It has been a long time since I have organized a solo show of my art. If fact, it was in 2006. Stuff happened that took the front seat and needed to be addressed. I promised myself that once I had recovered my my wake up call called cancer, I would show again. The time has come. I got my ‘all clear’ last fall. So my new years resolution was to create 100 artworks by June. I booked the Mill Pond Gallery in Richmond Hill for the weekend of June 9/10 to secure my commitment.

I used to steal an hour, grab a brush and go at it. My spontaneity has disappeared. Now before I plan my escape, I need to make sure all the house chores are done, commitments are resolved, turn off the computer and unplug the phone. I’m best if I get up at 5:30am, forgo the coffee and straight to the studio. I put on some soft music like York Region artist David Rankine’s ‘Healing Space’ cd and begin to lay out the paint.

If I eat or drink I lose the momentum. I concede to bathroom breaks. A good day is if I can stay in my hole for about 9 hours. Then I’ll come up for air and take a look around. On days like this I can finished half a dozen paintings. I put them away where I can’t look at them and pull out the previous six I did on my previous session. This way I can look at these pieces with new eyes and tweak the little details I missed on round one.

My time between sessions is 5 to 10 days. If you can do math, I think I’m in trouble to reach my 100 by June goal.

I’m looking for other artists suggestions how they get their engines roaring. But to apply to this question, you have to be over 30.

____________________________

Herbert Pryke | www.herbertpryke.com

It’s time to take control and face reality: social media plays one of the largest roles in marketing today. Do you have a social media plan? You should. It’s as important today as a business or marketing plan is. Everyone uses social media today or at least those who are social do. But to do it right takes time and effort to learn what the tools mean.

Things to consider:

Try to post positive tips more than self-promotional ones, at least four or five times more. One of the top reasons people unfollow is because of overwhelming marketing, boring or repetitive posts.

Retweet an article because it makes good business sense to you and your clients. Make sure the offering is sound. Link it to your Facebook page or latest news from your company blog.

Spread your posts out so that when your followers log in, they’re not inundated with only your posts. It’s a sure way to get unfollowed.

Always try to put a link in a post for more information. You can only say so much in Social Media. Use simple and positive language. Remember that it is ‘social’ media. Include an action phrase to motivate your followers like saying ‘please retweet or please like. Research shows that more LIKES are made on posts at the end of the week, so make the ones on Friday count. Be polite. Thank your followers for retweeting or mentioning. It’s all about relationship-building.

Remember that when sending email newsletters to customers and prospects that they need to benefit from the message or they’ll opt-out from further mailings. It’s not just about you.

If you can keep these basics in your head, they’ll help you become more social. The Internet’s not going away, so leverage it’s power and grow your business!

 _____________________________________________________

Franklin Beecham is a visual artist. His paintings are collected internationally. He is also the Founder of markhamartcollective.com an online visual art resource.

Website:  http://www.beecham.ca

http://www.markhamartcollective.com  

Before William the Conqueror set out to ‘affix England to Normandy’ people were called simple names like Fox, Wildgoose, Smalldove, Toogood … What do you think yours might have been?

When standardised spelling arrived in later centuries names became more creative reflecting landscapes and trades among many other identifiable themes. Smalldove might instead now be known as Mary of the Wood and Toogood – John the Butcher. As villages and towns grew and more than one John appeared they had to find ways to differentiate the two.  This gave rise to names like John, son of Robert, which eventually evolved to John Robertson and so on.

Surnames became a requirement when rulers, starting back with William, began keeping census records for tax purposes.

Later on middle names further complicated things. At a time when children had a spiritual name plus a day to day name, the spiritual name was eventually adopted as a middle name. By the early part of the twentieth century, most people had middle names.

When doing your family genealogy you may find yourself hitting many roadblocks because your name could have changed several times over the centuries. My paternal surname ‘Byrne’, Gaelic for ‘raven’, was first O’Byrne, the ‘O’ standing for ‘son of’ or ‘God’.  My ancestors did however drop the ‘O’ at some point. If they were Christians they likely didn’t want to flaunt their spiritual devotion during times of religious suppression.

Have fun tracing your paternal and maternal family names to their origin; the history of these names will add a fascinating layer to your life story.  

Signed: Lesley from the Newmarket

No more wishing strangers well, shaking hands, and holding the door for little O’Ladies.

The spirit of giving ends for many people, but not for artists.

Artists, through the generosity of spirit give their inspiration visually in every brushstroke.

Artists love to give; need to give; and in this pleasure of giving become stronger people.

Art gives hope and inspiration – in children’s hospitals; school walls; cancer research clinics; and in your own home.

A gift that happens to be personally crafted by the giver is most likely to be a treasure to the receiver. All the more reason to make a New Years resolution to open your creativity. Break out some brushes and give.

Don’t think your an artist? Hum Bug. Creativity lies within each of us. All we need to do is eliminate any expectations and ‘just do it’.

A healthier lifestyle is a New Years resolution for many, so here is another reason to be creative. Put simply; art makes you feel good and happy people are healthier people.

On a more scientific note, when anyone practices an exercise that involves using their imagination, an amino acid is released in the brain. It is the same protein that regulates our sleep; encourages proper appetite and builds our immune system.

Being an artist is a big sack of abundance. Presents come down the chimney every time we squeeze a tube of paint.

It takes some courage to begin and resilience to continue; but soon your patience will be rewarded with joy when you’re signing your name on the canvas.

 ______________________________________________________

Herbert Pryke teaches acrylic painting classes for the Town of Richmond Hill.

Herbert Pryke is founder of Artcures Inc. an organization that engages the community into exploring the healing power of art.

 Digital presence

You’re expected, first, to have a website and to keep refreshing it. Then you have to appear on social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Tumblr, Wynken, Blynken, or NOD. (Okay, I made the last three up, but trust me, if they don’t exist right now, they will within the next 4 microseconds.)

You also have to get your music up on sites so it can be bought (you hope) and downloaded from the Net. And you have to video your latest gig so that it too can go up on YouTube, because the one you put there of last week’s gig is, well, so last week.

And then of course, you’d better blog about the gig and tweet about it, both before and after—and preferably even during!

 Cyber smarts

And you must also learn how to DO all of the above. Some of it’s easy, some of it’s harder, especially if, like me, you weren’t born with a digital device in your hand.

So recently, and belatedly, I learned how to use Windows Movie Maker. While a couple of other people have done videos for YouTube for songs of mine, I’ve been told my YouTube presence is sorely lacking, so it was time to try my hand at one myself.

Now I could have just put the credits up with the audio track and no images at all, but I wanted something that would stand out a bit more (on the Web we’re all competing for eyeballs and earballs, after all), especially since this song honours the memory of one of my sisters.

Sourcing images

But it wasn’t easy, in part because I didn’t want to steal images from other people’s websites or Flickr streams, etc. (which I’m sure millions of others do). And contacting them to ask permission would have been time consuming. I was finally able to find a few images I could use because they’re licensed with Creative Commons, and then I added images of my own.

So here’s my first original video, of a song from my 2003 CD Pegasus. I kept it simple in order not to distract from the story.

Digital slaves?

Movie Maker 7 isn’t that complicated, but I still spent many hours fine-tuning this little video—hours I should have spent trying to get gigs, practising new chords, or working out harmonies for the CD I’m recording. But this is 2012, and this is the current reality.

Or is it? If you’re a musician, how much time do you spend on your Web presence? Is it helping? Do we have to be digital slaves? Please share!

……..

Marie-Lynn Hammond is a co-founder of Stringband, a seminal Canadian folk group, and a critically acclaimed songwriter living in York Region. In past lives she’s written plays and magazine articles and hosted national CBC radio shows. In between working on two new CDs, she freelances as an editor of both fiction and nonfiction. http://www.marielynnhammond.com/

Maybe it was an accumulation of troubles that made them decide to leave: smallpox, suppression, debt, food shortages, religious persecution, plagues … Posters for their salvation flashed everywhere – ‘Come and own your own fertile land in North America!’

If you write about your family’s immigration local genealogy societies based in the immigrant’s homeland can help you to describe their life there, as well as provide possible reasons as to why they left. This may seem easy to do but because country boundaries are forever changing as a result of conflict and other influences, especially in Europe, this can complicate your research and it may have you checking out several countries to trace your lineage.

Another thing is that alphabets can vary from country to country, and this can affect the spelling of names. Some names were spelled phonetically on forms and the immigrant then signed with an “X”. This “X” does not necessarily mean your ancestors were illiterate.

Speak to as many relatives as possible to pick their brain for information about your ancestors.  This is when you may have to draw from a pool of “already written” stories or archival sources that may depict your ancestors’ lives. Immigrating to a new country is a bold step to take. Much can be written here about courage, sacrifice, fear, uncertainty, weather, food, language, work, and nostalgia.

Dig deep into the psyche of your ancestors as you journey with them to the new lands they sought out so you could live and prosper today. Give your ancestors a regal place in your biography so that their faded names, grainy photos and X’s may blossom forever in your family tree.

“Well, sure,” I said, but hesitantly. I haven’t written a blog post in a really long time. Actually, I haven’t written much of anything in a really long time. I am ashamed to admit this in the face of other, more prolific writers, but a blog post of 500 words often takes me at the very least three days to complete. One day to draft and edit, a second day to edit again, and then another day to edit… and then usually I sit on it for about a week thinking: Is this really what I want to say? I don’t want to put anything out there that I’d be ashamed of tomorrow. I want pieces that are concise and well written – as perfect and professional as I can possibly make them. The result of trying to create a perfect piece every time? Hardly any pieces are completed.

No more of that. After much discussion, I’ve decided, at least for the moment, to let go of concerns with perfection, portfolios, and professionalism, and instead just write. To be honest, the thought of writing freely had never dawned on me, and likely wouldn’t have if I hadn’t been able to discuss my fears with Sam. I was too busy thinking: Oh dear, whatever I send out will be out there forever. Once it’s on the Internet, no matter how ashamed I am of it later, I will never be able to take it back or take it away.

Perhaps this is the big problem with art these days: This worry of art as though it’s a business, where each piece you put out is a measure of your worth in a pool of other artists – another thing to add to your portfolio and therefore something that must reflect well on you as a professional. I never entertained any ideas of having an audience when I first started blogging, so I wrote prolifically about everything that came to mind. The result? Often a bunch of garbage. But sometimes, rarely, gems that I would look back on later and think: Wow. Did I write this? Was that me? The reason for these gems is clear. When you produce more, you increase the odds of producing something good. When you only write a little, your chances of happening upon gold become much less.

The problem with looking at writing as a business – a platform, a voice that will echo and echo and follow you for all online eternity – is the fact that you become too worried about being professional to write freely, to take risks, and to say what you want to say. I realize now that it’s not good for me creatively. It’s definitely not good for the publications I write for either, which often have to wait for a long time before I send out anything new.

From now on, I’ll try harder to supress this need for perfection and professionalism and instead say what I’d like to say honestly and frankly. I want to try harder to get back to the basics – to write for writing’s sake.

To be honest, artists like Sam and I who are green and young and are just starting their artistic “careers” (again, that word “career”! I hope to address this idea of real life (careers) vs art in a future post) are at one of the most exciting and frightening points in our lives. Everything is up in the air. Every day we have moments where we think, “Oh my, what am I doing? And why am I doing it? And how will I sustain myself for the rest of my life off of love and passion alone?” Usually when I find a blog that is honest about these fears, I like it and relate to it, though I would never have thought of writing about it myself. Is it professional to confess fear on the Internet? I’m not too sure. But at this point, I’m tossing that question away. Perhaps there is another writer out there who shares these concerns and would find a post about it interesting too. That’s the person I’ll be writing for now.

I find nothing more inspiring than meeting with other artists, whether literary, visual, or musical. Meeting other artists gives me a sense of belonging and reassures me that I am NOT crazy listening to those voices in my head and trying to articulate them in the world somehow. Arts councils thrive on the idea of sharing that most vulnerable part of you, of embracing what you love, and of seeing others embrace what they love too. That is what is most beneficial about them. YorkScene is just another extension of this meeting of minds, and somewhere along the way I forgot about that. I started looking at it as a platform – a place where ideas were stated rather than shared and fostered.

Come back to my artistic roots with me! Somehow I lost myself, but hopefully I’ll find myself again soon. And I look forward to getting feedback from you too.

Where we ‘see a movie’ but we ‘watch TV’. Where a ‘fat chance’ and a ‘slim chance’ mean the same thing, and where a ‘wise man’ and a ‘wise guy’ are opposites. Where a bunch of consonants are often strung together with just one vowel to help us pronounce the word – like in the word ‘strengths’. And what about a double negative forming a positive, but a double positive not forming a negative … hmm, another exception.

And then we’ve got various countries pronouncing English differently; America, Britain, India, Australia, and where I’m originally from – South Africa. I still have a hard time saying ‘ba-na-na’. To me it’s still a ba-naa-na’. And what about the stuff English borrows from other languages?  ‘Hors d’oeuvres’, from the French, ‘robot’ from the Czechs.

What a tricky language to learn to write, and here we all are, with one foot in tradition and the other in creativeness, as we try to create a beautiful symphony of text, to express ourselves, to correspond.

Here’s to you, all you movers and shakers of the English language – Bravo! (By the way – that word is borrowed from the Italians).

You may have noticed these days the indie record/music scene is almost as big as the non-indie scene – if not in terms of dollars, then certainly in terms of the number of artists. In fact, there are probably more independents than there are acts signed to major labels.

Sharing isn’t caring

The Internet played a large part in this, of course. Suddenly everyone was illegally sharing and no one was buying, and labels would only sign sure moneymakers, so artists began making albums independently – i.e., paying to do it themselves.

But the indie scene has actually been around a heck of a lot longer than the Internet. I like to say, jokingly, or semi-jokingly, that at one time, it used to be called the folk scene.

Folk pioneers

That’s where my musical roots are. My old band Stringband has been called a pioneer of the indie record scene. What that means is we just couldn’t get any label to sign us all those eons ago. Most of the majors in Canada then were US subsidiaries, aiming at the big commercial US market, and they all told us we were too folky and too Canadian. So we started our own label.

 A generous fan funded our first album, but we didn’t want to ask him for help for the next one, so we borrowed an idea that was floating around but hadn’t become that common: we asked fans to send us $5 upfront, and we’d use the funds to make the album and then mail them a copy. It worked! We did our next two albums that way. A number of other folk acts followed suit, and that model of doing things has become commonplace in the indie music scene.

Crowd pleaser

Now they call it crowdsourcing; we just called it asking fans to help. In fact, for our third album, I got the bright idea to call it Thanks to the Following, and we printed all the supporters’ names in tiny font starting on the front cover and almost completely covering the back.

If you’re a musician and decide to go this route, there are websites that can help you, such as http://www.kickstarter.com/, http://www.gofundme.com/and others. Or you can do what I and many musicians do: contact your mailing list, and tell the fans you’re making a new CD.

Full support

Create multiple levels of support – e.g., see my fundraising page – and offer various perks. For example, my top level is $1000, for which a patron gets 10 signed CDs, 2 free tickets to the CD launch, a free house concert in their home, and – yes – an honorary producer credit on any song of their choice.

So “honorary producer” may not be quite like twiddling the dials or telling the drummer to go easy on the high hat, but some fans are tickled to become record producers this way. And you can always invite them to watch a recording session, which they may find fascinating – or boring, depending on how many takes you end up doing!

It’s a juggling act because you don’t want to downplay your story by fudging the truth of how your grade four teacher threw a box of pins at you, but always be aware of the consequence of writing disparaging remarks about people who could take offense to, or, in extreme cases, legal action, against you.

When you write your bio you have the opportunity to show your evolution throughout your story; your other characters do not have this same privilege, so don’t tell the part about how Stretch Raubenheimer fell and damaged his …. while streaking through the caf without first asking Stretch how he feels about this incident or his scarred …. in the spotlight after all these years.

Try not to use your biography as a revenge platform either, like Shania Twain indiscreetly did in ‘From This Moment On’, for that may come back to bite you one day. Telling the truth about those honest-to-goodness baddies in your life may require a few creative writing skills, but it can be done with integrity and flare, leaving you proudly perched on the high road.

Be aware and handle characters with care.