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I have an opening at the Artistic Edge gallery tonight from 4-7PM. located at 1880 Fulton Ave, Sacramento, Ca. Come if you can! Ron Walker

I work on my art every day as I know many of you do. Some days I just don't have it, i'ts like my hand and eyes don't get along. I should blame myself but that would be no fun! So i'm blaming the days of the week. Are there some days which it's better to paint on then others?

Just this week I received an e-mail from an old artist friend who I had lost contact with. After thinking about it I realized that I had not talked to this person for about 20 years! I talked to him on the phone today and am quite happy he found me. I was wondering if any of you have had similar luck in finding or being found by long lost friends?

I am 49 years old, I have two great kids,ages 6 and 4. I have managed to continue to paint by making my car a studio and painting at every chance I get. It's getting a bit better as the kids are able to do more on their own but for awhile it was tough. Love my car but I was wondering what other solutions are out there?

I love money! Don't get me wrong here, I would love it if my paintings made more money. However please don't get the fact that someone is financialy successful with their art confussed with the idea that the art is any good! The market is what it is and the majority of collectors have little art training. I know what I like dosen't mean that what you like is any good. A friend in graduate school put it this way, " Just because Superman comics outsale a Kafka Novel does not mean it is a greater piece of wrighting!" Keep on creating the best art possible and don't fall into the money trap! Did I mention "I love money?"

Design , color useage, space making, composition, content, form are all the same in a good piece of art. Art is art. Chuck Close never produced a single "realistic piece and picasso never abstracted a piece of art. Realism must go through the eyes, brain and nervous system before it pops out. In other words the distillation process is the same for all art. What is realism? I don't know, but once picasso took on the topic. He held up a photograph of his daughter, and asked a reporter if the picture was realistic? The repoter answered "yes" and Picasso replied "Funny I don't remember my daughter being so small. " I don't consider myself to be a realist or an abstractionist, I am just an artist doing what I can.

When I was an undergraduate at a small university in Missouri I worked on a abstract painting for quite awhile. I finally quit and tossed it out of my run down trailer that I lived in at that time. The painting sat outside in the winter snow, the summer heat the rains everything. When I did my senior show I dug this piece up and included it along with dirt, grass and other crude it had gathered. The piece was one of my more popular ones in the show. Thanks Ma Nature! Do you have any odd techniques or stories?

I had a one person show back in the 1980's at the county government center where I use to live. I went to view the show after it had been up for about a week to see how things were going. I had one piece in the exhibit in which I sort of used phrenology. I had a large head devided up into various shapes in which I had a tiny space for reason a tiny space for kindness etc. I had one large space labeled Mc brain. While I sat looking at the show I became aware of a argument between two people over this work. One person was convinced that the work was satanic and the other thought the work was a christian metapor. I thought the work was humorous, but realized that people bring baggage to the viewing of artwork that you could never guess. Have any of you had the interesting experiance of having your work interpeted in ways you could not even imagine?

The all time greatest critic I ever knew was my cat named Pablo, after Picasso. In 1984 I was getting a painting ready to ship to a national competitive I had recently been accepted in, I left the work on my garage on the floor for only a few minutes while I ran into the house to get something. When I returned there was a LARGE pile of vomit right in the middle of this work! After investigating I noticed that the vomit had come from up in the rafters. My cat had been up there, and after looking at my painting, had let loose scoring a direct hit in the center of the work! I have been critique many times over the years but never quite as harshly as by my cat.

Many years ago I was working with a acrylic mold technique in which I would make a low relief picture in clay and then cast it in acrylic. I went to a Japanesse market to buy dried fish to cast (Cool textures!). The owners of the store aparently did not have many people of the pasty variety buying these fish and they were very excited! They were all talking to me about how to prepare these fish for eating. They were so helpfull I did not have the heart to tell them I had no intention of ever eating these fish. They did look great in the painting, but to this day I'm not sure how they would taste!

In grad school I remember a lecture about how abstract expressionism was exported and supported by the US government as a way of countering the official art of the Soviet Union. (Realism) Abstraction ment freedom and realism ment repression!

I have two young children at home and my studio space has become a storeage area. For the last six years I have reduced the size of my paintings and have been painting in my car. So I am just currious, Where do you work? Beautiful studio, garage, outdoors, car, where???

In graduate school I went through a personal crisis concerning art. The big question was, why is art important? I started to research art produced under different or extreme conditions. The Australian aboriginals created what was called dreamtime stories and stylized paintings to go along with these stories. This culture was unique in that they never developed a written language, but why the paintings and stories? These stories and paintings served as a type of map to find water holes and for knowing what time of year there would be water in these holes, a vital bit of survival information in the outback! I also became interested in the art produced in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. This art was so important that it was smuggled from prisoner to prisoner at the risk of death, why? These people often were very well educated and certainly could and did express their experiences in other ways. So why art at all? Communication not esthetics or decoration was my conclusion to this question. 80 to 90% of information we obtain comes through visual means, certainly important but not unique to the visual arts that make them unique as a means of powerful communication. First they transcend language, you may not be able to read a French or Russian author's work unless you speak their language but you can understand a painting done by a member of any culture despite the language barrier. The second issue is the time factor, with most forms of communication such as writing, theatre and dance the time it takes to receive the information contained within takes awhile. The visual arts, on the other hand, present all the information to the viewer at once. The combination or the visual image, the transcendence of language and the immediacy of the message make the visual arts not only important but also vital as a means of human expression.

People have changed very little on the inside since tribal times.