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We deliver paintings the very first week of December and so it’s with great excitement that I’ve finished the final three Big 500 dogs. That way I can stuff myself silly over Thanksgiving and not worry about finishing everything up.

Finished my first dog for the Big 500 show.

You guys! This is happening in just a few weeks! Full disclosure: You may notice my name is not on the list of artists. This is because while I am a Red Dot member (and proud!), I'm not actually partaking in the show. The time pressure was a bit too much, and I realized it was more important for me to work on my studio practice and style than try and force myself to create something in time. As soon as I made the decision, I knew it was the right choice, and because of that choice, I've made some pretty broad gains.

It does bring up an interesting challenge that I hadn't realized before. One of the challenges to a beginning professional artist (notice I didn't say a beginning artist because these problems are professional challenges) is that you want to try and be in group shows. Group shows often have themes, and some work lends itself better than others to theme. Sometimes that theme is square or red (like our next show) and for those, it's a bit more straight forward. However, for something like PDXTRAOrdinary, an artist like me who basically does portraits runs into some challenges. I could have painted a Portlander (which in retrospect, um, right, yes.) I still really love the idea of bringing in colors and patterns from Portland. But the challenge is how to adapt what you do to a style so that you're work can be seen. I'd never thought about this before, but now I'm thinking about it a lot. There are all these wonderful opportunities to join group shows...but I'm not yet sure how to take my style's take on a theme without going outside of my style.

Good problems to have though. It means I'm not using all my energy being angry at my drawing abilities.