It started with a simple painting and a business plan with goals

Today I decided to start a blog about one of the most fascinating career choices I ever made, pursuing a career as an oil painter. In this post I’ll only give you a little background on how it started. 

 

I started out as a painter in my early youth, as a teenager I made money at it and continued to do so up until I turned 35. I was also a successful commercial designer. By the way this was a great combination if you also worked. I made an interesting choice to drop Oil painting, I never did anything as a hobby and it included oil painting. I knew if I wanted to go to the next level (whatever that was) I would have give it 100% of my time. It would also be fair to say I leveled out or lost interest so it was probably an easy choice.

Over the following decades I opened my dusty paint box twice, after 20 or 30 paintings later I would close it again. Not that I couldn’t paint, I just didn’t see it leading anywhere. It wasn’t about time, because my time was always my own and my paintings sold in the past so I had no financial constraints. I believe it lacked a serious challenge, no goal, and no real reason to do it other than a pastime and I didn’t need a pastime!! As a designer I had the creative issues covered. I was dealing with space light and colour and I spent a life time manipulating it... How could a painting compete? Then it couldn’t!!

Everything changes with time and I got weary with design projects, to counter the boredom I would only do projects I’d never done before. That worked for a few years. Then I got lucky. The California economy went in the toilet and as a designer “we are a luxury item” and “we got shelved”!!...Lucky!!! Well…at first I didn’t think it was funny, but it happened fast and the timing was right, besides I was finished with it (design) and no intentions of hanging on for what might be a long recovery process. One day, and I don’t completely remember why I opened my paint box (now totally unusable). I resupplied it, got a few canvas panels and cheap little table easel and on March 16^th 2009 I painted my first Alla prima (all at once) canvas in two decades.

#1 (no Title) 14x18 oil on canvas panel 3/16/2009

As you can see it wasn’t that bad, in fact if it were for sale today it might even fetch a price. The real value of this painting is not the money it might bring but that it got the ball rolling. The big question for me was “where could I take it”. The following day (after sleeping on it) I developed a simple business concept with goals and the game was on!!