AMak Color

Review of the Feb. 19th symposium

So, last week's symposium went quite well. We had a crowd of 40-50 artists who gathered for the presentation, and FOTA's board organized a lovely dinner for the panelists. Every artist, I thought, gave an interesting speech with their own twist on the big world of art marketing. I spoke mostly about the pros and cons of art festivals. One thing I stressed to artists is always finding opportunities to diversify the way they show and market their work. "I don't want to be 50 and doing art festivals," I said, only to realize that half of my audience is over 50. Ha! Actually... Correction, guys: I don't want to be 50 and ONLY doing art festivals. They are physically demanding and can be very unpredictable.
Here is a photo of us four presenters:
From left to right: Jason Messinger, Nancy Pirri, James Klekowski, Yours Truly, and Ted Preuss. Thank you to all who came, asked and listened!

New Painting: Cloud Gate

I've been asked for to make some giclee prints of the Chicago's Bean sculpture, and they are finally ready! Archival reproductions of this painting are available here. I've painted many small "Beans" before, but this is my first large one, and for that it gets a grown-up title: Cloud Gate. Nobody in Chicago calls the Bean "Cloud Gate", only tourists do - but because "Cloud Gate" is the sculpture's official name, we will go with that! Original is an 18x24 Acrylic on Canvas Painting.

Brazilian visas: check

I returned from the Chicago Brazilian consulate yesterday, with our Brazilian visas in hand. Coming from the former Soviet Union, I am used to the visa process being on a par with Gestapo interrogation. I remember trying to get my first student visa to come to the U.S. from Moscow, where an agent questioned me relentlessly about my English skills and my purpose in life. Then I was told to come back in a week with additional paperwork – apparently a pound of documents I supplied them with was not enough.

The Brazilian visa process was relatively painless. It took a week, $130 per person fee, and both of our signatures on the application. Although, this consulate, too, works like your typical government bureau: you can not call them, they do not reply to emails and half of their website does not function properly. I wonder, when will government offices around the world realize that it is more beneficial to act as a business? Probably never…

Now comes the harder part: learning some basic Brazilian Portuguese. As exciting as it is to learn new languages, I find that there is always that frustration of wanting to have perfect pronunciation NOW!!! To me Portuguese is tricky – my brain wants to think it is very similar to Spanish and retrieves Spanish expressions to build sentences. But, even though two vocabularies share many words, their pronunciation and intonation are quite different. And then Portuguese speakers swallow and shorten a lot of words when they talk.  And then there are R’s that are pronounced as “H” and all other strange sounds. Anyway, all I know for now is that eu vou beber uma cerveja. :)