I slept not a wink last night, with my dog Sydney farting and snoring at my feet and the tricky Santa Ana winds blowing hot dusty air through the trees outside. I had restless dreams when I did drift into shallow dozes, felt the creepings of dark shadows and imagined every creak to be the sound of ghosts and ghouls. Most of the noises were simply the sound of Syd’s stomach and her grumping about it.
Thanks to her indigestion keeping me awake I’ve been irritable and baggy eyed all day. No painting. On the up side, I found a quiet time after lunch to sit in my office for an hour or two and take a breather.Â
The photographer from the Ventura County Star arrived mid afternoon, and shot a plethora of photos in the gallery. I quite enjoy the process of doing a news photo, because the photographers generally dislike telling you what to do, because they’ve trained to shoot what’s there in front of them, not to arrange things to suit them. This means that they’ll shoot pretty much whatever you choose to do, so you can really enjoy coming up with ideas for the shots almost as if they were paintings.
Mike Adams has done a fantastic job preparing a four page brochure for the show, very clean, beautifully designed. I gets me excited about the potential for producing a book. The work looks great when its printed, and I have a lot of good shots of it now, and text shouldn’t be too hard to put together. So it’s really about money to produce it. I think there’s a profit to be made in books, which can provide a small but useful income, especially if you can produce several different texts that appeal in different ways, so you become collectible. One day at a time. Making a book will be a goal for next year.Â
