Anniversaries...

This year marks a few important milestones. Being that I let this past year go by without realizing that it has been 25 years since I began selling my art, I wanted to pay a little better attention this year, keeping an eye out for any milestones.

This year will be my 20th as a photographer, so I am planning to have monthly shows of new work at my family's gallery in the Cotton Exchange in downtown Wilmington, North Carolina.

As it turns out, this year is also a milestone for The Golden Gallery as well. This year marks our 30th year in business. My mother started the gallery as a way to sell her watercolors way back in 1977, shortly after my family moved to Wilmington.

The Cotton Exchange had recently been saved from the wrecking ball and urban renewal, and was a small complex of shops in an historic grouping of buildings that had once been saloons, a bordelo and a cotton warehouse. Many shops have come and gone, and we are the only original shop owners left. A few shops and restaurants have remained with new owners, and some new shops will be opening in the next few months.

From the age of 10 years on, I have been spending time in the gallery, from when I used to walk to the gallery after school, in the back room of the gallery building model houses out of scrap matboard, to this last year, when I moved my office into a space in the Cotton Exchange, and now spend part of every day there.

To mark our 30th Anniversary, we are moving across the hall into 2 spaces. This will be our 5th location in the Cotton Exchange, and we are very excited about the prospect of more wall space and a larger back room. We are a working gallery, so there are often several of us working the back room matting, framing and otherwise packaging artwork and filling internet orders.

The pictures here show our current gallery. We moved to our current location several years ago after some repeated flooding in our previous space. It was a hurried move, into about half the space of our previous location. We will be bidding farewell to the brick wall (hard to hang stuff on) and saying hello to having 2 entrances and a more visible storefront.

We have to knock a big whole in the wall between the two spaces, and add a few walls, and paint a lot of walls, but we hope to be in our new digs by March 1st, ready to go another 30 years.

Because I said so...

Somehow, the inspiration for these actually came from those "Beware of pickpockets and loose women signs" in New Orleans. Plus my three kids keep me busy repeating certain things over and over. So, I thought these might be fun to create and it has been great to see people's reactions in the gallery when they come across these.

There are 2 sets of these available at Etsy, with plans to list some larger single pieces later.
EDIT: I have added these to my imagekind store, with large sizes available, plus prints on canvas.

Who knows...?

I'm not really able to put my finger on exactly where the idea for this new series came from, but I think it developed as I was trying to finish this illustration of a bear. He came out smiling, so I thought, "The Happy Bear". Then I had to determine why he would be happy. Hence the big dead fish. So is it a comment on the fact that one's happiness can come at the expense of others, or is it just a big happy bear about to eat a dead fish? Did it just strike me as a funny juxtaposition. I'll leave that to you.

Future entries in this series will include the Disgruntled Skunk, the Persnickety Opossum, and the Hirsute Hedgehog. While it sounds a bit like new books by Lemony Snicket, I think it will be a fun series to produce.

For now, The Happy Bear is available on my Etsy shop, with future plans to offer him on imagekind.

Happy Accidents

Here's some new work that sort of came about by accident. I had this idea to do some work with a little red devil character that I had designed a few years back by superimposing it over a rising sun type background. In the process of creating some more art in that motif, I turned off the layer with the rising sun pattern, and the rest is...well...not history, but the rest is a new style that is reminiscent of propaganda posters. The text in there is tongue in cheek.


These are now available on my Etsy store.

Spreading Prints out all over the web...

Did some searching this weekend to see what kind of outlets there are for my art work on the ol' WWW. Found some new places, and now have galleries in place on many print retail websites.

What spurred this was an email from a retailer that I had joined a few months back. I had kind of forgotten that I had set up a gallery there, and in the meantime, without knowing it , had sold in excess of 50 poster-quality prints. That was a nice surprise.

It was also plenty good reason to expand my web presence to other sites. So...a comprehensive list of places you can get my prints and what's unique to each involved:

Art.com - We have some of my saltwater fish and some of the Lunastrella Series available here as posters. The posters are standard sizes, but our images are not, so you have some excess paper involved. Makes the framing feature relatively useless, but for frame shops and the like, this is a great place to purchase stock.

Visit my Art.com Gallery

ImageKind.com - A relatively young site, with a lot of options for the buyer. You can choose from many different papers for your print and they have a few options for canvas as well. The Framing feature on this site is great, and is the best way to get a framed piece of my work.

Visit my ImageKind Gallery

Etsy.com - The place for all things handmade. I package and ship these pieces myself, and in general, most of the work available is under 12x18 inches. This site is where I go first when releasing new work. You'll probably find more of my work here than anywhere else (besides johnwgolden.com).

Visit My Etsy Shop


BigCartel.com - A cool little place designed for bands, record labels, clothing lines and specialty shops. I'm a specialty shop. Just a few Lunastrella pices there right now, but depending on how those do there, I may expand it.

Visit my BigCartel Shop

JohnWGolden.com - What will eventually be every print and photo that I offer, but with 25 years of ilustrations and 20 years of photos to go through, it's a long process, so not yet the best place to buy, but a good place to browse.

Visit johnwgolden.com

I am also in the process of adding some new retailers that I will be announcing in the coming weeks. I hope you will support these folks as they begin to support me.

The Golden Gallery in Second Life

After talking with an artist friend of mine, I was compelled to take a look at Second Life. The hype machine is running in high gear about this 3-D metaverse, and think what you want about it, but for a would have been an architect if I coulda done math, 2-D artist, it's a fun place. If you're a resident, visit the Golden Gallery in beautiful Han Loso. It's managed by my online personality, Walter Berchot.

Thinking about possibly having some online meet the artist events in the future, which should be interesting. All the art in our Second Life Gallery has Real Life equivalents available for sale as well.