With my new job I am finally working 40 hours a week..it's a good thing!
I started working as a large format digital press and digital cut operator.  This has finally given me the opportunity to concentrate on painting.
 
As far as my art work goes,  I sold all of my inventory last month and gained 2 new collectors who each bought 4 pieces or more. Now my studio is empty, no shows lined up, money coming in and no pressure for sales. Sales pressure is poison to me, needing to sell art to eat really effects my work in a trite illustrative way. Over the last 8 years found out that my audience is limited.  


Lately, I have been looking at the paintings of Franz Klein, I find Klein's monumentality and heaviness attractive. His works like "Le Gros" have a permanence like structures of iron. (Mark Di Suvero comes to mind. ) Looking at them closer the way his grays, blacks and whites interact with the texture of brush stroke give each work a quality of portrait or landscape. Franz Klein is painting motion and letting the action of the stroke paint the painting instead of painting an image that has been planned out like an illustrator. He conjures the painting and is a witness to it not a dictator of it. He lets the shapes and textures that are a result of his kinetic energy paint the painting with out a plan for the result. I believe this is why his work looks so fresh and new because he had no plan for the final image.
This is also what attracts me the most, his method of painting