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According to Wikipedia, the "Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest is an approximately 3,800-acre tract of publicly owned virgin forest in Graham County, North Carolina, named in memory of poet Joyce Kilmer (1886–1918), best known for his poem "Trees". One of the largest contiguous tracts of old growth forest in the Eastern United States, the area is administered by the U. S. Forest Service. The memorial forest is a popular family hiking destination and features an easy two-mile, figure-eight trail that includes a memorial plaque at the juncture of the two loops."

According to Creech Fine Art, a visit to the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest should be on every person's bucket list. It is very much like our backyard, except that at Kilmer many of the trees were living - and big - before the first English settlers arrived in Jamestown. I have been to Sequoia in California so I know what a REALLY BIG tree is, but the Kilmer trees aren't from a one of a kind species associated with a micro-climate. They are tulip poplar, a very common tree, unique at Kilmer in that they have been allowed to grow up over centuries without the interference of those pesky humans with their axes and saws.

We've been there twice, and would like to go again. Our first visit happened on a cloudy day, which turned out to be a good thing because like most people we are not professional photographers. We stood at the base of tulip poplars maybe eight times the diameter of the ones in our neighborhood and pointed our camera straight up (this was before cellphones replaced cameras). Our photos turned out wonderfully because it was cloudy. I think if there had been bright sun the light through the leaves would have overwhelmed our point-and-shoot camera's capabilities and we would have gotten blurry nothingness.

This is an old painting based on that visit, and I attribute my having been able to create it to, well, a cloudy day. While thinking about moving into a new year I couldn't help but to remember this painting and our visits to Joyce Kilmer. Amidst all the fast food, dysfunctional government, stress, disharmony, unwillingness to listen, hatred, bullying, and trash that accounts for much of life in the 21st century, these trees serve to remind me that there nonetheless remain kernels of beauty, goodness, wisdom, compassion, and peace. I have never been a new year's resolution person, but no matter how cloudy the events of 2020 turn out, I will think of the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest and take hope and look for the kernels of light. However passive and minuscule such effort might be, every little bit helps.

Happy New Year.

Disclaimer: If you are a “real” real artist, don’t read any further. I don’t mean talent or expertise, I use the word real to mean you pay your mortgage, buy groceries – you make your living – by means of your art. It is your day job. Good on ya' mate. I doubt anything I have to say below will be of value to you.

No. This is written on behalf of the other kind of real artist, the ones like me. The kind who paint because they cannot not do it, work at something else for a paycheck, and with respect to sales – hell, if they could even just recover their costs they’d be dancing in the streets. The ones whose houses are full of paintings, leaning against walls and under beds, who just can’t stop because the process of painting feeds their souls. If this describes you I invite you to read further.

I enjoy having this website. FASO makes it simple to maintain a professional online presence – just pick a template and go. But you have to keep it alive. Artist’s websites are not generally visited the way amazon.com is. If your website remains static, nobody will seek it out. I have come up with my own way of doing things, which gets me what I consider to be good traffic, and there are nonetheless many days (up to a third) with no hits at all. 

I would understand if your response is to ask what’s the point? Why should anybody go to the bother of paying to establish and maintain a website if some days not a single person on planet earth will seek it out? In response I assure you that you are already a creative person and the blog and newsletter features of your website give you another avenue for your creativity. I will also refer you to Aesop’s tortoise; slow and steady wins the race. Let’s take a look.

TAKE THE TIME TO SET IT UP RIGHT

Yes FASO makes it easy, but it will still take hours, even dozens of hours, to set up your website. In my case, it helped that I was (cough) between jobs as a result of a lay-off when I first established my site. The great thing is that you can pick any template you like when you start. If you end up preferring a different look or feel – just assign a new template and everything you’ve already done will transfer and magically orient itself to the new look. Seriously, FASO kicks ass. I’m sure there are other hosting sites to choose from, but FASO really does it all. Almost. It is up to you to label things correctly, spell it right, take reasonable care with your visual images blah blah blah zzzzzzzzzzzz. Think of it as a Ph.D. dissertation: have somebody you trust mercilessly proof every page, image, and word, and then allow yourself to be edited.

BLOG AWAY

I do not write conventional blog posts. Many are whimsical. Some are so tangential as to make you scratch your head. Few if any are mean-spirited, but snark can appear without warning. I write about anything I want to. I mean anything. I frequently discuss a painting; not in terms of how I painted it or anything technical, more along the lines of the story behind the story. Like this ONE or this ONE, which talk more about Icelandic history and our travel memories than about the paintings themselves. Sometimes I wander off the reservation to discuss something totally unrelated to art, such as the World Series or my mother’s funeral. The way I see it, I am king of my website and so I can write about any darn thing I please. So can you. Can't think of an art related topic? Write about something your kid did, write a movie review, tell 'em what you did on your summer vacation. Anything. I suggest, though, two rules:

1. Keep it short. The post you are reading right now is already longer than my typical one. I recognize that a lot of people will read it on their phone so short and sweet is the way to go. You won’t get repeat readers if you drag things out. 
2. Don’t overload. I generally limit my blogs to no more than two a month in the hope that when people see a new one they go “Yay” rather than roll their eyeballs and automatically delete or unsubscribe.

If you hate writing, blog an image of one of your paintings. Even if all it says is "Title, medium, size, cost" you can still make it a blog post.

ADVERTISE YOUR BLOG

I share my blogs on my Facebook page. Takes about two minutes. Just need to write a one or two sentence lead-in and make sure it can be shared. Boom. Done.

I also send my blogs out as newsletters. This takes a wee bit longer, and, if I have any complaint about FASO it would be that the newsletter feature only gets a C for user-friendliness. If you rely on italics and underlining and such in your blog, you have to redo them all in the newsletter. The captions you put on the visuals all have to be readdressed as well. It’s a pain. But then – pow- out it goes to your email distribution list. It takes some time to set up an email list, and I tend to opt for quality over quantity. My list isn't as long as I could make it, but I'm pretty sure that everybody who is on it wants to be. 

I titled this section Advertise Your Blog, but really just advertise yourself. If you have paintings in a gallery, send out a newsletter. If you will hold a workshop – send one out. If all you have is a cute cat video – send it. As noted above, don’t overdo it. Try to find the “Yay” timing that works for you.

WHY?

The blogs and newsletters are what keep people returning to your website. FASO has an analytics function by which you can track stuff.  For example, as I write this post, I see that a total of 3,035 newsletters have been sent out since February 24, 2018 (at 8:17:39 am to be precise). My mailing list is around 100 people so that’s maybe 30 actual newsletters over 23 months or an average of 1.3 per month. Analytics tells me that 48.1% were opened, 4.78% were clicked, 0.20% unsubscribed, and 0.86% bounced. It further tells me that a 20-35% open rate is “about normal,” below 20% stinks, 35-50% is “really good,” and above 50% is “simply stellar.” Ever since I started periodically checking, my open rate has hovered between 48 and 49.7%. I haven't reached simply stellar yet, but I intend to.

Analytics also monitors your website traffic by page views and number of visitors. I see that whenever I publicize a blog by Facebook or a newsletter or both, I get a spike. Again, as I write this, over the past 30 days, 126 pages were viewed by 51 unique visitors, 74.51% of whom were new visitors.  Eleven days out of 30 had no visitors at all.

My one takeaway is that without the blog sharing and newsletters, there would likely be very little traffic on the website, maybe only 2 or 3 visitors a month. There is probably a lot more I could do mining this data to develop new strategies, but this is good enough for me. Write a blog and share it, and people come to the website. Works every time.

Useful information also can be gleaned from the email responses to the newsletters and comments on the Facebook posts. I generally receive between 5 to 15 or more written responses each time I post something, which I think is fantastic. Every one has been a positive response, and the one negatively critical remark in two years was nonetheless just a sentence in an overall positive note.

And…you can sell paintings or get commissions from doing all this. As one example, I wrote a post earlier this year about a painting done well over a decade ago. It was a scene in Jamaica. Because I shared a link to the blog on Facebook, and somebody shared it beyond my friends list, it came to the notice of a person who has a getaway home in Jamaica.

Sold!

I will take a moment here to acknowledge Crystal Jonkman, to whom I am married, quite elatedly, and who continues to constantly astound me with her incredible artistic strength and passion. Her field of art is music, something which consumes her every single day and many nights. Classically trained, she plays the pipe organ and piano. Not just dabbling in it the way I do in my painting. No, she has competed nationally and internationally to considerable acclaim. She is a wonderful choral conductor whose joy in vocal harmony encourages others to achieve their own very best. Of late, she divides professional time between Richmond's St. Michael's Episcopal Church and the Greater Richmond Children's Choir, a fine organization indeed.

On the Saturday morning after Thanksgiving, I joined Crystal (as I've done for several years now) at a Richmond Symphony "Lollipops" Concert. Why? Because for many years running at this annual holiday concert for children, a chorister from the GRCC has sung solo as the symphony accompanies the holiday film "The Snowman." This isn't Crystal's gig, it's all Richmond Symphony. But Crystal supports her kids. And their parents. And music. It's what you do when you want the best for those you mentor.

Imagine you are 12 years old, sitting on the stage with dozens of professional adult musicians facing some 1,500 or more audience members, knowing you will be the only one singing when the big moment arrives. I can't. I cannot see my once twelve year old self being able to do anything even remotely as public and focused and possible to screw up. I would have been an oxymoron: petrified jello. Yet every year, a 12 year or so old kid steps up and sings and just blows the auditorium away. In clear, crafted tones and with firm commitment to honor the composer's vision over the performer's ego. A professional just as Crystal has instructed. These kids are fantastic. 

In my younger days courting tinnitus listening to extremely loud rock music I would never have been able to predict that one of my annual highlights would be to sit happily with hundreds of fidgety tykes during a holiday concert waiting for the Snowman's magic to happen yet again. But it is, it is. Earlier this year, GRCC singers participated in a presentation of Carmen along with the symphony, members of the Virginia Opera, and guest mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves. Crystal was backstage and tells me that Ms. Graves was all over the young singers as they came off stage, handing out high fives and enthusiastically telling them"you killed it! You totally killed it" Crystal's been in the biz long enough to distinguish polite praise from the real deal. This was the real deal. I write this because I believe that all of these young choristers kill it when they get the chance due at least in part to Crystal's instilling so much love of singing and the art of being professional. They reach high and they make it. And I'm proud of them. And of her.

But you don't have to take my word for it. Listen to the words of an 11 year old choir member: "I never knew the Greater Richmond Children’s Choir would be so much fun! First we got to sing with the world famous opera star Denyce Graves! Now we get to sing with a famous choir made up of singers from all over the country!"  

Or learn of the even younger singer who demanded a password from everyone entering the rehearsal space, including Crystal and her assistants. Her required password?

"I Love to Sing."