Maria Popova wrote a great Brain Pickings article about Bill Watterson, of Calvin & Hobbes fame, that I took this quote from. I firmly hold  to Rilke's "Live the questions" philosophy & the Window Questions experiement played with that. What questions are you living with today? 

I spent this past weekend at Creative South. It was awesome talking about art & design all weekend with other people that are passionate about our visual world. These are the 5 things that most stand out from the talks. 
1. Dig the Ditch: Do the hard work, it might not be glamourous, but it is productive to not have your field flood. 
2. Help your friends: Do NOT allow your mama's pie shop to have an ugly logo, fix that before you do anything else!
3. Prioritize: If you do not have enough time stop watching tv, or playing video games, whatever is taking you away from your work.
4. Value Custom: Anyone can use that font, but not everyone can design that "e" the way you can. Value this & charge accordingly. 
5. Do the Work: Be professional, meet your deadlines, care about details. You are your brand. 

I based this print on the stained glass window at St. Matthias Church, in Summerton, S.C.
It clearly illustrates the relationships in The Trinity.

While playing with circles and connectors I stumbled upon this X design... I like the balance of positive and negative space. As with most of my patterns I start with a hand drawing of the element that repeats and then manipulate in photoshop.

Here's the deal: I know I need to learn how to code. Back in the day I dabbled with the code on myspace personal page and while I didn't know really what I was doing I managed to take others templates and change them so they met my aesthetic standards. Now I use Weebly for my website hosting & design and I can accomplish minor changes, but nothing really significant. And I know it is time, I need to learn how to code. TED is telling me. Jessica Hische is telling me & she even made a beautiful website to show me how! There is even a Code.org website with Bill Gates & Mark Zukerberg telling me to learn code so that one day I can be an industry titan like them. So there really is no excuse. I am not promising a new site, but saying maybe there will be some changes.

P.S. You really should check out all of Jessica Hisches' sites! She has a great sense of humor & provides a lot of info/research on her pages. They are an education in & of themselves. Prepare to spend hours in her corner of the internet.

What are you going to do to make the year more awesome?

Jiro is living a life that exemplifies what it is to hone your craft.

People in the art community criticize me for coaching. "It is taking time away from your art." "Why are you wasting you time with those kids?" "You don't really care about being an artist unless you are committing every minute of every day to being in the studio working." To all of those people I say, "Coaching is printmaking." "Whoa! What?" "Coaching is printmaking."
Printmaking in its broadest definition is the transference of an image from one thing to another resulting in multiples. When I coach crew I am attempting to help those eight rowers and one coxswain replicate their motions using correct form and technique over and over again for 2,000 meters. Humm, that sounds strangely like an edition which is inking a plate and pulling it over and over until you have prints that are as close to identical as humanly possible, 20 times or 200 times.
Coaching trains my eye to see small inconsistencies that effect the movement of the boat. How could something that helps with detail focus be bad for an artist? I pay my studio dues. If coaching takes me out of the studio completely then yes that is a bad thing, but if it gives me the opportunity to hone my skills of observation and get some fresh air then I don't think it is bad or makes me less of an artist. So I say, "Coaching is printmaking." And I am going to go make some prints on the water. Go team!