Celebrating the cold and snowy season of early Winter, I have selected 5 original paintings for a special one week sale. From midnight December 8, 2024 until Midnight December 15, 2024 you will receive 20% off the shown price. If you had your eye on one of these, now is the time to adopt it.
I’ve been thinking about some of these new restructures and endeavors that I’ve been exploring in my work and my thinking and one of the things I’d like to experiment with is creating online sales in the store, or sales gallery. I have been using the product ‘Square’ for both in person and online sales management and am pretty happy with it. It is safe and secure on both your end and mine.
As the holidays approach I would like to participate in some of the small business sales events. How to do that isn’t something I have had the courage to learn on my website but I think it’s about time. Don’t you? That being said I have read about how to set up a sale discount for select items to run for a particular time frame and I think I am ready to give this a try.
I see that the next installment of the Outlander television series finally resumes on Starz on Friday, November 22nd so for my first step into making online buying fun and easy for you let’s have a special “End of Drought-lander” Sales Event! Fellow enthusiasts can enjoy 10% off select Outlander related items (the giclee icon series and bookmarks) all that weekend from Friday, November 22nd to Sunday, November 25th. I have it set up to change the price of the items to reflect the 10% off so that it works right in the checkout process during the sale period. There is a minimum threshold of $4.50. The discount will expire at midnight Sunday and change the price back to where they were.
Thank you all, my friends and patrons. I encourage you to sign up to get upcoming e-mail announcements so you won’t miss new works, announcements, and sales.
I encourage you to subscribe to getting these posts sent directly to your e-mail address. It is safe and convenient and as easy as clicking on the subscribe button at the bottom of any one of these pages. I have disconnected the distribution to my social media FB site and plan to continue to modify how I interact with my patrons without unsolicited interference. Thank you for your continued interest and support.
Nothing is easy right now. Trying to look objectively at each of the instances affecting my life recently, from the small daily challenges to the national level events, everything feels harder to sort out and deal with than usual. Twenty twenty was admittedly a really hard year and the year at hand looks to be following suit, so it might just be that I’m having a tired moment. When I’m tired everything looks a little bit bleaker so I need to make a concerted effort to get my second wind.
I do believe that things are rarely binary; strictly black or white, right or wrong, positive or negative. I believe that very rarely is someone purely evil and no one is purely good (deities aside) and some good can usually be found in any outcome. Perhaps it is my artistic perspective, or perhaps it is my idealistic life views, but I always believe things will be ok in the end. I have often been accused of Pollyannaism. Fair enough. Admittedly, it takes intervention on our part and is almost always difficult work, calling on calm and measured thinking, but it can be done…with grace and perseverance.
In the meantime, I will keep plugging along doing what I do to the best of my ability. I will keep processing the events of these days through my painting and my writing, and admit my processing will be reflected in my work.
Today’s painting, an 8″ x 10″ oil on canvas, is a self study – a snapshot that clearly reflects how I’m feeling at this moment and painted with an unfiltered eye. Rest assured, however, things are going to be ok.
Today is New Year’s Day and our thoughts turn to new beginnings, and making changes to our lives. No, I’m not going to start talking about diet and workout routines, and my own promises are things I will probably keep to myself. Quite honestly, I think that all of our personal lists going into 2021 are valid. This website, however, is about my work and the integral, even foundational part it plays in who I am.
Making art is more than my craft, it is an exposed insight to who I am and how I process my world. Over the last decade, becoming bold enough to show others my artwork, first in person and then online, was and is …difficult. The writing that I do here to accompany it increases the difficulty but I feel compelled to share some insights of my thoughts. My technique, my methodology, and my thought processes have all evolved steadily but this past year began an acceleration of transformation. 2021 will continue to be challenging for all of us since nothing with the magnitude of the trials of 2020, can turn on a dime. The inertia will continue to effect me, no doubt.
I intend to continue to paint and show my work here, and to look at this site over the next few weeks; closing galleries that have not proved interesting or fruitful, shifting the 2020 gallery items into their topical galleries, and exploring ways I can improve the experience for you. I appreciate the support that you have shown me. Thank you.
This morning has been so relaxing. It has been enjoyable sitting at my easel painting and thinking about friends on the North Shore of Lake Superior. It’s delightful to me that while painting I can transport myself in my mind to particular moments in time. For those of you, my friends, who were in the encampment at the Grand Portage National Monument in August of 2019, you will recall the evening when the storm blew up quickly resulting in a lovely double rainbow. It’s been rare for me to be able to see both ends of a rainbow in my life, and most assuredly I had never seen the rainbow reflect off water like that, almost creating a circle. Circles are everywhere in our lives from repetitian within our visual spheres to our relationships with people, and are most certainly demonstrated in our paths of life.
Thank you for circling back to see how this painting turned out today, and thank you for walking the circles of my life with me.
Feel free to send me a comment about the work, or that day, or our walk together.
Welcome to the new look and feel for this website. Moving to a new home can be daunting and even doing it in web space can make a person feel off kilter. [Thanks to the friend who brought the truck and helped me take all this stuff to the new place.] Like any new home there is the first stage of painting the new walls for the fresh start, hooking up the technology, and the never-ending quandaries of what box ‘that thing’ was packed away in, and in which drawer the silverware should now go? The bright side is a move also gives a person a chance to rethink everything. What should each particular room (or gallery) be, or what changes do I want to make as long as it’s a new start anyway?
Some of that work is done enough for company to stop in for my open house but remember, I will probably be monkeying around with things for a while before I settle down. Here’s to new beginnings. Come on in.
Christmas time. The holiday season. Breaks from work to eat, love, rest, and in my case, also paint. It is a time when we are in the process of finishing all of our tasks and projects, and scrambling to wrap up year-end commitments. With that, we all look to the New Year with some degree of excitement, nervousness, but most of all, hope. 2020 has all of the potential of a new year, a new decade, and a new path.
We may not always have control over what appears to be destiny, for that control I believe remains in God’s hands. We do, however, have a great deal of control over the things that happen to us through the choices we make, and the thoughts we form from our own observations and what we believe of the opinions of others. We must use our wisdom and our soul to choose, for it is why God gave us choice.
As part of this next step of my walk in faith I am making some changes with the New Year. I won’t call them new years resolutions because in fact, they aren’t a promise because of the calendar but a promise because I need to make the changes.
One of the things that is changing is the look of my website. It will be just a freshening and a rebuild of my interaction with you. It also can serve as a reminder that many other changes are beginning their birth behind the scenes. I thank you all who have followed or are now following my walk in faith toward being a full time artist.
This painting is inspired by a photograph taken by a friend on the beach at Kenosha, Wisconsin of the Christmas Morning Sunrise. My thanks to her for the permission. I enjoyed painting and contemplating through these last two days.
I would also like to extend the thanks to include those people in my life that surround me with love each day. Each action, no matter how small, matters greatly. Those who reach out with the spontaneous hug, the conversation in the street when I need it, the lifting text on a Christmas afternoon, the visit to my office to say “well done”, the help with the website, and the tender guardianship of my heart… I thank you, truly.
Blessings to you all In the coming year. I will not be back here until the new look is launched.
Gosh, time has flown by so fast! 
I am hurriedly wrapping up the end of an academic semester, and I still have boxes of art all over my home place from last weekend’s show. They need to be stowed so that I can decorate for the holidays. Slightly panicked, I’m trying to imagine how fast I can get my living room rearranged, my tree up, and my decorations placed around this Saturday.
I did take a moment yesterday to think about all of the wonderful people I had met at the Outlander Convention last weekend. I learned a lot at that show. Many of those lovely patrons had advice on how to present my work at a multi faceted venue like that was, and others had good advice on the need for a broader scaled pricing model. As a working painter I have tried to have some prints available but have also learned that offering prints of too many original works can devalue the original pieces. For this recent show I had made a few smaller prints that were created specifically as small and affordable works of art (Outlander icon pen and inks), some notecards using an image of one of my larger works (Morning Fog at Craig na Dun), and a small edition of a detail from a larger original (Safe Harbour).
Last night’s conclusion was that I needed to have a new gallery with a unique body of work for gift shopping and not solely investing.
ANNOUNCING: the newest gallery in the STORE is the “Gift Shop” in your right hand menu bar. In this new gallery will be those unique, handcrafted, or small works and prints, usually under $100. It will be those items we’re looking for as a quick gift for someone else or a treat for yourself. I’m going to be adding some of the other fun things I like to create – craft or utility items such as note cards, jewelry, buttons, or whatever is not a large scale original painting. I have also made a link to the gichlee prints I carried previously and put them in there for your convenience.
As always, your feedback is welcomed and appreciated. If I don’t get back to you before, have a very happy holiday season.
Kelly E. James 