Newsletter November 2011

In my last newsletter I talked of snowdrifts on the ground here at home in Montana even though we were well into spring. Now we are well into fall and this morning woke to the first skiff of new snow on the ground. In Alaska where I used to live we called this sure sign of the end of the warm season termination dust. That I seemed to have gone directly from melting drifts to termination dust, skipping summer entirely, means I am remiss in getting out a timely quarterly newsletter.

The summer without a newsletter continued to be wet like spring was, so we got a bumper crop of wildflowers around our house and I was back home enough from my art show travels to be able to appreciate them.

I had a very good summer of art shows this year, including my best show ever at the Utah Arts Festival in Salt Lake City. Perhaps due to it being the first warm weekend of the summer in Salt Lake, the city turned out a huge crowd that were very enthusiastic. I welcome to my newsletter all the new readers who signed up at Salt Lake and all the other summer shows as well.

My traveling exhibition of crow and raven photographs, Opus Corvus, which was at the Viewpoint Center for Photographic Art in Sacramento earlier this year, is now at the Oesterle Gallery at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. In late September I traveled to Naperville to give a gallery talk at the reception for the show. It was a fun time and the gallery director, Nickole Lanham, really knows how to flatter an artist as witnessed by the limo ride she arranged for my wife and I to get us from the airport in Chicago to our hotel in Naperville. Now that's the way to treat an artist!

The Opus Corvus exhibit will be in Naperville through the middle of November. After that, it returns home to Bozeman where it will be at the Zoot Art Gallery from December through March 2012. There will be a reception there on December 8.

In addition to the solo exhibitions in Sacramento, Naperville, and Bozeman, selected images from Opus Corvus have also been included in exhibits at the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, CA, the Nicolaysen Art Museum in Casper, WY, the Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings, MT and the Missoula Art Museum in Missoula, MT. Earlier this year the collected images were published in LensWork magazine.

After the visit to Naperville we spent a couple of days in Chicago, a great place to photograph. I was as always drawn to the art and architecture of the city but this time also to the opportunities for candid shots of people in public places, i.e., street photography. People have never been high on my list of photographic subjects but I find myself more and more attracted to the possibilities. Who knows, maybe it will become a new specialty for me. If you follow my blog or my Facebook posts, you've already seen a lot of the work from Chicago and I am currently still posting photos from there daily. Check it out if you are interested.

As many of you know, at my summer art shows in addition to selling prints in the larger sizes you see for sale at my web store, I also offer smaller 5"x7.5" prints over-matted to 11" x 14" for the very reasonable price of $29 each. Each print is mounted in a white acid-free mat and enclosed in a clear display bag. I don't offer these on my web store because at that low price the extra effort and cost to ship a single small print just does not seem like a good deal for me or the customer. But because they are the perfect gift size and price for many, for this holiday season I've decided to make them available by mail to readers of this newsletter. You will not see this offer on my web store page.

This offer applies to almost any image you find on my website, blog, or Facebook page. (See below for the exception.) Also check out this special web page where I have posted some popular images, many that do not appear elsewhere on my website.

The first catch is you must buy a minimum of two prints. (Buy one for yourself and one for a gift!) The total cost for two prints of $58 includes free standard ground shipping within the continental U.S. You can of course order as many prints as you'd like beyond the minimum of two.

The second catch is that this offer does not apply to images that are in a square format (such as some of the popular crow and raven photos). The simple reason for this is that I do not stock mats with square openings in that size. If you really have your heart set on one of the square images, I will offer any square image in the larger 10"x10" size matted to 16"x20" for $79 including free shipping within the continental U.S. (Note there is no minimum purchase requirement for these larger prints.)

The final catch is that you won't be able to order these from my web store. Instead you must send me a personal email indicating which images you'd like. Once I receive your request, I will send you instructions for making a payment. You will be able to pay with a credit card, a Paypal account, or a personal check.

Tomorrow we are off to Budapest, Hungary for three weeks. I am really excited about my first trip to eastern Europe (although I understand that with the formation of the European Union, Hungarians consider themselves to be in central rather than eastern Europe). I'm really looking forward to three weeks of just concentrating on my photography and having fun. Stay tuned to my blog and Facebook page where I will be posting new photos from there daily beginning next week.