Holiday fruit breads of mass destruction

About the only baking I do is fruit breads.  I do a great banana bread and I recently mastered cranberry orange bread.  Also pictured is a loaf of orange blueberry bread.

'In the tap room'

(acrylic and marker on 6x20" canvas)

She's baaaaaack!

To round out his cabinet, The Orange One just named Christine O'Donnell Witchfinder General of the USA.

'The gold dog and his friends'

(acrylic and marker on 16x20" canvas)

'The musician without his hat'

(acrylic and marker on 16x20" canvas)

Make every day a Dolly-day

Dolly is love.

Trump's cabinet takes shape.

Our soon to be new Sec. of State at a national security briefing.

Congratulations Piyumi!

Sparky's student worker from Sri Lanka got her Master's degree in chemistry today.  It's been an uphill battle for her but she hung in there and did it.  I couldn't be more proud of her.

Not gonna do it (UPDATED)

The woman from the local magazine who wanted me to do her job for her without paying me finally contacted me back after I sent her another email saying that I took her silence to mean that she would not paying me for writing for her little publication.  This was her response to me:

"Actually you won't be writing for our publication. It was an offer for you to talk about yourself and help promote your artwork and use our magazine as a vehicle to do so, but if you do not want to, then that is your prerogative. In the 6 years we've been producing our magazine, we have never been asked to pay for a feature, so thanks, but no thanks. We already have other artists that are willing to send us stories and pictures of their work without need for compensation."

And so I responded by sending her this:"Actually you were asking me to work for your publication. For free. I don't produce any work for corporate media for free. The other artists who are willing to produce articles for you are suckers who have fallen into the trap of providing work for you for free because 'it's good exposure.' Which is bullshit because in this area exposure in publications like yours is meaningless because of the scarcity of art galleries that sell original work at fair prices.

Also, just because your magazine gets distribution, that doesn't mean that people read it. I've seen it and have never ever picked up a copy. It's someone's vanity production."

Then the more I thought about it the more pissed off I got and I sent her this as well:

"I'm still not sure you understand what you are asking of people. So, let me break it down for you, if you get paid for doing work for that magazine, then anyone else who writes for it should get paid as well. It's actually pretty simple. "

I'm not going to link to the publication in question because to do so would give them exposure and if they want me to advertise their product, then they're going to have to pay me. And also because linking them would ruin my perfect record of never viewing their website, along with my never having read one issue of their little magazine.

This incident proves yet again that the local corporate media in my area of east TN is really awful.

Update!
The co publisher of the magazine in question sent me a private message on Facebook telling me the humble beginnings of her little publication and how enlightened they are for not charging artists for doing stories on them. She went on to say a bunch of other horse shit but what it boiled down to was that she's not going to pay me to write for her magazine because she thinks the exposure in her rag is worth more than money. To which I said:

"Of course you don't charge people to do coverage on them, that would be idiotic. But if you pay others to write for your vanity publication, then you'll pay me as well if I write an article for it, even if it's an article on me and my art. Other artists in this area have been cowed into thinking that they should give their work and time away for free in order to get exposure in an area that doesn't value their work. Not me. If you want my work, then you pay me for it. That's a pretty simple idea, one on which our current capitalist system was founded on.

There's no need for you to tell me all about your little magazine's humble beginnings, I don't care about any of that because like I said, I've never found your publication worthy of my time and after being asked to work for free for it, I highly doubt I ever will."

Then after getting counsel and opinions from people I know and respect, I tried to send her another message that said that in any other region of the country a magazine that wanted to do a story about an artist would send out a reporter to do an interview with said artist and then they'd go write an article based on that interview. But in this region where the populace routinely votes against it's own self interest by electing Republicans all the time, where wages are depressed, and where corporations and business cows workers into subservience, magazines like her can get away with expecting people they want to do articles about to work for free for them. I also tried to encourage her to develop a more ethical and responsible business model, but she and her magazine blocked me from sending them private messages and they blocked me from commenting on their little Facebook page.

So once again, the corporate media in this area shows how horrible they are.

Fuck you VIPSeen. And fuck your stupid shitty magazine.

Some good news for a change

Trust me, she's pretty pumped about it.

A couple of new 16x20's

'Hearsay' (acrylic and marker on 16x20" canvas).

'Where fog comes from' (acrylic and marker on 16x20" canvas).

She's got the biggest balls of them all

A woman from a local publication approached me Saturday at an art show and told me she wanted to do a story about me and my art in the local publication she works for.  She said that if I was interested that I should send her an 800 to 1200 word article about myself and submit 10 photos of my work.  I told her I’d think about it.  

After I thought it over for a bit I sent her this email: 

“I thought about it and I thank you for thinking of me. If I get paid to write the article then I’ll be happy to do it, otherwise, no thanks. I’m sure you understand that some of us don’t want to produce work for any corporation for free.”

I’m eagerly awaiting her reply.  But seriously, if I’m going to do your job for you, I sure as hell want to be paid.

Sorry for the light posting lately

I've been kind of busy making art, doing an art and craft show, and generally living life.  I wish I could say I'll be more diligent about posting, but I can't, so there.

I'm building a new bird based mythology

'Adoration of Saint Avianna' 

(acrylic and marker on 10x20" canvas)

Click on the picture to see it in it's entirety. 

My atheist mantra

'ALL WE HAVE IS EACH OTHER AND SOME BIRDS'

(acrylic and marker on 16x20" canvas)

Silver fox of the week

I'm a bird brain

'NATIONAL BIRD NIGHT' 

(acrylic and marker on 16x20" canvas)

I can't stop making art with birds in it.

Peering into the future

The following people will be receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom under President Orange:

• Ted Nugent
• Alex Jones
• Ann Coulter
• Sean Hannity
• Chuck Norris
• Gomer Huckabee
• The Osmonds
• The guy who invented the 'trucker' hat
• Tila Tequila
• Larry the Cable Guy
• That pig faced woman who called Michelle Obama an ape in heels
• Anyone willing to round up undocumented workers and force them to self deport
• Youth ministers who have not bee convicted of child sex abuse
• Pete Rose

Sorry to have missed you

This artist wasn't participating in the handmade art show we went to the other day.  I wish they had been, I liked their work and wanted to see more of it.  Oh well.  Like the Stones said, you can't always get what you want.

Anyway, I'm still fixated on birds in my art right now.  So I go get back to work.

I'd be shocked if any of them were really going in the first place

White women be all like...

Cheep cheep

'All the birds we saw that day' (acrylic and marker on 18x24" canvas).

The genius of Jack Kirby

(Click on the photo to enlarge it.)

The political landscape is toxic right now so here's some eye candy

Art for art's sake

Some art from this year's fall River Arts District studio stroll in Asheville, NC.

Gugu of the week

Gugu Mbatha-Raw.

Formula for success

Okay imagine this, you take all those people who voted Hillary, all the Sanders supporters, the ten million people who didn't vote this time around but who voted for in 2008, and you give them a progressive candidate who speaks to them as an equal, who doesn't condescend to them, who goes to states outside the 'swing' states, who listens to working people, someone who isn't in the Davos neo liberal jet set. And you know what you've got there? A winning Democrat.

It's not here yet, that's why we're saddled with Trump

Rest in peace Leonard Cohen.

This kind of elitist attitude is absolutely one of the reasons why Hillary lost

I dropped two 'friends' who posted this image on Facebook.  

This kind of shit is exactly why Hillary lost and the Democrats failed to win back the Senate.  They wrote off the entire interior of this country and stuck their elitist noses in the air while they lectured us time and again about the benefits of globalization while hanging out with their celebrity pals. 

I know the DNC won't ever learn because they repeatedly write off working class voters.  They rigged the primaries against one of the few populist pols left in the Democratic party because they decided it was a woman's turn to be POTUS.  And look how that worked out for them.

I could not have said it better myself

"But the Democratic Party won’t learn from these mistakes. Rather, they will blame everyone but themselves. Green Party candidate Jill Stein will be a likely scapegoat, despite the fact that if all of the votes for Stein went to Hillary Clinton, Clinton still would have lost the election just as badly."

The most loyal Clinton supporters will predictably attack Sanders and his supporters for Clinton’s loss. They will do so without acknowledging that Clinton did nothing to extend an olive branch to Sanders supporters. Tim Kaine was the exact opposite of a progressive, and Clinton immediately hired Debbie Wasserman Schultz after she resigned in disgrace from her position as DNC chair after WikiLeaks revealed she helped Clinton cheat in the Democratic primaries."

Michael Sainato