No, I have not left the planet

I just noticed my last post was sometime in March. I do look at and comment on bloggers posts I follow, but there hasn’t been much going on in my studio except waiting and a little bit of painting. Somehow I managed to get quite tangled up in my unpaid job as treasurer for Cass Area Artists, which is a 501(c)3 nonprofit of which I am a co-founder.

It seems that the last two years have made for a rough road for a lot of organizations, and ours did not escape. So my first task, completed in March, was to secure our official 501(c)3 status with the federal government and then put together a fundraiser. As is usual with bureaucracies, they took their sweet time granting 501(c)3 status. Then I worked on a never-ending project with Facebook to be able to get a “donate” button on Cass Area Artists Facebook page. At some point in the past we had to change our address because our director retired and moved out of state, and that’s where the mail had been going. It again fell to the federal government to accept our change of address. That still has not happened, although I filed the form for the change on March 1. Facebook refuses to give us a “donate” button until our physical address (which we actually don’t have because we neither own nor rent property…) matches between what we told the feds was our new address and what is the address on our bank account. I had to make two tries to get the bank account changed. And it still didn’t appear on the bank statement. So I went the other route Facebook suggested, and got an official letter from the bank verifying our account and the address Facebook insisted we should have. Still not good enough.

I rebelled, as I am wont to do when faced with utter nonsense. I decided to do a work-around for Facebook by setting up a fundraising account with another entity which would allow me to put a link from anywhere to the fundraiser. I can put a link on the Facebook page too. The only frustrating part of all of this is that setting up the fundraiser account has occupied hours of my time so as I said at the top of this screed, I have done little painting. However, all was not lost.

After waiting a considerable amount of days since that last post in March, a hot day (heat is essential for the process) finally arrived and I was able to pour paint on two canvases for the next Sky Pads paintings. Then I had to wait another long time for them to dry sufficiently so I could transfer the drawings. Somewhere along the way I managed to squeeze in about one and a half coats of paint on the first one. When I finally decided to document it on my blog, it had been so long that I couldn’t remember what the next number was for the Sky Pads series. Had to look it up. It’s number 35.

Sky Pads 35, maybe 1/3 done.

In passing, I can say that I managed to get two Sky Pads paintings into a couple of good shows. One at the Box Factory in Saint Joseph, Michigan, which I have been in a few times and even had a sale out of a few years back. The second one is at the South Bend Museum of Art in Indiana, which was doing a special exhibit of local artists only.

This one went to the Box Factory, Sky Pads 34

This one went to the South Bend Museum, Sky Pads 27

So looking ahead, Cass Area Artists has its monthly meeting this coming Saturday, and if everyone approves of how the fundraising page looks–a couple of photos and a video in addition to a laundry list of text pleading for money–it will go live and I can get back to being an artist. Heck, I may even put a “donate” link on my blog. Why not?