Ever since I closed my gallery in Taos, I have been looking for a new space. I am being picky about my potential new space and that takes time and patience. I have flown to Oregon once and Seattle three times to check out spaces. I have spoken to commercial real estate brokers in Colorado, Arizona and here in Oklahoma too. I am currently waiting on a space to become available in Seattle's Pioneer Square neighborhood. Pioneer Square is the first neighborhood of Seattle and there are lots of art galleries in the district. The building I am waiting on has been vacant for several years. It's over a hundred years old and a new group just bought it. They are getting it ready to put on the commercial lease market. I am one of the first businesses in line for one of the spaces. But it is very much a hurry up and wait situation.

     I have lived in the Seattle metro three different times over the course of my life. I love it! I love the Pacific North West. There is so much to see and do. Things in Seattle you must experience...

1. Pike Place Market - this is the fish market where the guys throw the fish, check out the lower levels too
2. Seattle Waterfront - cool shops, great food, ferris wheel, ferries and cruise ships coming and going
3. Seattle Aquarium - really cool and immersive
4. Space Needle - has gotten expensive to go up but still cool to see, go up if you can though
5. Ferry Ride to Bainbridge Island - I like to ride over and turn around and come right back, best view of Seattle
6. Pioneer Square - Cool shops and art galleries
7. Go East - If you have a car, drive east on I-90, through the tunnels, across the floating bridges and out to Snoqualmie Falls *
8. Go South - If you have a car, head to Point Defiance Park in Tacoma. You won't be disappointed. **
9. Flagship REI Store - If you like camping and outdoor gear, this is it!
10. Washington Park Arboretum and Volunteer Park - beautiful parks (Volunteer has the Bruce and Brandon Lee grave sites)

* If you don't want to go all the way to Snoqualmie Falls, go to the botanical gardens in Bellevue. You may even be able to take public transport there. Public transport in Seattle is really quite good. I love to use it to get around.
** There is a ferry that goes over to Point Defiance but I'm not sure that it's any quicker. It may be more of an adventure though.

     After the crazy year of festivals of 2022, I was looking for a more cost effective way to show and sell my work. I was represented in the Taos Artist Collective in Taos and Wildfire Gallery on Paseo in OKC. Sales were ok in those two galleries but I wanted to be more proactive in the sales process as well. Touring festivals was great and I sold a ton of art. My sales were over ten times what I had ever done previously! But my expenses to tour like that were over six figures! I needed a way to continue to actively sell my work and get it in front of a lot of art buyers. I found a beautiful gallery space in Taos, NM that had become available and it had living quarters too! I opened Taos New West Art Gallery on Kit Carson Rd. just a half block from the Plaza. It was in line with several other galleries up Kit Carson. Locals called it "Gallery Row". The gallery was a gorgeous 300 year old adobe building with a kiva fireplace in the main gallery. The gallery showed my work plus 10 other local and regional artists in the "New West" genre.

      Unfortunately, due to several factors, I made the difficult decision to close the gallery in November of the same year. Sales had been good but Taos was starting some construction and tourism projects that were going to very negatively affect traffic to the gallery. I needed to close before I started really losing money. It was a smart business decision but a tough emotional one. A lot was learned about opening and running a business. Overall, it was another pretty cool year. Still better than clocking in for someone else!

     I'm guessing that after going back to work as COVID was waning, I stopped writing here and honestly forgot about this blog. I was dealing with memory issues after the car wreck. I was missing lots of pieces of memories for about a year and a half. What seemed to help was diving head first into my artwork, sans blog.

     I went full time as as artist Aug, 25th 2021. I had been doing art festivals on the side for over ten years, nut just in my home state of Oklahoma. My first out of state show was in Evergreen, CO and I killed it! The following weekend was another art fest in the same town and even in the same park, so I was a bit worried that maybe that town had had it's fill on the first weekend, but no, it was the same results! I was officially off and running as a full time artist. That fall, I had not booked a lot of shows because of deadlines missed since I still had a full time job when those deadline passed. But, I started applying to shows for the following spring and summer of 2022. I ended up doing 26 festivals in '22. I had shows in Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico, Nebraska, Texas and Arizona. I bought a travel trailer and new truck to pull it. It was crazy, exciting super fun, a ton of work, and way too expensive. I met so many artists on the circuit and learned something from everyone of them. Of course there were awesome shows and there were not so great shows. One thing that kept me motivated and positive was an idea that I kept in my head, and mentioned to other artists that may have been having a bad show. The thing I kept saying and fully believing (still do) is "A bad day at an art festival is, and always will be, better than clocking in for someone else". My summer was truly spent camping in Colorado, going to art festivals on the weekends to make money, and fly-fishing and creating more art during the week. One can only be so lucky!