Why You (Always?) Need A Teacher / Mentor In Your Artists Life

Seriously, I have been what I consider being an artist for about four years. I have painted on and off my whole life but it was only when I started painting on a regular basis that I suddenly saw myself blossom as an artist. Now I know that defining an "artist" is very subjective and what I define as an artist may be very different than what YOU consider to be artist. That was the clash that has resonated between the Salon and the Impressionists. In fact, it has resonated throughout the ages and that clash is what spawns and has spawned the all great movements in art.

I started being able to paint in oils only after I started going to an artist, Margot Lennertz at the Creative Arts Gallery in Sierra Madre, CA. Even in her 80's at the time, she was a wonderful start and showed us how to use oils. The times I tried I made mud.  However, it was from my first mistake, buying an acrylic magenta paint instead of oil, that led me to what I considered a wonderful way to under paint. I have taken classes from artists who use a solid background, orange, black, deep green whatever to accentuate the colors placed on top. I immediately liked the acrylic base and I didn't have to worry about contaminating the oils and yet was easily able to let that magenta, ala California Impressionism, show through. Near the end of my time with Margot she had come to the same conclusion. I don't know if she ever acted on it. I've never let it go.

However, it was after attending the shows in Vegas, plein air painting and reading books by other artists that my own art started to shift in ways I seemed to have no control over. Margot and I seemed to be moving in different directions when I remembered a teacher I had in Vegas and decided during the summer of 2010 to visit her shop and see what she had to offer. Diane Trierwriler of the Tole Bridge in Norco, CA had been a teacher for 25 years and we hit it off! That fall I started going there and my painting changed forever.

She encouraged me to do whatever I wanted as this was an open workshop Thursday mornings and since I was retired it was easy to go east in the morning and come home in the afternoon against the traffic. It was this collaboration that had my art suddenly shift yet again and it both matured and became a style that people could identify as mine. It was not what I had expected it to be but I seemed unable to stop this progression. Have any of you had this happen? You start with what you style you want to be, as an artist, and then watch, almost detached, it become something else entirely?

Multnomah Falls, First conclusion

Multnomah Falls, Second conclusion

A perfect case in point about having a mentor is shown in these two images, actually, the same painting. The one on the left was finished before Christmas. I looked at that painting throughout the holidays and was not happy with it. It seemed to lack depth. Going back to class last week I again dragged what I had thought was a finished painting and tried to understand what was wrong. Without saying much and never touching a brush to this painting, she suggested that I look at the darks and lights. The background needed to recede a bit, but not too much. The key here were the trees on the upper left and the shear wall behind it. So I applied a wash of color that both darkened it yet left those trees to stand out making it very clear there was distance between that wall and the hill the trees were on.

Then I played with the shear wall itself. Part of it was in the sun but most was in the shade. By darkening one side and lightening the other depth was added. Next came the water. The addition of Prussian blue throughout gave the water more depth...lights and darks that was apparent in the original scene. By manipulating the water where it pooled, and spattering white around it, the water took on oddly enough more power and force, what it had as it roared down!

Each of the banks coming forward had color added, a careful balancing act of not too much but more than the bank behind it. The brightest and richest in detail was the hill just above the water. It gained not only color but texture and detail. You can almost see the rocks yet they were not so detailed that it overrode what could be seen throughout. 

It took only two hours to correct, or should I say, finish? I had a good base but it needed refinement, refinement that mere suggestions helped me see and made it possible for me to finish.

That is why it never hurts to have a teacher and mentor. I have heard from many artists that they have a person they admire and discuss things with. It never hurts to ask for help!

Visit KrugsStudio.etsy.com to see this and other wonderful acrylic and oil paintings.

Americans And Color

Years ago, the first time we visited our Danish friends, they took us to the local mall in Odense. From the outside it looked kind of bunkerish, but inside it was a riot of color. And I mean COLOR! Walls in bright primary colors - yellow, red, green, blue! Your teeth would vibrate they were so bright! Looking around all but dazed our friends laughed and said that in Denmark you need to get people to buy so merchants use lots of color. He said most of the year is grey and dark so bright colors perk them up to buy things. Then looking at me he observed, "In the states they must calm you down with pastels so you will buy."

KrugsStudio's CELESTIAL BIRDHOUSE

I have thought about that statement on an off over the years and after yet another trip to Norway and Denmark last summer, realized that is still true. American malls are swathed in pastel colors though with the influx of immigrants from other nations, I have noticed their shops use much more color. Panda Xpress while an American company of immigrants uses red and black, Hispanic stores are more colorful too. Going to Oliveria Street in Los Angeles, the tiny shops are literally a riot of color. I often take photos to remember combinations I would have never tried!

CELESTIAL BIRDHOUSE, front view

One of the most common comments on my Etsy store is about my use of color. People say they love them and to be honest, some of the brightest items seem to sell first. Not all, but many. When I was trying to adapt what became my CELESTIAL BIRDHOUSE, I knew that I wanted it to be colorful. A bright blue sky reduces to a lighter blue, a golden yellow sun with golden rays would be punctuated with my growing fascination with Zentangles. The colors had to be bright, cheerful yet had to work together to create a united whole.

This birdhouse, a 3 room "condo," came with a wire hanger. A friend, looking at it commented that the wire was ugly and didn't compliment the wonderful birdhouse. While the wire would be needed to hang it, I had to agree that it was indeed ugly. After all the work to create a unique birdhouse, that plain old wire was a blight on my work. I scrounged around and found some raffia my wife used for projects and wrapped it around the wire. Its soft tan color is the perfect foil and it looks now like the amazing birdhouse it is.

I have often wondered about our use of color. Even as bright as Impressionist paintings are compared to the dark and often murky salon paintings, few have the bright richness and intensity that Van Gogh and Gauguin had. There's a reason STARRY NIGHT is considered by many the finest painting ever made. Its deep and intense blues counterpointed by the rich yellows of the stars and moon resonate with us. The fellow expressionists that followed have never had the acclaim the masters of Impressionism had.

Today, when gallery looking in Palm Springs, Laguna Beach, Los Angeles and even Las Vegas, I notice that people tend to shy away from anything too bright. And yet, many artists use bright colors! Maybe we are just not comfortable with color or at least too much of it. That's why, in just about any home, you should set aside a place to add a color accent. I'm not saying paint a wall red, but use an accent that uses red or bright yellow or green. Just a splash of color can make an entire room come alive.

If you love color please visit my store, KrugsStudio.etsy.com. Each and every one is the perfect accent piece to compliment your good taste AND colors! If you see something you like but need another color way, email me. I can certainly give it a try!

Using Quark 10.02

Quark used to be the premier desktop publishing software in the world. Since it lagged behind Adobe after Apple changed operating systems - going from 9.0X to the new Unix based 10.X, not once but twice with software running on OS 9.X, they gave Adobe with their creaky PageMaker the opportunity to come back with their "new" InDesign, actually a glorified PageMaker. The difference? It could run on Mac's OSX software.

The first few iterations were terrible. But it meant to designers that they didn't have to have two operating systems running on their machines tying up memory. Finally, when Quark launched QuarkXpress 6.0 it was already too late. Because desktop publishing used PhotoShop and Illustrator anyway, and they were already Adobe products, the integration of InDesign was just too good to pass up. In just two years Quark was toppled.

They haven't gone out of business and have continued to upgrade. First 7, then 8, then 9 and now finally 10.02. I stayed with 7.5 until I upgraded to Apple OS 10.8. It stripped all of my older, non Intel based software. I lost two thirds of my software in that move and had to spent a thousand dollars to replace it. Adobe, MicroSoft, even Apple products. I was furious. Quarks solution was to have me buy version 8 at the time for $349. I dug in my heals and bought an Adobe package that included PhotoShop, Illustrator, InDesign and others I would never use.

My year with InDesign was not happy. I hated it. Then I inherited a project that someone designed for a client and I literally pulled out what little hair I had left. I got it done but not by what you would call good desktop publishing standards. It was ugly anyway and I proposed a total redo. I decided there and then it would be done on Quark.

I broke down and bought Quark 9.5. Installing it was hell. It took over two weeks to get it up and running. The customer service rep for Quark, bless her heart, tracked me all over Southern California trying to help me. Finally, I was home, sitting in front of my computer when she called and after an hour or so isolated the problem and got it installed on my iMac. It loaded on my laptop in a heartbeat. The difference though is I would rather work on a 24" screen rather than one 15".

I am sure it can do lots of wonderful things but I didn't have time to watch a bunch of videos to find out what I needed to learn. They don't even have a PDF version yet! Luckily the commands I knew still worked but unless I stumbled on it, I didn't learn one new thing. You see, no one is writing third party books about Quark anymore. That is how far they have fallen from grace.

When I upgraded to Apples's 10.9 Mavericks, the same thing happened to Quark. It wouldn't work. Everything else did, just not Quark. I entered the seven circles of hell again and after multiple (and still) calls, I got 10 installed. Its hell. Each and every time I load it, weird things happen and just as I am about to reach for the phone, it finally loads.

When I say loads, do you remember Windows 3.1? You could run to Starbucks, mail a letter and fill up the gas tank in the time it took to load. Now granted, I don't have the newest iMac, its only a dual core Intel chip, but I can measure the minutes it takes for Quark to load... 4 - 5 minutes on average. On a quad core laptop it takes about the same time. So its not the processor. Its Quark.

As a visual learner, I loved the QuickStart books because not only did they explain steps of using a software program with words, they had screen shots for us visual learners. I loved those books and buy them when they are available. There hasn't been one for Quark since maybe version 7. In 10 they changed the screen around yet again and oftentimes don't even know where anything is. Commands have been changed as well. In correcting a project yesterday, I suddenly had a pale blue box that covered the entire top of the screen not allowing me to look for commands. I finally had to shut the program down, re-launch (got in a short nap) and continued on.

As a computer user, older but certainly experienced, I don't understand the need to constantly replace things. If it works, leave it alone. I know, I know. Money turns the crank. If you beef it up you can change for it all over again. People have this need for the latest thing. I have learned that isn't always the best tact to take. I regret going to Apple's 10.9 OS, I literally hate iOS 7 for my beloved iPhone. Things worked well. If new things needed to be done, that is fine, but why mess with how it worked before? Anything new can be an option AND clearly explained.

Adobe is trying to get everyone to go into the cloud with their software. You pay a monthly fee and never own the software again. Their argument is, Microsoft started it, that you will ALWAYS have the latest and greatest versions. What if you don't want that? Now, and I only have Office 2011, every single time I load Office there is an update. Every time! That 5 minute letter is now 15 IF you are lucky and the update is small. Besides I hated 2011. Everything I knew about Office changed and I poke around all the time looking for things. If I had my way, Word 5.1 would reign supreme.

But back to Quark. I really don't know what to do. The documentation is at best minimal, there are no third party books to explain things and so, I guess I will learn to hate it just like InDesign. I hope someone from Quark is listening. Get your documentation done, give us clear instructions, not silly videos, on how to use your product. Sit down with your users, give them a task and watch what they do. Software people literally are so close to the trees they can't see the forest!

For completed AND totally unique items, please visit KrugsStudio.etsy.com. A visual feast awaits you! Thanks for visiting.

The Miracle of Murphy's Oil

If there is any reader here that crafts, like me, you have more that a few things ruined by paint. Clothes, paint brushes, trays, palettes, countertops, sinks and probably more than a few other places in the kitchen.

There are a variety of products out there that are supposed to remove paints, oil or acrylics, maybe some glues but despite their cost, I really haven't found anything better than plain old Murphy's Oil. I think I've tried them all too. Everyone has their favorite and is willing to give you advice.

One type comes as a cake that works well enough on a still wet brush. Dried and hard, nope.  Some of the fabric paint removers are best used outside, maybe in a gale force wind. I nearly passed out on one that had enough chemicals to give you a true high! The paint still remained on my clothes but I'm convinced my sinuses were squeaky clean!

The Murphy's Oil tip was made offhand by a teacher I had in Vegas.  I was the only one that picked on it but made sure I got a bottle when I got home. Needless to say I had paint on my clothes. I put some on, let it set a day or so, troubled the spot again, gave them another squirt and washed them.  Most of the spots were gone.  What remained was nearly invisible and a few washes later was gone.

The more dramatic transformation though is what happens to a stiff brush. Stiff? I mean rock hard! Mixing a 50-50 combination of water and Murphy's Oil, soak that brush.  Sometimes it's pretty fast, other brushes take awhile but in the end the brush becomes clean AND completely pliable again.  It's truly a miracle. This also works on palettes and counters as well.  Tonight I cleaned a plastic palette dish that I had forgotten to clean yesterday. The paint was rock hard acrylic paint. I poured a little oil in there and awhile later cleaned it out.

Murphy's Oil also comes in a spray bottle that works well too. It's already pre-mixed. All you need to do is spray it on the let it do it's work.

I've been told another great attribute of Murphy's Oil is that besides removing paints on many surfaces, it also, for brushes,  puts back natural oils for the bristles keeping them pliable. No other products need to be used. In fact, I don't use anything else ... well, except Dawn Detergent to wash my brushes when I am through that session.

If you have paint on clothes, frozen brushes or paint spattered countertops, give Murphy's Oil a try! If nothing else it makes a great general all around cleaner and wood loves it!

Visit KrugsStudio at  krugsstudio.etsy.com. I post new hand painted, original designs in a variety of accessory items all the time. There is something for just about every budget!

The Battle Of The Giants: Wal-mart vs. Etsy

Since about October, when Etsy released their new code of crafters ethics, they finalized a prediction that WIRED magazine had made the year before ... that craftsman, like me, who only made one of a kind things were going to be competing with people, who may have started like me on Etsy but who grew so large that they were still designing but not making anything anymore. They became so popular they had it made somewhere else or were using additional workers. In any event, they were no longer "individual" craftsmen. My retort was, and still is, "everything" we use is designed by someone and usually created by someone else. What then would distinguish Etsy from Wal-mart?

The day that announcement was made, hundreds, if not thousands, fled to zibbet.com and crashed their servers.

Then Craft-Star, another Etsy wannabe did the same thing. They sent an email asking its members, those that had about 1,000 of the same thing laying around, to sell it for two days at 50% off because they might be seen on TV. I don't know about you, but unless you work in a factory, you have never even seen a thousand of the same things anywhere, even Wal-mart.

To prove to myself this was happening I purchased a ring on Etsy for ten bucks that ironically was shipped to me from a few miles away.  The ring is nice.  The price was right yet there is no doubt that it wasn't hand made. Really, that's no different than buying it from Wal-mart also a few miles away. It is nicer than one can usually find at Wal-mart but it is not hand made.

I woke up today remembering an article I read years ago about a study on the impact to a community of the arrival of Wal-mart. While it was devastating to the local merchants, the consumer got a price break, of a kind. Tax bases actually went down impacting city coffers, so did personal service and choices often came down too.  It became so notorious communities started turning them away, in fact, in droves. There have been epic battles here in Southern California in fact. Big box stores usually win.

Is there any hope for the craftsmen in Etsy? Maybe.

Another book, now studied in college, is a book written by Robert Pirsig called ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE. It's a true story of a semantics professor who went mad trying to define the word "quality." As he nears the scene of his madness on his motorcycle, the University of Montana, the pressure builds. He still has no answer. Yet, as he discovered, everyone "knows" what it is. I had a boss who once observed that if you put a Chevy and a Mercedes next to each other, removing all identification, nearly 100% would choose the Mercedes as the better car. Most of us have the sense of quality but maybe not the definition.

Which leads me back to Wal-mart. That same study gave local merchants everywhere a ray of hope. The answer? Sell, what Wal-mart does not. Service, better or unique products, things consumers can't always get anywhere else. In fact, merchants who changed their strategy in fact thrived. Many even congregated in the same mall benefiting from the foot traffic. Possibly the same applies on Etsy. If you are selling the same thing as 50 other merchants price becomes the target. If what you offer is different than anyone else, unique, fills some kind of niche, you stand a chance. I really don't know any other merchants but I would guess that is sound advice.

Standing out in the crowd, I guess there are 1 million Etsy sellers, is not easy. Yet, constant refining of key words, attention to detail and especially checking out the competition can give you some hope. We craftsmen can never compete against the giants but we have it in us to stand out in the crowd!

For unique, one of a kind and hand painted crafts and paintings, please visit Krugsstudio.etsy.com. I can assure you each and every design you will see there is mine and was not made in the hundreds overseas!

Happy crafting!

The Present Visits The Past

For the first time, well, ever, I included a business card I created for my Etsy store and my blog in my annual Christmas cards. I mean, its there, why not let everyone know, right?

I received an email from the wife of my college roommate who decided to look up my Etsy store and was surprised. She had never heard of any artistic talents. When she mentioned it to her husband, my old roommate, he observed that I always made him look at what I was doing when we were roommates. The difference, I was a Journalism-Advertising major and we had an ad a week to create. Poor Larry, he had to put up with me ALL day Sunday and had to follow just about every step of the process unless he fled the room. Back in 1966-67 there were no computers, desktop publishing and all that. Instead we had to draw our ads and that included the item, and the headline fonts as perfectly as if they had been typeset. I know Bodoni forwards and backwards. Maybe it's that detailed training that haunts me still.

When he finally bothered to look though, he was stunned. This was what his old roommate was doing now? Really? WOW!

That comment could be something said for a great many of us. Some start early and either succeed or more often are defeated and migrate to something that puts food on the table. More than one artist has muttered that critics were failed artists. Others often defer what they really want to do, live their lives and then when opportunity presents itself try again. As Scott Adams observed, we may need to fail a few times to finally succeed, learning along the way. Read enough biographies and you will see that those that succeed have one common bond to success ... their paths are all different. Some like Van Gogh had to die first. Jackson Pollock did manage to become famous but just before his death had run out of ideas. Yet, in his death, spectacular as it was, he became an icon of the post-war era. He was well known, but understood? Probably not.

That email and another toting the new" artists on the Artsy.net web site gave me pause. Who are these people? WHAT is this art? IS it art? Every era tries to distinguish itself from the era before. Yet, how many of these artists will survive this 15 minutes of fame. The one basis that tends to be ignored by critics (who many feel are failed artists themselves) is the appeal on the public at large.

Looking at their web site and their "Must-See" exhibitions for 2014 I find myself beginning to question what art is. Where is it going? Will it be 3D? I can remember seeing the very first holograms. You went into a room with cameras shooting all sides of an object. After we left, the floor had to settle for hours before the shooting, remotely of course, began. A look at the photos and the artists above gives you an idea of what is happening now. Will anyone of these make a mark? Or, is it simply the 15 minutes of fame as Andy Warhol observed. I certainly can't make any predictions but it sure will be fun to watch.

Have an idea? Non-traditional? Give it a try? Why not. All you can do is fail and in every failure are the seeds of another idea!

Happy New Year!

Happy New Art & Design Year!

To all my readers, regular or first timers, I want to wish you all a wonderful New Year! Lets all hope that 2014 will be a great year for everyone, and selfishly for me, a healthy one.  Lets hope the frustrations of last year are improved in this.

There are so many things to consider as we assess the world of art and design. I was thinking yesterday about this as my daughter and I went first to the Apple store, amazing art AND design, to purchase an iPad Air, then over to BEST BUY, which is the anti-thesis of the Apple store, to check out additional covers to protect her new device.

Best Buy has to be the poster child for dysfunctional. Nothing works or if it does, not in any meaningful way for the consumer. If there's a computer it will only play some inane pre-recorded message. You will never see what it will do as every device at the Apple store can. None of the cameras ever work though it appears they are hooked up to some charging as well as anti-theft device. If you find someone to help you, chances are you might know more than they do.

We then headed to the Nordstrom Rack, probably my second or third time ever visiting one.  Now to be fair, I am sure it was well picked over after Christmas, however, what was left was easily some of the ugliest merchandise that I have ever seen. I felt that I had entered a Wal-mart! Colors, styles, patterns, all left one to realize that these designers would never follow Coco Chanel's dictum, less is more. And while beauty IS in the eye of the beholder, you are tempted to wonder about that eye.

Last evening we decided to watch my Best Buy purchase, DESPICABLE ME 2. That required three remotes to watch one movie.  First to turn the cable off on one remote. Then to use the TV remote to change the HDMI channel, then the DVD player remote to turn it on and open the drawer, wade through ALL the junk on the DVD before you watch the movie (feels like a movie theatre's parade of ads and promos) then back to the TV remote to adjust volume.

I can hear you now, program the cable remote. Its been done by the cable guy several times and works until he leaves the house. We feel fortunate that the TV he came to adjust works after he leaves. I can't begin to tell you the hours spent on the phone trying to get a TV to work with cable.

It was then that I realized, if I was in my 20's or 30's again, I would go back to school and get my masters in Ethnography...the study of how things work. I realized that so many of the things in our lives add to not reduce the stress in our lives. In fact, I would hazard a guess in that I bet they are in many ways the causes of it.

If you think back, our lives WERE simpler. Cars started with a key. There were no remotes to lose or batteries in them to die, TV was on, off and you got up to change the station between the 3 or 4 channels you had back then. There were shows to watch too, not like today where you have 200 channels with nothing to watch. The phone rang and you answered it or not. There wasn't a answer machine that at times defies us all. We wrote letters, the kind that used paper, needed a stamp (around 5¢) and if you really needed to get it somewhere fast you used air mail that cost a few cents more.

Amazingly the world seemed to get along just fine. I wonder if the next generation will have neck problems from bending over looking at their smart phones hour after hour, day after day and go blind from doing that.

Its a new year! I urge each and every one of us to do our part in urging or making changes in the way things work. You may not have designed it, but if you use it and its less than acceptable, say so. More and more what people say about a product or company, changes happen. Companies are starting to listen and are at peril if they do not. Twitter's inane policy on privacy showed how complaints stopped it in its tracks. Hopefully the members of our Congress and state governments are getting this message as well. It could be a very interesting year on a number of fronts.

With all of our input, this could very well be a very good year! Please visit krugsstudio.etsy.com  for a wide range of items to decorate with or give as gifts!

Peace.

The Delicious Sin of Pinterest

Screen Shot of Pinterest After Renewing Etsy Items

As an artist who paints or draws or does anything thing that ends up displaying an image, you are drawn to images...Your own images and the images of others in a need to know what they are doing! If you haven't, and it seems that still many have not, the place to look and see is Pinterest, that great secret fun and BIGGEST time sync of your life!

Not only do you find art, photos, crafts but clothing, recipes, decorating tips. With judicial board selecting it's very easy to find tips on how to do artsy fartsy things and so, SO much more. Beware that search box!!!

Not only can you post your crafts or art there, you can just pin just anything you see on the Internet.  Besides what you post, you certainly don't need to post anything, you get to see what your friends and their friends are looking at as well. I don't know if its as intrusive as Facebook, but this is the land of images, often stunningly gorgeous images. You get to create boards to remember your favorites that can be a public or private (they allow "private" boards).

For an artist it can be invaluable. I can't tell you how clicking on a piece of art has taken me into adventures that rival the old card files at the library. I would go in to the library with a class topic to research, say democracy, and by the end of the evening be checking out the fall of the Roman Empire marching up and down the non-fiction aisles. With Pinterest, you are on the same kind of adventure and before you know it, it's well past bed time. Really, it's that addictive.

I find one of my greatest delights is seeing new things, or more likely new to me. Van Gogh is my favorite painter and while I have several beautiful books of his work, now and then a piece I have never seen before crops up.  I enjoy seeing new artists, really cool cars, tech info, even recipes.

You can pin others boards that feeds into your daily stream or "pin" images to your own boards to check back again and again. I have boards for all my Etsy store categories, even my blog, but have other boards for things I want to see another time. Your stream moves pretty fast after awhile, but the general Pinterest flows like a waterfall. However, I have never seen my items there but someone must as I do have items pinned now and then. Some even venture to my Etsy store.

It's easy, free and sinfully time consuming. If you haven't set up your very own Pinterest account what are you waiting for?

The holidays may be over but Valentines day is about six weeks away. Visit Krugsstudio@etsy.com for a wonderful selection of gifts for your loved ones.

The Curmudgeons Lump of Coal

If there is anyone out there who doesn't think their lives are designed by forces they never see, think again. They are. From the bed you sleep in to the house you live in to the clothes you wear, cars you drive and the work that you do plus the government you live under, someone(s) has made a conscious effort to design how civilization should work. Since man came out of the forests and tamed that first animal and gathered that first harvest, every aspect of your life is designed.

As we can all agree not every design is a winner which leads me to 2013's lump of coal. The problem is where to begin?

Obamacare probably deserves the biggest lump of coal. In a nation that probably was key in inventing the Internet and embraced it in ways DARMA never conceived, it's a national disgrace that will not soon be forgotten. Why our national government hired a bunch of hacks (not hackers who probably could have done as well in one night) is stunning. With a nation of 40 million citizens, or not, uninsured, plus untold more who were lied too and had insurance cancelled, why they they thought a system that at best could handle 50,000 at a time was good enough staggers the imagination. Especially when fines would be doled out if you didn't register. Clearly there wasn't anyone in charge. Amazon could have handled them all in one day and in a few hours.

That leads me to the next lump, our government, Congress in particular but the executive mansion isn't off the hook either,  has the worst approval rating since the Tea Tax levied by England in the 1770's. In fact, hemorrhoids were more popular on a poll rating. Well, we always knew the government was a pain in the butt but now we know just how much. A year of standoffs resulted in the government shutting down after already living under the sequester that started in March. An article I read said this would be the worst do-nothing Congress in history. That's just fine with me. As we have seen, they seem to have trouble enforcing the laws they already have.

Moving down the scale, there's the State of California. I live there so I know a little more about it than the scandals we read about in New York, Illinois, Florida and a host of other places where the natives and their governments are restless and greedy.

The city of Bell, CA is the poster boy for corruption in government. This blue collar town of less than 50,000 was paying its city manager around a $1 million a year in salary and perks, his corrupt assistant over $500,000 and the list went on and on. The city councilmen were making nearly $100,000 a year. Not bad for a position that usually gives you $100 a month IF that. One city. The Comptroller of the Golden State just released preliminary findings that showed Bell is really the tip of the iceberg. Milpitis, a small town in the Bay area was paying its city manager well over $500,000 a year or about five times what the Mayor of Los Angeles makes in a city 1,000 times larger. A state senator caught red-handed accepting bribes and water districts that shovel out money by the bucket.

If you go down to the county and city level, it gets better. A columnist for the Pasadena Stars News gave a lump to the people who are shutting down Baldwin Ave. just above Valley Blvd. for two years to lower the street under the railroad tracks. Can you imagine? One of the most important streets in the San Gabriel Valley and a direct entry and exit from an interstate freeway? Two years? You can imagine the hoots the first intercontinental railway people would have had over that. Twenty or so years ago, Alhambra, a small city to the west lowered their tracks because in an emergency there was no way to service the southern part of the city when a train came through. They invited all the cities around to go in with them to reduce costs. Not one city did. Now, from Alhambra east through the valley the southern cities are being torn up to finally lower those tracks. The cost is probably about 10 times higher. In the northern areas the towns are being torn up to extend the Gold Line and every major street for 20 miles is torn up for improvements or for train tracks.

Which brings me to something near and dear to my heart, light signals. The State of California has passed laws that will encourage and allow driverless cars. This is a state that has spent 100's of millions of our tax dollars to digitize the DMV and it is still "in progress." Like FAA control towers everywhere we are running on 50's technology. The thought of a car with a driver is oftentimes daunting but a driverless car with the state of our technology? Truly terrifying. They have never heard of the use of packets, a discovery AT&T made years ago to send information on their copper wires. Traffic signals are willy nilly and often every lane of traffic on big highly traveled streets sit there because the signals can't tell they are there and use arrows to tell cars to turn when there is no one there. There are smart signals but California seems to have never heard of them. Its a shame. Milan Italy back in the 70's had a strangling traffic problem that they improved with the use of software that regulated signals and improved traffic by 20 - 30% in the first year. That was the analog age folks.

If there is any point to this, well I guess rant is a good a word as any, its that people made this mess but you the people can also improve it. Hats off to the jury that found that Bell assistant guilty, the FBI for exposing a corrupt state senator, the press for many of the other revelations that we read about. Sure, some news is silly and oftentimes hides the true problems that need tackling. As voters and citizens, you have the right to speak out. We may not agree with each other but to remain silent is to continue to invite these problems. Remember it is better to tackle them BEFORE they are a problem because it takes far more effort to correct them, if they ever are.

Developing A Style Of Your Own

One of the most difficult things for me as an artist has been developing my own personal style. It is relatively easy to copy or mimic an artist though in my case, never very well. What happens along the way is a kind of transformation going from what I see another artist doing and then in the process of painting or crafting myself, transforming it into something quite different. I guess there is really nothing wrong with that because many believe that all art has been derived from what came before.

I used to get that sidetracked in school. I'd go to the library with a topic in hand and hours later find that I had moved into another realm entirely. Then when test time came I found that it wasn't that I didn't know the topic, it was usually that I had learned too much and could argue either way. I find that I am often that way with my art as well.

 Erin Hanson of redrockfineart

The other day I was looking at what other people I follow on Etsy were favoring and in the process found a few artists that I favored as well. One was an artist, Erin Hanson, of redrockfineart.etsy, that had a style that I really, really liked. In fact she painted in a style that I, at one point, had wanted to paint myself.

Hanson has a style of what became known as the Southwestern School of art style, a kind of Impressionism that developed in California and the Southwest during the early 20th Century. It had a strong color sense of the Southwest fueled by colors from nature and Mexico. Whereas in France colors were light and bright, the colors in the Southwest were strong, vivid with earth tone reds, turquoise skies, purples and pinks that were shown at sunrise and sunset. Gauguin would have been right at home.

I'll never forget the first time I saw one of those spectacular sunsets in Albuquerque, NM. My mother had moved there from dreary Portland, OR during my sophomore year in college. Talk about a change! Days of rain exchanged for nearly endless days of sun. Anyway, the mountains behind the city are the Sandia's, a tall majestic range that runs north and south.  I puzzled at their meaning, watermelon, until one night there was a spectacular sunset and the mountains turned watermelon red and the shadows were clearly purple. It was spectacular. In an instant I realized the source for a style that gets big bucks still today.

For me the hardest part is putting colors that are not seen for colors that are.  I greatly admire Gauguin for doing exactly that. As discordant as his colors are, the scene, beautiful as it is, somehow makes sense. Hanson's red skies with a splash of blue, lavender trunks of trees in shadow, vivid underlying reds and orange backgrounds capture the vibrancy I have yet to achieve.

Oddly I can let colors run wild in my crafts, and often do, but am more hesitant in my painting. I find that I do better with smaller themes than larger. My landscapes tend to be bland but simpler scenes are vivid because I have narrowed my focus concentrating on form and color.  I think my WHITE FENCE works because the simple white fence acts as a foil for the riot of colors surrounding it.

Painting is a process. We are swayed by what we see. To not try to change and evolve can be, for the artist at least, a kind of death. So, while still trying to find what my style is, I have managed to understand what I am good at.

Please visit Krugsstudio.etsy.com. I have a variety of art and crafts across a broad price range.