A friend mentioned to me recently that they were impressed with the volume of content about other artists on this blog. Everyone loves an attaboy of course, and I do, in fact, put dedicated time daily into learning about what’s up and who’s doin’ the dang thang. I also leverage this practice into a library I can use to look up each of the artists later, by dropping the image from each blog into thumbnail galleries. I also use hashtags for each blog so I can search for the artists later if needed (so between the two, it’s sort of like this blog is really my diary). Current count is 1,517 as of this post. Kind of surreal to even write that number.
I sort of got into blogging by accident. When I rebooted my practice in 2018, I decided I needed a site. I had owned sterlingbowen.com for years so I could have the email address sterling@… (I only recently bought paintingafterartisdead.com after my old IG account got locked up by a f&$%ing hacker and I had to rebrand). I built this site with WordPress because a friend of mine who has been a developer for a couple decades now suggested it was very well supported and sort of ideal for non-programmers who were willing to spend some time learning. I like learning. I was also reading a lot about the state of the art world and at one point decided the try out the blog functions of a platform built to do the same, and I published a post about Julie Mehretu. At first I would blog every week or so, then eventually I found there’s plenty enough content, once you start digging back through history, to publish a post about an abstractionist daily, which I hope keeps all of you reading, learning and sharing.
I also began using some of the features of the platform and specifically the template I picked to create mini-diaries on work (paintings mostly) in progress, which eventually become “recently completed” pages. Beginning in 2021 once I was showing more regularly and gaining more followers, I reorganized the site and also switched up the format and began writing a post about the site’s namesake every other week (these posts can be an update, a hot take or random, theoretical ideation in long form).
I’ve gotten pretty efficient at creating posts, mostly because WordPress has a great feature that allows it to play nice in an IOS environment (don’t ask me to explain how) which lets me create a draft post from most apps that serve me content via a hyperlink. However, “yes” I do have to read a good bit. Not the same as reading books, kids, btw. The internet is often the worst place ever, and, holy cow does it allow me to cover a lot of ground. One can keep up with most of the good, new painting in NYC (which is where most of it is) just reading Two Coats of Paint. BTW, please don’t (just) subscribe to their email list- if you love painting, throw them a few shekels. I read (and support) several other zines/blogs- at one point I created a page with links to most of them, probably for a class I was teaching. I also use an RSS reader (Feedly) to catch most of these, which allows me to bulk create future posts from one app if, say, I’ve got an hour to kill waiting in an airport or something.
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Painting After Art is Dead 