has been shown at Spruce Meadows, Quarter Horse Congress and the National Finals Rodeo; all top horse venues with lots of visitors. Reports are that visitors are just blown away by it! You can buy your own poster of it, too, or buy a book and put together your own life sized horse poster of the mural. I have books, if anyone is interested.

At the top are my foxgloves blooming. And below is my panel for The Horse Gift.

One Chapter Closes, Another Opens

Last week we took a trip to Alexandria, VA to attend a memorial service and burial for my mother at Arlington National Cemetery. Our daughter, Tina, accompanied us, along with a chair that my sister wanted but couldn't take home with her on the plane back in March. We fit everything in my Subaru wagon with a few inches to spare and saved a lot on gas versus driving the SUV such a long distance. Tina had a lot more room on the way home, needless to say.

It's been quite a few years since we took a vacation of any sort, much less travelled east to the DC area where my sister lives, so it was a real treat to get away even if only for a few days. DC/Alexandria is one of my favorite places in the world, and I would love to live there if it weren't for the heat, humidity, congestion and traffic! It's a far cry from northern Michigan in all respects, but is so loaded with the history of our great country that there is tons to see at every turn.

I was quite disappointed that I didn't take my camera because the flash cards were acting up, so I had to depend on my husband to take photos and thus didn't get a lot of shots I would have taken if I'd had my camera. So, there were no photos of the mountains in Pennsylvania or Maryland or all the interesting barns we saw along the way. And, not many photos of family once we reached my sister's house in Alexandria.

My sister has an ideal location just off the George Washington Parkway north of Alexandria proper. She's also a few miles south of Mt Vernon which we visit almost every time we go. There is a wonderful biking/hiking/running path that goes along the parkway which my biking/running daughter took advantage of a couple of times while lamenting that Ann Arbor, where she lives, doesn't have anything nearly as nice. There is just a small strip of woods that separates the parkway from the Potomac at this point also, which makes the area very beautiful. To top it off, Alexandria is a city that oozes with the charm of colonial style architecture and buildings dating to the early days of our Republic.

The weekend's events included a mini family get together as well as the ceremony at Arlington where my father had already been laid to rest. My oldest sister and her daughter joined us from S. Carolina and Georgia, and my niece and her husband came from England. My nephew and his wife also live in Alexandria, so we had some good times visiting at my sister's house and having great food and fun conversation.

The weather cooperated, and the ceremony at Arlington couldn't have been nicer! My sister did a wonderful job of planning it, and all who wanted to spoke a few words about my remarkable mother. Afterwards, we had a delicious luncheon at the Army/Navy officer's club (thanks to my retired Army brother-in-law's connections) and then went home and took a nap. We were all pretty exhausted by that time.

The next day the three of us took in the wonderful new museum at Mt. Vernon and learned much about the Father of our Country. If you have a chance, be sure to take it in the next time you visit Mt. Vernon. That night Tina was invited by her cousins to join them at a concert of The Gipsy Kings at Wolf Trap. She had a wonderful time.

On Sunday we said our goodbyes and headed for home with me feeling a sense of peace, both for myself and for my mother. With this chapter of my life closed at long last, perhaps now I'll have the time and emotional energy once again to devote to my art; my life's work.

Lilac Season

The lilacs above are an old fashioned variety that were here when we bought the property over thirty years ago. They had probably been here for many decades before that since this property was once a farmstead along the banks of the lake, going back to the nineteenth century when the area was cleared and homesteaded. Hard as it is to believe today, northwest Michigan was still very much a wilderness until late in the 1800's. Some southern Michiganders still think it is!

Our lilacs are now in bloom, and their sweet fragrance fills the air when I do my daily tour of the flower beds. Unfortunately, we can’t see them from the house, but there are small lilacs planted along the road fence which will be visible from the house once they’re big enough to put on a real display. I was told they need lots of manure to bloom well, so I must remember to bring some home from the barn each time I go. Last year they got a dose of Moo Doo, but it didn’t spur any blooms this Spring, much to my disappointment.

Last weekend I drove all over in search of the annuals that I wanted for the flower beds; wax begonias with green leaves and pink and white flowers. By experimentation, these are the colors that work the best in the beds along the driveway and house and the round bed that hides the well pipe. These are partially shaded areas, and the begonias do better than any other plants I’ve tried, plus they bloom profusely well into autumn. I just love them!

I also bought a flat of pansies, another favorite, and will plant them in the road fence beds as border plants where ever there is a need. Several years ago these happy little plants bloomed so well that they could be seen from the house and even managed to over winter and bloom again. I lost the remaining ones when they dried up one summer before I could get them mulched. I don’t know what it is about that bed along the fence; whether it’s a thick layer of insulating snow that the plows deposit or what. My snap dragons come back every year, too, and are now about five years old.

On Sunday I weeded the driveway flower bed and planted some of the begonias; by far the earliest I’ve ever planted before! Usually, June is ending before I get around to this chore, and wouldn’t you know it; there was a freeze warning for Sunday night! We missed the freeze, and the plants looked healthy the next morning and happy to be out of their confining little boxes.

For the time being, I’m contenting myself with this form of creativity while winding up other urgent projects around the house and figuring out how I can fit in significant blocks of time for artwork. I suspect that means curtailing computer time to an hour a day instead of the several that is the current routine. Goodbye Facebook and other mindless wanderings around the internet.

Just as I had hoped, my last blog post about the licensing agent has exorcised this unpleasant experience once and for all and has allowed me to move on. As negative as it was, it had a very positive and beneficial effect. Such people are just not worth stewing over!

The Licensing Agent; A Cautionary Tale

"Sweetie" 11"x14" pastel painting

I’m giving you fair warning now that this is going to be a long post. I’m writing it because this incident has been haunting me for almost two years, and I’d like to let it go and move on.

A couple of years ago, I was contacted by a licensing agent who was looking for an equine artist to represent in a new venture into licensing horse images for her corporate clients. She was very enthusiastic about my art and very flattering in her comments. She told me that my art had the WOW! factor and that she wanted to “brand” me with a big marketing campaign and thought that I could become another Chris Cummings in the licensing world. Pretty heady stuff, right?

The problem was that I already had a licensing agent/dealer, but, I hadn’t had much luck with her for several years. I told the new agent (I’ll call her Cindy) that I would consider her offer. We chatted on the phone, and she built herself up by saying that she had a background in marketing and worked with many big companies which licensed images for their products and that she had a very good reputation in the industry. Then I contacted two of her artists, a husband and wife team, who gave her an enthusiastic endorsement. Next, I checked the contract I had with the current licensing agent and found that I could cancel it by giving her 60 days’ notice.

After doing this due diligence, I felt safe in accepting the new offer from Cindy who was willing to wait the 60 days. I told her right up front that the only images I had available for licensing were on my website, and she didn’t express any concern about that. I notified my current agent, and Cindy sent me a contract to sign that would be effective at the end of the 60 days. She also requested that I send her images so that she could put together a marketing sheet to show to her clients. I asked her which of my current images she wanted for this purpose.

That’s when the trouble began. I never got a direct answer. Instead she emailed me a list of ideas for paintings based on requests that she’d gotten from her contacts. I asked her several times more which images to send. Her response was always to tell me that certain ones would be better in color or with a different background or with the horse facing the other way or this or that. I asked her what sorts of images to work on first. Her response was to just send me the same list of ideas that she’d gotten from her clients which was a long one.

Without any guidance from Cindy, I had no choice but to do my own research. I reviewed all of my sales records and came up with a list of best sellers and worst sellers in prints and note cards. I presented that to her and got no response. I looked through all of my horsey gift catalogs and horse catalogs to see what sorts of images are on the market to give me ideas for what works best. Based on those findings, I finally gathered ten of my best sellling images on a CD and mailed it to her. Her response was that they were “a good starting point”.

Two weeks later, the contract went into effect, and I emailed her to find out what was going on. I didn’t hear from her for two days. Then she emailed to say that I didn’t have an “extensive” enough portfolio of current work and that she was talking to another equine artist who had a “large” portfolio. She explained that she needed a “minimum of 20 strong images” in order to launch a marketing campaign which was something she had never mentioned before. She was still willing to represent me with my limited portfolio, though, if I was willing to continue.

Naturally, this came as a shock since she hadn’t given me a clue before that there was any problem from her point of view. So, I went through my images again and sent her 16 more possibilities by email that I’d originally eliminated for one reason or another and asked her to let me know if any of them were suitable. By this time, I was getting very uneasy about the whole situation and Cindy’s lack of communication and candor.

Over a week went by, and I heard nothing from Cindy. So, I sent her another email asking if she had gotten the images. I heard nothing for another two weeks and emailed her again, asking for advice as to what to paint first. There was still no response, so I phoned her. She told me that she couldn’t talk now because she had a business client coming for the weekend but would phone me on Monday. That was on Friday. On Sunday night I got an email from her saying that she had found another “incredible established artist” with “a large portfolio” to represent and would not be able to represent me after all. She went on to twist the knife deeper by saying that it would take many years before I would reach “profitability”for her in licensing due to my limited portfolio and lack of dedication to regular painting.

I wrote her back and agreed that I wasn’t the right artist for her and hadn’t been happy about the way things had been going. I also expressed puzzlement over why she had contacted me in the first place and why I hadn’t been told in the beginning that I would need X number of images and why she hadn’t given me more guidance in what to paint for her.

The funny thing is that no new artist appeared on her website, and a year later she contacted one of my best artist friends and other artists as well. So, what became of that “incredible” artist I wonder?

I’ve since come to the conclusion that Cindy knew nothing about the equine art licensing market and that she expected “her” artists to produce paintings quickly. I also suspect that her view is that the artists work for her rather than the other way around.

This whole incident was a huge blow to my ego; one that I’m still struggling to overcome. I’m hoping that this post will help to put the unpleasantness behind me once and for all. My biggest regret is that I let go my former licensing agent. She helped to establish my career early on, was always supportive and helpful and was familiar with the world of equine art. I’ve found her advice far more helpful than the little bits that I received from Cindy. I regret that by hastily cancelling that contract, I also lost a friend.

Perhaps that’s what’s bothering me the most.

My First Blog Award!

This is truly exciting! I am very honored and humbled to accept my first blog award from fellow equine artist, Linda Shantz, whose blog I guested on last month. Thank you very much, Linda!

The past two weeks have been busy ones, filled with appointments, tweaking my new website design, raking leaves and other assorted duties. Happily, I finished up my latest short stint in Physical Therapy on Friday and am looking forward to more days at home when I don't have to run to town for any reason. That will allow me to get back into the studio again and do some early season gardening to get the beds ready for summer. I don't want to be out there in the heat working this year like I have the past two years.

While I'm writing this, I'm also backing up my computer. Once all those images are safely saved onto disks, I can erase my two camera disks and be ready to shoot more photos.

Finally, I'd like to thank my friends, Linda Shantz and Judy Johnson for visiting my newly revised website and giving me thoughts on how well it's working. As I mentioned before, Linda does a lot of Thoroughbred race horse paintings, and Judy is doing a series of shelter dogs paintings which she sells to benefit her local shelter. They are really cute paintings which she also sells as prints. Please visit her blog and pick out a shelter dog of your own to take home.

That's it for today. I would still love to hear from anyone else with your thoughts on my new website design. I think it's already paid off, as I got a call this week from someone who is interested in buying one of my paintings that I hadn't put up for sale yet. He'll call back next week. I hope, I hope, I hope!!

Thank you for visiting, and a Happy Mother's Day weekend to you all.

Alpha Mare Gets a Makeover

Whew!! That’s one more big job accomplished! Or, as my grandmother used to say, “I’m glad that elephant is behind me!”.

I’ve spent the better part of the last two weeks revising my website which had, frankly, become a bit of a shambles. I had started to revise it a couple of times but never completed the job, so there were pages with three different designs, and the site had lost its uniform look. More importantly, I had rearranged some galleries but neglected to change old links and the result was duplicate content. Google doesn’t like duplicate content.

My visitor numbers have dropped dramatically over the past two years to a point where they are now less than half of what they once were. Knowing that there had to be a reason for this, I did some exploring, both on the website pages and in my stats and came up with some answers. I hope. I found a lot of broken links, among other things. Google doesn’t like broken links.

One of the things I did was to go through my Sitemeter visitor logs and write down every single page that visitors visited during a 10 day period, excluding those who only visited one or two pages. I wanted to see which are the more popular pages and how visitors were navigating around the site. Then I compiled the figures into a spreadsheet and sorted them by number of visits. This was invaluable information as I decided which images to keep and which to leave on the site; which galleries to keep and which to combine with others.

My mantra with this revision was to simplify the whole site, so the first thing I did was to decrease the number of different galleries by combining some together. For instance, the old jumping and dressage galleries were combined into an all english riding gallery. From there I proceeded to make a list of paintings and drawings I wanted to take off the site. Mostly these were paintings which were either old portraits or just not up to current standards. Some had been sold and didn’t really fit in anywhere or serve any purpose. I figured there was no point in showcasing a bunch of old portraits if I’m not accepting commissions any longer.

I made a bunch of other changes that I won’t bore you with and have ended up with a “new” website which I think is both warmer and softer in feel and cleaner in look with the artwork better arranged for greater impact. I’m hoping that the Google gods will now smile on my website again, raise its ranking in the searches and once again bring the hoards to my doorstep, metaphorically speaking.

Perhaps you could help the cause by visiting my new website and letting me know what you think. You can visit Alpha Mare Equine Art by clicking on the link.

Meanwhile, back in the studio, I’ve decided to resurrect the pony drawing at the top and work on it again. It’s the preliminary drawing for a painting, but I got stuck with what to do about a background. I’m thinking now of going simple with mainly a toned canvas. The title is The Little Inspector, and I’ll get to work on it very soon.

But first the house needs cleaning.

Thanks for visiting, and please come again.

The Forsythia Are Lovely This Year

Can I distract you with that statement from the fact that I haven’t posted in two weeks? Or, perhaps you hadn’t noticed.

Yesterday was an exciting day mostly because I was a guest artist on a fellow Equine Art Guild member’s blog. Linda Shantz paints mostly Thoroughbreds and has plenty of her subjects to choose from right in her own backyard. This month she’s doing a painting a day which is something I haven’t had the courage to tackle yet. Her blog posts are always entertaining because Linda is a good writer as well as a gifted artist with a great sense of humor. Please check out her blog for today’s painting and my guest spot from yesterday.

My only regret is that I was so sick with an intestinal bug when I wrote my guest blog post that it came out less entertaining and engaging than I would have liked. It discusses all the changes I made from the reference photograph while creating The Green Team painting.

The other exciting part of yesterday was that I made some really good progress on revising my website. To make a long story short, I had revised some pages and “galleries” over the past year or so but not others. The result was that there was no uniform “look” to the pages, lots of broken links or links to pages which contained duplicate content. These are all things which Google frowns upon and could explain why my website visitors have been dwindling for the past year.

The time had come to tackle the whole website and give it a new, fresher brighter look, and yesterday the last of the major web pages was revised. I have only the image pages to do yet, and they should be easy compared to the rest. In the process, I’ve deleted a lot of pages and quite a few of the images to help streamline the site and show only my best work. I would love it if you could take a look and let me know how you like the new design, navigation and arrangement.

Now, as for the forsythia, it IS lovely this year! After several days of gray, rainy weather, the sun came out this morning, so I took a tour of the flower beds and took the photo above of my oldest forsythia. It’s the one the deer keep pruning into a mishapen mess despite my best efforts to protect it.

As luck would have it, just after I snapped this photo, my camera announced that the CF card was full. I was standing under the Burning Bush, and a chickadee alighted just inches from my face. I mean INCHES! He was not the least afraid, and I had no way to take his picture! Of course, by the time I went back out with another card in the camera, he was gone.

It’s clearly time to burn those photos to backup and empty those cards because I don’t want a repeat of that experience the next time I have camera at hand.

As soon as I get this website revision finished, I’ll be back in the studio and out in the yard. Next up will be a dressage drawing and a pony painting that’s been lingering around for years.

See you next time, and thanks for visiting!