it's not a rebrand if you don't have a brand

I paint slowly and post very little of it. I'm okay with this. After crying over wiring paintings in the parking lot of the Ho'omaluhia show, I decided to take a break. No gallery shows or sales this year, I said to myself. Just paint for pleasure and focus on travel and health.

And then I got an email about the big annual statewide art exhibition in the fall, with a $10,000 prize for Best in Show. It’s eating my brain. Okay, I think, so you walk into a gallery, there are paintings of flowers and fish and palm trees, and then you turn a corner and there it is - the Best in Show… WHAT IS IT? I don’t know. It’s big, whatever it is. I went to 7-11 and bought a bunch of local junk food and dumped it on my studio table, and I’ve been painting it for the last month (from photos at this point, because shrimp shumai don't make good still life models). A person with half a mind for marketing and self promotion would be taking videos along the way and making reels for Instagram, but I just don’t want to.

I also don’t want to paint landscapes. This seems to be a realization I need to come to over and over again. I can’t compete with nature. I don’t even like landscape paintings in my own fiddly “paint what you see” style, I like tonal minimalist landscapes with weird trees or giant robots in the mist. Give me eldritch landscapes or give me travel photographs.

So I'm just going to post my reference pictures instead of trying to paint them. If people only followed me on Instagram for paintings they were out of luck anyway, because I never post anything. My self esteem is still in the toilet, but I've started going for walks with my camera on my lunch breaks to see what I can see, and it's been a nice change of pace.

Maybe the Best in Show piece is a photo, who knows? I have decided to stop thinking about it, I'll submit something if I feel like it.