Late Blog Anniversary

It's been over 13 months since I started this blog and I wanted to write a short anniversary note.

I wasn't really sure what I was going to do here. I hoped to use it to show new sketches, perhaps more developed drawings and paintings, and write about my birding and other nature-oriented activities.

In some ways it's been wildly successful: I think it's really been an impetus for me to do more artwork. I can't argue with that. The more time I spend on art the better.

Writing about birding and nature has not been as successful. But that's really because I've learned that though I am interested in them there are very many other bloggers writing similar blogs and my observations aren't really anything special. So I started off writing more about birds and nature but slowly I changed to writing more about art, especially art that has birds or nature as it's subject.

That seems to me to have been a pretty organic evolution. I'm sure readers might sometimes wonder just what kind of hodgepodge blog I have: sometimes it's about birding, sometimes about art, sometimes something else. Well every blog has a right to be just what it wants and hope that it finds an audience. I think along those lines. But I also think that it's grown into a blog with a fairly predictable subject: art about nature, especially my own art.

Another huge aspect of blogging though is the people I've met visiting their blogs, and sometimes welcoming them as visitors here. I was a skeptic about blogs for many years. Who would be interested in someone's personal writings, especially a few, million 'someones'? Well I found that I became quite attached to certain blogs and get a great deal of pleasure from reading them. I also feel that I've become part of a community. I'm not going to name any particular blogs here but blogs where I comment frequently will know that they are among them. As I said this has been one of the most pleasant surprises of the blogosphere.

Finally there's something I've kept out of this blog: art theory. As readers of other blogs know I can sometimes expound at length about art theory. This is a dangerous tendency and I've often felt that I ought to expound here if I'm going to go on at such length. But I don't. I may mention it once in awhile but I don't go at length about contemporary art history and theory as I have on other blogs. I think it would be too disjointed if I were to do so here. And I think it takes away from my main goal: to create art. So art theory is something that I'll continue to avoid here and probably on other blogs as well. Art theory is fine but I think for most artists they should really convince themselves that they don't have time for it. It can be enervating rather than inspirational. Enough said on that!

So Happy Anniversary to this blog and to all its readers!