I want to use this blog to post my musings and ramblings about working with art.

Now, mind you, I don't make art. I'm not an artist and I'm okay with that. People that want to have the "Everyone's an artist" conversation with me won't get very far. Being creative is not being an artist.

I'm what we call in the biz an "arts professional." In 1998 I got a degree in art history studying ancient Mexican architecture and went to work for a local museum. I worked there until late 2005 doing installation, handling, collections management, and some research for the curatorial staff. I also did a contract gig or two for other local museums during this time and headed up a project doing the initial archiving of a Russian photographer's complete negatives collection. Currently, I work at a local contemporary gallery as the anything-that-needs-to-get-done guy. In the next month or so I will begin a 2 year+ project working with a local artist to archive & care for her life's work.

My main interests in art center around the activities that comprise collections management, such as housing, storage, location, records creation & management, packing & shipping, environmental concerns, access. The list goes on. I'm an art nerd, a details freak.

Forthcoming articles here will hopefully address how people who make art can utilize and learn some techniques and behaviors that will enhance their experiences and professionalism as artists. I want to give some basic primer information that may save an artist, and their works, a lot of trouble.

How do you pick up a piece of paper? There's a right way, and a lot of wrong ways.

There are many ways to hang a painting, but how do you make them all hang at the same sight-line, and how do you get them to always be straight?

What's all this nonsense about acid-free & archival? Well, do you want your drawing to turn orange and snap in half? Do you think a person who buys art wants to buy your drawing in that state?

There are basic things to do if you want potential clients, galleries, or maybe even museums, to take you seriously.

Straight talk about some basic art realities.

Another part of being an artist--and becoming a better artist--is getting out and see what is going on in the community. So, I will be posting about upcoming shows and exhibits, things that I find particularly interesting or promising. And maybe I will jotting in the occasional review of something that I've seen. Maybe I'll review and critique the work, maybe I'll have something to say about the environment, the hanging/display; maybe I'll praise or even excoriate the staff. I'm not one that believes that all reviews have to be good reviews: Bad Art Exists.

In the meantime, I will not be using this blog to promote the gallery where I work. It's not about that. I might post a link to the gallery's website, but in and amongst other links. If I play my cards right, you'll never figure out where I work. Not because I don't want you to stop by, but because I spend a lot of hours every week promoting that gallery on the web, because that's my job. This blog is about trying to help artists in the community. That, frankly and unfortunately, isn't my job. I wish it was!

Occasional articles. Hope you read them and point your friends to them. And if you think I'm way off on something, please do let me know. I'm good, but not god.

This isn't my first or only blog. I've been keeping a blog of my dreams for some years now. I've never advertised that particular blog-spot, as it is meant _primarily_ to be my own space & I've never looked for interaction on or through it. When people ask me, then, why I chose to use a blog and not just a physical notebook, my answer is that I am an internet user and I can type faster than I can write. Especially in the morning when I'm no fully "on" yet and my hands don't want to perform the arduous task of writing legibly. Also, I can drop on when I'm at work and type out a dream, or if I am away on a trip I can do the same. On top of that, I do enjoy being able to email a friend that I've had a dream about and just give them the address to a particular entry. As of today, 26.November, 2007, I have 196 entries at my dream blog, and all by maybe 10 are dreams, those 10 or so being my amused reaction to tracking how people randomly hit off of google, almost always looking for what sounds like really unusual pornographic material. People googling "hairy nun" is probably my favorite in that category.