Getting Started! (Channeling my inner Bateman)

I have finally got this website running!  At the end of last year, I set a goal for myself, which was to do a drawing a week.  For the most part, I have succeeded, but let's face it, life happens, and when it does, you have to roll with it.  Furthermore, I love to venture into new styles of working, and in order to do this, sometimes you have to set aside your rigid rules, and let the creative juices flow.  In the past month that is exactly what I have done!  I bought a couple of travel watercolour sets, some inexpensive (but pro quality tube watercolours) M Graham paints, and some brushes and paper.  Watercolour is something I've always wanted to explore but never really have.  Ultimately I would like to start working with acrylics, but I have a pretty new daughter, and life as a new parent doesn't always lend itself easily to a medium that requires a lot of setup and cleanup.  That's why drawing and watercolour is so great, it's quick to start, and quick to clean up, so if duties call, I can quickly finish up and run to the next task at hand.

So how did this all begin...don't worry, I won't go back to the womb!  In the winter of 2017, my wife, Lois, and I took our daughter on a trip to the Millerville Christmas fair.  We stopped at a woman's booth and she was making a killing selling prints and original works of birds and general Canadiana.  I thought to myself, I could easily do the same.  So, long story short...I did.  As Lois can attest, when we are riding our bikes down country lanes in the summer, my head is usually turned up to the sky looking for the local hawks cruising the farmer's fields for a meal, or off to the side ponds looking for Blue Herons or whatever grebes and ducks might be meandering around.  Bottom line, I really like birds and Canadian wildlife, so I made the choice to do something I never dreamed I would do as a pretentious young artist trying to push boundaries.  I let myself love art simply for the sake of what it is for me, something that makes me happy.  Not something that has to tell a story, or make a political statement or change or push idioms about art.  No, I am now just making art for the love of making art.  I am embracing my inner Robert Bateman!  Haters be damned.

Coming back full circle, the website.  As I said, I started my work goal at the end of last year.  This has led to me producing a lot of work, and being invited into a show at my dad's golf club at Lynx Ridge in Bear's Paw.  So I set another goal, have a website, a body of work, and business cards by April before the show.  Well today is the day of the show, and here we are!  The business cards look pretty sweet too!  I also have a rock solid collection of about 11 really nice illustrations (and a handfull of less than great practice watercolours).  I would love to tell you that becoming a father has made this difficult, but on the contrary, it has turned this master procrastinator into a doer!  I used to think I had all the time in the world to make art, so I never did.  Now my time is so limited that as soon as I have a spare moment, I have a pen or brush in hand and my head buried in my work.  I may have less time now, but I use it a million times more effectively than I did in the past! 

Hopefully I can keep this blog interesting and useful.  I will try to provide any opinions about products I use, about techniques I'm working with, being a husband and father, about cycling, and about my life in general.  And a shout out to the love of my life, Lois, for being so supportive in my venturing back into art, and to my daughter, Dianna (the other love of my life), I do this for you.

Thanks for reading!

​-Eric