I was accepted to the Central South Art Exhibit in Nashville Tennessee opening in May and have a show opening Friday March 4th at the IUS Library Art Gallery in New Albany IN.  

Also HERE is a review of the Ali Center show.  Apparently I am a "recognizable name" and happy to be so.

So it's been a busy couple of weeks for the work and the studio.  Last week I sold a piece through a trade with a piece that was purchased at a charitable auction.  It was a trade up and a regular customer over the years so I was happy to do it. I installed it for her and was happy to have it in a permanent place.  It was a large piece that needed the right location so I was really happy to have that place end up being a person I have known for a while. Shot of the final placement:

In other news...
Dropped of work for the Muhammad Ali Center show opening this Friday.  Excited about being at that opening since it will likely be a different crowd from my usual people at the gallery.

Some info on the show can be seen HERE. 

And on other fronts...
I have entered another showdown on the Saatchi Online site, I don't really expect much from the showdown (you have to make it to the top 127) , but just saw that an article was written on my work by a friend that is an art historian and writes for them regularly.  You can see the article HERE. And he has included me in his Top Ten Picks HERE.
I particularly like the last paragraph, I would copy it here but feel it best read in the context of Adrian's set up.
 I'm excited to get into the studio again, in the process of working on the last few pieces for the Ali center I came across a material that I think will work for something I have been pondering for quite a while, tests are currently in process.  News on the results to follow. 
It is this kind of thing that make me further recognize the need to just be in the studio working whenever possible. These kind of revelations are the reason it is so much fun to be an artist and the more I get to the studio the more they will happen.  It will happen. 

I sort of knew that the bank had a few pieces of mine floating around but I hadn't seen any yet so I assumed they were out in other parts.  I was sitting down at a desk getting a new business debt card and looked over the shoulder of the woman helping me and was greeted with an old friend from the studio. He looked old and a bit out of fashion but had enough character that I felt he had something to offer to me in my new ideas.

2011 seems like it could be a great year generally. I am in a group show here in Louisville at the Ali Center called LoCAL.streets that opens Friday Feb 4th (thanks to Daniel Phalzgraf for including me).  A friend in Memphis (Adrian Duran, art historian, Cultural commentator, and, who knew, fan of football) emailed me and said, "hey your work is in a show here, you can thank me later".  I love it when that happens.  In  a recent trip over the holidays I tried where ever I could find them to take photos beyond the standard vacation variety.  Here are a few.

There was something about these old piers that I really loved.  I could not help but think of Harry Callahan when I saw them and so I gave them a bit of that treatment with the black and white. 

This was a video that I created to promote the show Jim Doiron & Lisa Simon New Work from The Eleventh Hour.  It's a bit late to be posting it now here but I was pretty happy with it and it had a few views (102) but I don't know if it brought anyone in. 

The show Jim Doiron & Lisa Simon New Work from the Eleventh Hour comes down tomorrow.  It was a great show with a great response.  I think the real success of it was the fact that we put it together in such short order proving, with the proper motivation, we can still be effective as artists.  I feel the long view lesson in it is to try and get to the studio more regularly, to try and get more done in short bursts than trying to create a show in 45 days. This is something I have been attempting to implement in my studio practice for some time but requires such a level of discipline that is hard with so many outside forces (wife, kids, job-or lack thereof, housework, pets, etc) it is enough to make one retreat to a lone cabin in the woods except then I would have to learn how to make liquor and then that would be my distraction.  Small steps-it is something I have taken from other interests such as bonsai and Tai chi. You cannot force a tree to become the ancient specimen you would like it to be in a season or even 1 year or 5.  It is the regular maintenance of it and regular revisiting that become the focus and then one spring the tree you want is there.  Left to neglect and it falters or dies, forced to move faster than it should and it stresses and meets a similar end (in this metaphor the artist would meet this fate having nearly killed ourselves with this show).  In bonsai it is common to have multiple trees in various stages of development and this is how I would like my studio work to be, a constant cultivation of multiple bodies of work growing at a steady healthy rate. It may be all that keeps me from running away to the woods.  

So I have this up and going thanks to my friend Brent Dedas, master all things web related. Check out his stuff HERE
I am hoping to keep this going better that I did the last blog.  I recently applied to a job that asked about blogging, web design, writing reviews of others work and I realized, "I could have done some of that with that blog I had set up?"-"damn it". So, live and learn.  I will try and do so with this one and keep it up. TO kick things off I thought I might post a gif image I made of piece in the last show.  I am hoping to do more of these which means being diligent about documentation.  I thought a few versions of this one could have remained but I was going for something else...not sure if I got there.