Feeling the love from Baby Gadget

Thanks go out to Justine at Baby Gadget for such a nice feature. Being an artist is very rewarding, but never more so when someone so thoroughly understands what you are creating. Thanks Justine!!!

Electroman gets painted

It's always fun to revisit some early subjects and try a different approach, mixing what new styles I have developed in the meantime.
So...Electroman, one of my early Golden age of Sci-fi robots gets scuffed up a bit in this new series. Others will come as well.

I have always enjoyed using typeforms in my work, and also putting messages in that aren't easily deciphered.

Swimming across the big pond

In the next few weeks, I'll be sending lots of fish prints to England, to be looked after by Tracey Tucker at www.traceytucker.co.uk . Tracey is an amazing artist with a focus on the sea, and my fish prints will be available on her shop site, http://tbythesea.moonfruit.com/.
This may make it a bit easier for folks in the UK to get my prints.

This new work is for the birds...

Alright, I probably shouldn't say it like that, but hopefully it grabbed your attention. These sweet little birds are inspired by Japanese paintings, and are available on Etsy. Chirpitty Chirp!

The Enamored Moths

This one is a companion piece to "The Enlightened Fireflies", and it was a tough one to get right. Now...tough is a relative term. Digital is certainly faster than traditional techniques, and it was not tough in the traditional methods sense. However, it took many, many attempts to get it right.

But now I am finally happy with it. I eventually realized out that the amount of light put out by a light bulb isn't not as low as that put off by a jar of fireflies. Once I got that idea, I conceded that I would have to make that bulb brighter, and that I could make it brighter and have the print still match the fireflies.

Anyway, this one is available in my Etsy shop.

Big thank you's go out to Christi Jensen at small.town.fun. for featuring the piece, and she now holds the world speed record for featuring one of my new pieces. She blogged about it before I could. Once again, I am blown away to be included with such amazing artists.

Hello Seattle...I come in peace...

For all you folks out there in beautiful Seattle: You can now find some of my reproductions locally.

The folks at Bluebottle Art Gallery have a slew of my Lunastrella and Quelstar Tin Toys series, ready for consumption by the Seattle art buying public. Please stop by and support these folks.

Bluebottle Art Gallery and Store is an art gallery and boutique located in Capitol Hill, Seattle. We exhibit and sell artwork and handmade functional items from local and national up-and-coming artists, designers and crafters.

Bluebottle is open Tues-Sun 12pm-7pm and is located at 415 East Pine Street.

Flitter Critters?

Okay, so I am on a major critter kick, what can I say?

Here is my latest. It is the first in a new critter series, tentatively called flitter critters. It's gonna be insects, maybe nocturnal insects, which may need to be it's own series.

Here's "The Enlightened Fireflys", available on Etsy.

Another Critter...

Ah, the sensible owl. Before long I will start a barnyard critters series, a yard critters (cats and dogs), a crawly critters series (bugs), and probably a jungle critters one too.

This is such a fun style to work, and we have some nice recycled barn wood frames on order, which look really god with these.

This one's available at Etsy.

Best Birthday Ever....

May 3rd marked a milestone for me with another birthday, and my lovely wife surprised me with an overnight trip to Bald Head Island. The idea was for us to travel over by ferry, and for me to spend the entire time taking photographs. My wife went along for the ride, and I came back with 250 pictures taken.

My kids gave me a Holga camera, which I am enjoying quite a bit, but have yet to see any of my results yet. It was really interesting to be using a film camera again after a year of nothing but digital. The first 4 shots I took with the lens cap on.

Even more thanks...

I must thank Degan Beley for including me and my work in her article on Etsy for the Canadian magazine Ion. I had a very nice discussion with Degan about Etsy and the Etsy community, and the mag saw fit to include 4 of images with the article.

As with Decor8's recent dominomag.com article, I am honored to be included among some of my favorite Etsy artists.

Many more thanks are in order

Lots of folks have been sending out the good word about my work into the blogosphere, and I am grateful for the exposure...

Sundry Buzz

Bankrupt Artist v.3

Fabulous Shopping

Alpha Mom

Enthusiastically Human

Sea and Sky

coochicoos


We Heart Prints

Any press is good press...

But press is especially good when it is generated by Holly Becker over at Decor8. She has written an online exclusive for Domino Magazine featuring myself and several of my fellow independent artists from the Etsy community.

Holly's blog is a great resource for finding new art, and I owe her a debt of gratitude for getting the word out about Etsy and its artists. As usual, she has done an outstanding job. Please visit Decor8 when you have a chance...

More critters, well...one, anyway...

Slowly but surely, I am making progress on creating more critters for the Woodland Critters collection. My newest is the Crooked Fox. I had to decide whether to follow an alliterative pattern with the names of these critters, or just try to find some names that fit the personalities of the animals. I went with personality, and if there is a double bonus of alliteration, so be it.

These can be found at my Etsy store,and in our Gallery in Wilmington, NC.

It's only been a year already...

So I was going full force on creating some new work in my Urban Naturals series (I have 31 new images in various stages of development), and I realized that a whole year has elapsed since I began my Saltwater Fish series. That's yet another series I have big plans for (I currently have reference for 100+ fish), so I thought it was time to get back on the "fish" horse, so to speak.

I have started to work on these at the front desk in the Golden Gallery, during business hours, so that folks can see how they are created. So far I have 9 new images, and at the rate of 1 or 2 a day, I might be kept busy all summer with these. I hope to get into SEWE in Charleston, South Carolina this coming year, so that's sort of the driving force to getting lots done with this now.

Urban Naturals series expands, becomes another series

I am calling this series Rovinato, Italian for "ruined". I wanted it to be Lenti Rovinato, which should mean "ruined lens", but in talking with some of my artist friends, that seemed a bit much for a name.

It started with the same idea as Urban Naturals, mixing photos of urban texture with close-up photography of items from nature.

In early March, I thought some of the bare trees around my hometown might look nice with this treatment, and that expanded to include the old historic buildings in downtown Wilmington.

One of the great things for me about this series is that it opens up my schedule for photography. With my scenic photography, I am usually looking for a time of day with good light and a good sky. With the Rovinato series, I can shoot on otherwise bad days.

So far the series is 24+ images, available in 5"x5", 8"x8" and 12"x12". 16"x16" will be available when this series goes live on ImageKind.

For now, these are available on my Etsy shop.

More new work....

I have a few new strains of work now. The gallery being relatively settled, I am now getting the chance to work quite a bit. Here's a little Spaceman that I now have for sale on Etsy.

He's kinda 50s, I reckon. I have been trying to find some subject matter that fits this style, and have a few more in the works.

Squeezing in a little art....

Amidst all the gallery goings-on, I managed to get a little work done on what I am calling my Woodland Critter Collection. I am really enjoying trying to keep these simple and to try to capture what makes each "Critter" look like it does.

There will be more to come, but for now you can view these 3 at my Etsy shop.

Pics of the progress

The space we are moving the gallery into was a Christmas shop, with mostly green walls and red carpet. We started by painting over the green paint, but the carpet must stay. Here are some views of the main gallery area half -painted.

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.

A new series for my 20th Year

I have been hard at work at building my Etsy store as of late. I have added many of a new series of photographs that I have begun to mark my 20th year as a photographer. When I started out most of my work was microcosm shots. Rusty dumpsters, grimy sides of buildings, etc. Over the years, I expanded my subject matter, but I am very excited to have developed a new series that allows me to combine my love of accidental design that occurs when nature and our manmade environments meet with the design that occurs in nature itself.

These images come in 5"x5", 8"x8" and 12"x12" and feature seashells and leaves right now, with fruits and vegetables in the works.