Recycling the East Side school – in a wood-fired clay pizza oven

Strictly speaking this blog is about my work as an artist . . . but occasionally the sculpture has other uses, in this case a wood-fired clay pizza oven. The sand dome (above) is standing on a hearth of fire bricks that came from the demolished East Side school in Decorah. An organization was formed to recycle the re-usable building material, Oneota Historic Future Alliance – East Side Material, and I was fortunate to find enough bricks for the hearth among the piles of salvaged rubble. The plinth is made from some of the old oak beams saved from our barn renovation.

We dug some clay and mixed this with sand and water with our feet – a wonderful pedicure – here we are testing the clay to ensure it is the right consistency. 

 

We used the clay to make adobe bricks which were laid over the newspaper-covered sand dome.

A couple of days later . . . an entrance has been cut out, an archway built and a chimney added together with a layer of mud and straw insulation. We made the first pizza before the final layer of adobe bricks were added!

Within a week I had made more than twenty pizzas! We are now learning how to use it, and not just for pizzas, but also for baking bread, sauteing and roasting. Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota was able to restore their abandoned school – the East Side school in Decorah was not so lucky. However, thanks to the Oneota Historic Future Alliance at least the school's very fabric, it's bricks, are seeing a new life.  As I stand over the hearth, with the ferocious heat burning my face, enthralled by the fluidity of the flames, savouring the tantalizing aromas, tasting the magic of the wood-fired oven, it is gratifying to think we are a part of that future.

Cursive hebrew (mostly) and not becoming a Sofer

Learning to read and draw Hebrew letters is a challenge. My initial attempts to copy an alphabet were soon thwarted by my unwillingness to be bound or restrained by the strict laws governing the formal writing of letters. I am not destined to be a Sofer (Jewish scribe). Nevertheless, the letter forms and language remain fascinating. The four abstract drawings here are based on my practice pieces. The first (above) presents a conundrum: while creating a satisfying abstract design, I didn't realize until I was 'finished' that the letters were upside down! This begs the question: how is the reader of Hebrew going to interpret this? Do tell me.

Seeking a more lyrical solution I made a number of composite drawings using a broad brush and nib pen. Again it is the word בְּרֵאשִׁית‎, (Bereshit) meaning Genesis, or 'in the beginning'.

Then I turned to the cursive alphabet that had first confused me. Here I felt there was more freedom for creating adventurous designs. Which, if any of these pieces will be included in my interpretation of Carlyle's Sartor Resartus & Heroes, remains to be seen . . .

Parian marble, Arundel-marble, Aeschylus, and Greece

Thomas Carlyle in Heroes . . . makes reference to 'Arundel-marble', obliquely referring to the Parian Marble or Chronicle, an early Greek chronological inscription. It is just possible to decipher the words in the continuous string of incised capitals, and colour helps in this calligraphic rendering of one typical entry.

Treating the letters with less reverence [perhaps] and injecting some lyricism it is harder to read, but only if we read Greek, so does it matter if it is almost illegible? Perhaps not, as its purpose is chiefly to be a decorative foil and accompaniment to the text. What is lost is any suggestion that the source of the text were letters are carved in marble.

The inscription translates as: 'From when Aeschylus the poet first won with a tragedy, and Euripides the poet was born, and Stesichorus the poet [arrived] in Greece, 222 years, when Philocrates was archon in Athens'. It dates to around 850 BC.

I will confess, I do not read Greek, nevertheless it is fascinating to discover in this sentence the roots of English words such as tragedy (Greek: τραγῳδία, tragōidia), written here as ΤΡΑΓΩΙΔΙΑΙ and poets, such as Aeschylus (Greek:  Αἰσχύλος, Aiskhulos) ΑΕΣΧΥΛΟΣ, and the Greek for Greece (Elláda) which is instantly recognizable in the inscription as ΕΛΛΑΔΑ.

בְּרֵאשִׁית

'In the beginning', and, 'Genesis'.

In On heroes, hero-worship and the heroic in history Thomas Carlyle makes several references to the 'divine . . .' and 'sacred Hebrew Book'. In Sartor Resartus he refers to 'young Ishmael' in the 'destitution of the wild desert'. Throughout both books he includes many biblical references and allusions. For my illustrations, I looked for a quotation, and then searched for an original source – and I found Hebrew texts.

The history, meaning and beauty of the letterforms are fascinating and I began to draw and learn a little of the Alephbet. The first problem I encountered was the inability of Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign to render the text as right to left (RTL) reading. Curiously my Firefox browser, Apple Mail and TextEdit did work, which helped when using the Hebrew keyboard layout.

Secondly, my insatiable thirst for language was hampered by a new alphabet and the myriad forms it takes. Besides the formal pen or brush-drawn block lettering based on a square of three kulmusim that follows strict laws concerning how it must be written, there are the usual variety of modern seriffed and sans-seriffed fonts, a manual print form and a cursive script used for handwriting.

Learning to recognize the various letter forms and their sound is a challenge and the following Web site has proved very useful: http://www.hebrew4christians.com/index.html. Here you can listen to the sounds of individual letters and how they sound together as words and in sentences such as this blessing upon smelling fragrant fruit:

Barukh attah Adonai eloheinu melekh ha-olam, ha-noten re-ach tov bapperot.

The calligraphy is just that, a beginning – let me know what you think, am I breaking rules?

Carlyle, Sartor Resartus and Heroes: Tasso, Shakespeare, Dante, Odin, Rousseau, Burke, Johnson etc

A few images from a new project: bibliographic references in Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and On heroes, hero-worship and the heroic in history.

Having discovered that Borges was inspired by Sartor I too began reading and found among his allusions and quotations much that was amusing and inspiring. In particular, his references to books and printing, that I now propose to present in book form (both digital and conventional), illustrated with a selection of quotations by Carlyle's 'cast of players'.

(above and below)
Torquato Tasso describes the enchantress Armida in his sixteenth-century poem, Jerusalem delivered.

Carlyle despised "Fashionable Novels" and contrives to reference Pelham, or the adventures of a gentleman by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. (below) 
 

One of Carlyle's great heroes was Dante, and there are many allusions and quotes from his Divine Comedy. "Se tu segui tua stella . . .", If thy follow thy star . . . (below)

Dante again 'Quivi sospiri, pianti, ed alti guai.' (There sighs, and sorrows and heart-rending cries). (below)

'Odin's Runes', says Carlyle, 'were the first form of the work of a Hero'. Here in runic script is a stanza from Hávamál, The words of Odin the high one from the Poetic Edda, in which Odin receives the runes. (below)

Odin's runes, this time in Icelandic script. (below) You can listen to a dramatic reading on Youtube here.

Unlucky Abelard is mentioned in the context of how books have changed the world and the development of universities. Here a quote from the Prologue to Sic et non. (below)

Burke, Johnson, Shakespeare, Byron and Coleridge to follow . . .

Shakespeare's King Lear & Hurricane Irene

Blow, windes, & crack your cheeks; Rage, blow
You Cataracts and Hyrricano’s, spout,
Till you haue drench’d our Steeples, drown the Cockes.
You Sulph’rous and Thought-executing Fires,
Vaunt-curriors to Oak-cleauing Thunderbolts,
Sindge my white head. And thou all-shaking Thunder,
Strike flat the thicke Rotundity o’ th’ world,
Cracke Natures moulds, all germaines spill at once,
That makes ingratefull Man.

Stockhausen In Freundschaft – work in progress

In Freundschaft – gallery installation – 1

Working again on the Stockhausen piece for solo clarinet, In Freundschaft. The installation photo above shows two large paintings together with smaller sketches. The painting on the right wall measures 96 x 42 inches, while the painting on the back wall measures 72 x 48 inches. These are derived from the "master painting" (67 x 108 inches) seen below.

In Freundschaft – gallery installation –2

None are intended to be the definitive, or final work in this series, as it still a work in progress. These pieces started life as interpretations or responses to a piece of music, but there comes a point in the creative process where the painting grows and matures and develops a life of its own and leaves the home, so to speak.

The main challenge is how to represent the linearity of music on a single rectangle and the solution might be a series of paintings. I have made a series of linear drawings in book form, where the pen behaves like an oscilloscope of sorts. One may argue that there is just as much potential in a single painting, given that the piece of music as a whole itself possesses all the lyricism and aesthetic qualities that a painting can offer and I have made several studies with this premise in mind. Currently I have been listening to just a few bars and painting in response; and making enlarged detailed selections, as seen above.

Scale is important, and I am seeking a larger gestural solution, hence these gallery installations – all digital creations, based on a small painting 8 x 5 inches. I am seeking the sonorous qualities seen in paintings by Barnett Newman, Yves Klein and other Color Field painters, together with the gestural lyricism of the action painters such as Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly.

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Watch and listen to the piece performed by Han Kim.

En homenaje a Jorge Luis Borges, born August 24, 1899

Es una locura laboriosa . . .
Text by Jorge Luis Borges
Pen and ink drawing by David Esslemont

"Es una locura laboriosa y empobrecedora la locura de escribir libros muy extensos desarrollando durante quinientas páginas una idea que puede ser contada perfectamente en cinco minutos de narración oral. La mejor forma de ocuparse de ellos es hacer como que esos libros ya existen y ofrecer un sumario, un comentario".

"It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books - setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them."

From the  Introduction to El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths)

Marketing and selling your art online – part two

Looking west over Grasmere, water colour landscape by David Esslemont

Building your profile

Standing out from or above the crowd is a challenge, to do so online is an even greater challenge, as the crowd is measured in thousands if not millions.

Your customers need to be able to find you and your art online. They do this in a number of ways: by going directly to your Web site, online gallery, blog or whatever, following a link, or searching for you or related subjects. Web site analytics will reveal where direct traffic and referrals are coming from, and what keywords are used when searching. Use your URLs everywhere, and link them. Add them to your e-mail signatures and use your domain's e-mail service e.g. contact david@solmentes.com and people will know where to find you and your work. Ask for reciprocal links with other Web sites, comment on posts, submit your URL's to the search engines directly.

Searching
“What are your customers searching for” begs the question “what are they looking for?” Are they looking for information or advice, or to buy art. I would further ask the question “why?” Addressing this latter question first: perhaps they are looking for a memento, a gift or they simply collect paintings or prints. Perhaps they are looking for a picture to hang in their hallway. Perhaps they are just curious to know more about you and your work. Perhaps they are looking for advice on how to frame a picture, or how to choose a picture for their home. The field is wide and if one is aiming to be in “the right place at the right time” you have to offer the online visitor what they are looking for and, something of value. Artist Lynne Taetzsch provides an excellent example both on her Web site and on her blog.

The chances are their search will include the criteria that will help them find what they are looking for: keywords. So naturally having matching keywords is a big advantage. Relevant keywords as header tags, image tags, link references, titles and body text will help your ratings with the search engines. My advice: work on this now or get someone well versed in SEO (search engine optimization) to do the job, it is important.

Keywords
Let us assume I paint watercolour landscapes of the English Lake District. I would expect all the bold words to be important keywords and ensure their inclusion together with place names, and qualifiers such as morning, evening, dusk, rain, cloud, and lake. If you are selling original framed art and prints, then include those keywords too, if you think it will look good on a wall, in a living room or elsewhere, say so. Keywords can be generated from a text (or Web site) by analyzing the frequency of words used [much as I did with Barack Obama's inaugural address] to find the most often used, or key words. There are many free online keyword generators such as Tocloud that will also produce graphic images, but none that will produce anything quite like I did for the President's speech:

Drawing by David Esslemont from My Fellow Citizens

Searching Google for “Grasmere watercolour” returns 105,000 results with this link on the first page:
 "www.solmentes.com/davidesslemont/wrs.04.html

You +1'd this publicly. Undo

These watercolours were made "in the field" from a perch above Grasmere looking west northwest. They were painted over a number of weeks, in March and April ..."

Searching Google Images returns 8,000+ results but fortunately shows my Solmentes logo on the first page! This links to a Facebook post about the Grasmere watercolour being available as a stretched canvas print. The actual water colour image is nine pages further down and links to my online gallery. The image itself is tagged with the title "Looking west over Grasmere, watercolour as stretched canvas print!"

Good luck.

Marketing and selling your art online – part one

Order this print today and have it hanging on your wall next week!

How to market and sell your art online? That is what I entered into the Google search box and in a roundabout way have discovered a whole new world of possibilities.

Marketing is about satisfying customer needs profitably. So to begin you have to ask what are you selling, who are your customers, where are they, and what do they want to pay: it's the four p's – product, people, place and price.

If I earned a penny, or even better a dollar every time someone commented on my work with a "WOW" (in particular when viewing the new digital flowers in the Florilegium Solmentes portfolio), I would be a wealthy man. How can one turn those comments into sales?

I decide to offer the flower prints as signed limited edition prints for $200 each, $150 each for two or more. There was the stumbling block: price. Apart from a strange antipathy towards digital prints such as these (do people realize it took me just as long to create these images as it would to make multi-colour linocuts, for example), the price seems to be the most important factor in turning the "WOW" into a desire to buy the work. At least I had some interest and "AIDA", the old acronym so pertinent to advertising (attention, interest, desire and action), can be applied here.

Going back to the four p's, being in the right place, at the right time with the right product, should give you a better chance of making a sale.

Free online galleries and portfolios abound! But there is the catch, if there are so many, it also means there are MANY other artists also trying to market and sell their work online. So you have to (as my grandmother used to say) "stand out from the crowd". For now I am going to throw a handful of bait in the stream and see if the fish are biting and address the profile issue in the next post.

FineartAmerica offers a free account that allows you to upload images of your artwork and sell prints, on demand in an amazing range of sizes and formats (canvas, matted and framed prints etc). While their offer is enticing with the unlimited number of image uploads, the small print limits the number you can actually sell as "print-on-demand". Unless of course you pay $30 for an upgrade to premium membership. So I did and now they have made money from me but I haven't sold anything, yet. Well done FAA.
PS The yellow blackberry flower print is available in a variety of formats from david-esslemont.artistwebsites.com

pine needle flower

A flower using different coloured needles.































Over-exposing the photograph creates the illusion the flower is floating. Tom adds scale.