Secrets of success over coffee

Photo by Iván Ramos

I had coffee with my pal Iván Ramos yesterday. He’s a part-time photographer and a full-time realtor, although the proportions are constantly shifting. I recently recommended he read Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, by David Bayles. He’d just finished it.

Photo by Iván Ramos

Bayles’ idea of what makes a successful artist can be boiled down to this: they keep making art. (However, don’t think you ‘get’ the book from that capsule description because every page is an ‘aha’ moment. It will be the best $7.32 you ever spend.) Launching from that, Iván and I started talking about our own organizational techniques.

Photo by Iván Ramos

Eat the Frog First—this means to start off by getting the most detestable part of the job out of the way first. Often these tasks have the greatest long-term influence on your career, but you really hate them.  If you have to eat a live frog, it doesn’t pay to sit and stare at it a long time—it distresses you and bores the frog.

For me, the “frog” is marketing and organization and part of the reason I dislike them is that they ‘distract me’ from my fundamental job. But that’s silly; they are an integral part of my fundamental job.

Photo by Iván Ramos

Time Blocking—this means doing the same thing at the same time every day, and it’s how I live my life. I approach every task—from laundry to painting—as a process that is allotted a certain amount of time, rather than as a job that must be finished. I learned long ago that this is the single best way for me to avoid “painter’s block,” because I don’t waste any time jollying myself into painting.

Photo by Iván Ramos

Don’t Break the Chain—this simply means that an artist has to work every day to be successful. Iván told me that in the early days of his career, Jerry Seinfeld put a big red X over every day that he sat down and wrote. The writer’s job, he said, was to not break the chain of Xs.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Belfast, Maine in August, 2014 or in Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!

How to Open a Tea Shop Online

If you are passionate about tea, opening a tea shop online may be a great idea. It can help you make money by selling tea and at the same time allow you to enjoy various kinds of tea around the world. As a small tea shop owner, you may begin your company with only a computer. It seems easy but making your online tea shop successful is still much challenging. Since four years, we began our oversea door-to-door tea wholesale service, we have gotten to know and cooperate with quite a large number of owners of online tea shops. Some of them now have already had a prosperous business but some of them shut down their shops just one or two years after they launched them. Why? Here, we just listed several steps of opening an online tea shop with some pieces of advice for you.

At first, if you have already had a physical tea shop, you can miss a few following steps but we still suggest you should hurry up if you still haven't had an online shop. You really shouldn't miss the web to cost-effectively reach your countless potential customers and if you are a novice and know little about tea, you should be cautious. Tea is a niche involving a great deal of expertise and you can't expect to earn a lot in a short time.

1. Learn about tea

There are six major types of tea--white, black, oolong, green, dark and yellow tea--and thousands of blends, brews and names within those groups. Tea has significance in various cultures and is touted for health benefits. If you are running a tea shop, you would be expected to be asked questions about it. You'll need to be knowledgeable about the regions tea comes from, the processing methods for tea, health benefits of it and importantly how to store different kinds of them.

Unlike other businesses you can choose, there is a lot to learn besides just how to open a tea shop. Read about tea books, join groups and go to seminars and presentations to get a good understanding of all. Some free online resources are also highly recommended such as Tea Guardian, Chinese Teas 101, TeaUSA and Vicony Tea Encyclopedia. It would take a lot of time for you to learn. If you would get bored of it, you should consider whether you should give it up as early as possible.

2. Register your business

Register your business with the Internal Revenue Service. Fill out an application providing applicable details about your online tea shop. Once you're registered, an employer identification number, or EIN, is submitted for tax purposes.

3. Build an online presence

Build an online presence. You can sell tea through established websites such as Amazon and eBay but we recommend you create you own website. Choose a decent company to help you build an attracting online tea shop. Each of them in it should have photos, descriptions and prices. Choose a reliable Web-hosting company to host the online shop. Its service need to be stable.

4. Purchase tea

Purchase tea by wholesale. Carefully select teas that are proven to be popular, along with rare specialties that can attract individual customers. Try to cover more kinds of teas from China, India, Japan and Sri Lanka. Try to include green, black, white, oolong, Puerh and unique blends.

If you're running a business at home, you may not have a big space to store stock (important: different kinds of teas should be kept in the different ways). You can opt for a drop-shipping arrangement but we don't think it is a good idea because you can't keep your customers information confidential and it is also difficult for you to make your products privately labeled and sometimes easily cause a delay in shipment so it is great to cooperate with the companies that can wholesale bulk tea in small quantities. For example, ViconyTeas have a wide range of Chinese teas and you can wholesale from 1KG per kind.

It is a good idea to use packages with your private labels. During the early stage, we recommend you choose common packages such as blank aluminum foil bags or paper bags pasted with your own labels. It is economical and at the same time can show your identity.

Take the storage requirements of different kinds of teas into consideration when you purchase tea. For example, green tea should be put in cold storage so don't purchase too much if your ice chest have already no space to store it. Black teas can be kept well for more than two years at room temperature only when they are sealed properly so you can make a relatively large purchase if you are satisfied with the batch of it.

Remember the proper time to purchase different teas. For example, you can start purchasing the best Chinese green teas of the current year such as Dragon Well or Biluochun in April while you need to wait and buy such as Jasmine tea and Wuyi Rock Oolong of the current year until Mid-September.

5. Promote your online tea shop

Promote your tea shop in various ways such as social networking, creating a tea blog, tweeting daily tea-related posts and creating a Facebook page for your tea shop. Signing up through an affiliate network to create online ads for your tea store is also recommended. Consult with a SEO & SEM specialist to make out a promotion plan and you can also find several books to learn SEO & SEM knowledge and apply them to your online tea shop.

It's apple blossom time

Orchard in Blossom, 1888, Vincent Van Gogh

This week, the fruit trees are starting to come into blossom. With my usual impeccable timing, I’m knee-deep in a project in my studio. Nevertheless, if Mother Nature cooperates, my class will be outdoors painting at G and S Orchards in Walworth this weekend.

Because I want my students to see how Vincent Van Gogh painted orchards in blossom, I went to Wikipaintingslooking for examples. I do this all the time, but this morning the process stopped me cold.

I’d estimate Wikipaintings has about 1900 paintings and drawings attributed to Van Gogh. Between November of 1881 and July of 1890, Vincent van Gogh painted almost 900 paintings. Wikipaintings, therefore, must have his complete oeuvre in one place.

Orchard with Blossoming Apricot Trees, 1888, Vincent Van Gogh

We can’t understand a painting in depth from the internet. However, it’s quite possible to understand a painter in breadth using a resource like Wikipaintings. And, very simply, nothing like this existed any time in the past. When I was young, we looked at paintings on slides or in books. (In comparison, internet images are very clear.) The rare and pricey catalogue raisonné, compiled by researchers, was as close as we could get to a broad view of a painter’s work.

Orchard and House with Orange Roof,  1888, Vincent Van Gogh. Wanna paint as well as Van Gogh? Draw, draw, draw…

We are beginning to see the development of online catalogue raisonné (see here for an example) but they’re almost redundant in the face of this free, open resource, Wikipaintings.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Belfast, Maine in August, 2014 or in Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!

Back to Castine in July

Castine from Fort George, 1856, by Fitz Henry Lane, The town is a little more populous today.

We interrupt the feverish painting of a lobster buoy to announce that I will again be painting in the 2014 Castine Plein Air Festival from July 24 to July 26.

Castine is a beautiful old town off the beaten path in Hancock County, Me. It is home to the Maine Maritime Academy. Like my home turf in New York, it has been under Native American, French, English, Dutch, and American dominion. But it’s a rare gem in that all those levels of occupation are clear to the casual visitor. They have great museums and their historical society has taken the time to clearly mark out historic sites.

One of two paintings I did at Castine Plein Air in 2013 of the tide turning at Wadsworth Cove.

Castine’s location at the mouth of the Penobscot River estuary gave control of the interior, which meant access to furs and timber. This is why it was settled early (seven years before the Plymouth Colony) and tussled over frequently. It was briefly the capital of French Acadia.

It even had a nobleman-gone-native, in the character of Baron Jean-Vincent d'Abbadie de Saint-Castin, who was married (in succession) to two Abenaki women.  Unlike New York’s Sir William Johnson, however, he appears to have been the real thing, rather than a jumped-up fur trader granted a title.

And the other one.

But all this history is overlaid not by the ruins of great mill towns, as it is here in New York, but with a “stunning collection of beautiful landscapes, rugged coastlines, historic architecture, and an abundance of New England charm,” as the Castine Arts Association quite accurately boasts.

This year, painters will be working on site for three days, with the festival culminating in a sale at the Harborview Room at the Maine Maritime Academy. They’ve doubled the exhibition space—which is grand, because it was tight—but they can’t double the hotel occupancy in the area. If you want to catch this fantastic event, you’ll book somewhere early.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Belfast, Maine in August, 2014 or in Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!

Forex Trading Business - The Advantages of Trading Currencies and How to Make Huge Gains!

Forex trading is a business and anyone can trade from home and win, with the right education and mindset. In this article, we will look at the advantages of currency trading and how to become a successful trader.

A Forex trading business, is the perfect way to make a second income and here are the main advantages you get:

- Anyone can learn to trade and no college education is required and furthermore, you can learn the basics in just a few weeks.

- You only need a hundred dollars, a computer and an internet connection to get started
You don't need staff, stock or to sell anything.

- Currencies are volatile and provide profit opportunities every day and as one currency rises, another must fall which means there is never a recession.

- You can easily trade in around 45 minutes a day, making it the perfect business for busy people

You can leverage your money to enhance profit potential and if you have a $100.00, most brokers will give you 200;1 leverage meaning you can trade 100 x 200 or $20,000!

Now the above are great advantages but of course you need the right education to win, because 95% of all traders fail to make money but they don't fail because they can't learn to win, they fail because they get the wrong education and have the right mindset.

You need to do your homework and never trust anyone who tells you, that you can make money with no effort - you can't. Ignore all the cheap robots and get rich systems because they lose money. Instead learn Forex charting which allows you lock into trends. You don't need to know anything about economics or the news, you just follow price action - you don't care why prices are moving you just want to get in on trends and make money when they do!

If you learn the basics and apply your system with discipline keeping losses small and running the big profitable trends you can make huge gains in 45 minutes a day or less. No other industry offers you the profit potential of Forex trading so learn this exciting business and get on the road to a great second income.

Heart of the Andes

The Heart of the Andes, 1859, Frederic Edwin Church

Next month I’ll be down at Olana (the home of Frederic Edwin Church) to paint with friends from New York Plein Air Painters. To prepare myself, I stopped by the Metropolitan Museum to visit his most famous painting, The Heart of the Andes.

This is an enormous canvas—ten feet wide and five feet high—that depicts the whole panoply of earthly conditions, from the peak of Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador in the far distance to the lush jungle landscape lying at our feet.

The Heart of the Andes, 1859, (detail) Frederic Edwin Church, showing the focal tree at the lower left.

Church visited Ecuador and Columbia twice. He was retracing the journeys of a famous 19th century naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt. The Heart of the Andes is a composite view, including topography from many places.  The enormity of the canvas allows him to use more than one focal light. There is human activity, most noticeably on the path that leads us in to the cross, but we are cut off from most of it.

The Heart of the Andes, 1859, (detail) Frederic Edwin Church, showing the remarkably intricate foliage running along the right.

In the month of its first showing (in 1859) more than 12,000 people paid a quarter each to see it, waiting for hours in line.

“Nobody would pay a quarter to see a painting today,” Brad Marshall said as we looked at it. “They’d just look at it online.” But no photograph can capture this painting, particularly the intricate work running through the foreground.

The Heart of the Andes, 1859, (detail) Frederic Edwin Church, showing the church and village in the middle distance. There are worlds within worlds in this painting and the mind boggles at the idea of how he sketched it out.

Church eventually sold the work for $10,000, which at the time was the highest price ever paid for a work by a living American artist.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Belfast, Maine in August, 2014 or in Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!

Anders Zorn, redux

Yesterday I went with my pal Brad Marshall to see Anders Zorn: Sweden’s Master Painter at the National Academy. Yes, I loved it. Here are a few paintings that really impressed me.

Herdsmaid (Walk), 1908. The softness of the firs is quite incredible. It appears to be wet-on-dry but I wouldn’t stake my life on that. He feels no need to be didactic about his narrative; instead, the figure of the girl and the cows disappear into the background. There is no brown in the dirtscape; it’s all shades of mauve.

Summer Vacation, 1886, watercolor. Emma Zorn posed as a tourist in this painting along the Baltic Sea. I’m blown away by the perspective in the waves; it’s perfect. So too is the soft wet (light) modeling and the dry (dark) modeling of the waves. It could be the Maine landscape with that outcrop in the background.

Lapping Waves, 1887, watercolor. Again the reflections in the water are stunningly realized, both in terms of shape and color. The houses rising on the far hillside are in perfect counterpoint.

Reflections, 1889. The foreground reed or branch screen is a problem in the intimate landscape. Painting them in can be fey; leaving them out ruins the sense of closeness. Zorn deals with this by bringing the contrast between the reeds and the background way down. The colors in the water are magical, and the light and chroma are all in the far bank, not in the figure.

Man and Boy in Algiers, 1887. Joaquín Sorolla and John Singer Sargent were renowned for their handling of white-on-white; here Zorn proves he’s just as competent at it. More than that, I feel like I know this guy; he may have been part of the late 19th century mania for Orientalism, but he’s a fully realized person.

Anders Zorn: Sweden’s Master Painter runs until May 18, 2014 at the National Academy of Art, XX Park Avenue, New York, NY.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Belfast, Maine in August, 2014 or in Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!