South of the Border

South of the Border • watercolor, 14x20"

The new piece is finished and ready for a good home. Giclée prints are available on the website: wilderarts.com

Thanks for looking,
DW

© Dave Wilder

Fame and Fortune

I am almost famous.

Which, of course, means I'm not nearly famous as I should be. This is America. I deserve fame. I want fame. I am entitled to fame. Fame is the birthright of every American that can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and act a fool in a public place. In this Internet age, that is nearly everyone.

Sure, people buy my paintings and collect my prints. My name is known here and there. If you Google me, I'm the Dave Wilder that comes up on top - at least for now. But somehow, real, in your face, cover-of-the-magazine type fame has continued to be elusive. How can this be? My fifteen minutes have yet to arrive and the clock is ticking. The question I must ask then, indeed, the one I scream at the heavens when I'm moderately sure that I'm alone is, Why the hell not?

Now, gentle reader, please don't get the wrong impression. I do not crave fame for fame's sake. Do not think me shallow and vacuous. I'm no Paris Hilton. Being famous for being famous holds no appeal for me. No, I just want to be universally loved, admired and rewarded for the work I so lovingly create. Mostly rewarded. With heaps of cash.

Let's face it, fame and fortune are two sides of the same coin in today's America and it's getting harder and harder to achieve one without the other. Especially if you're an artist. Doctors, lawyers, business executives and crooked politicians may still be able to get rich anonymously, but we artists have little recourse but to bare the heavy cross of fame if we want all the cool stuff that comes with it. See? I'm not shallow, I just want all that cool stuff.

Is that too much to ask?

When I was young, before I dropped out of college to become a freelance genius, my friends and I all naturally assumed that I would indeed be famous one day. This seemed the natural and logical course of things. I was brilliant. Heck, we were all brilliant then; naive, inexperienced, immortal and often stoned, but also brilliant. Talent leaked from our late-adolescent pores like oil from a Yugo.

Oh, those halcyon days! We were going to be artists, writers, actors and musicians; lauded for our myriad accomplishments and rewarded with undying adulation. And cash. Heaps of cash. Hey, we were bohemian, but we were practical. Sometimes we would stay up all night, smoking, drinking coffee, and talking about how righteously famous we were all going to be. It was cool, man.

Of course, all young people assume themselves to be brilliant, teenagers in particular. Brilliant, yet tragically misunderstood. Most of us get over that in time as life shows the door to our dreams one by one. An artist never does. A true artist will go on blithely for years, assuming himself to be brilliant, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This takes real commitment. That, and a heaping measure of blind faith no Bible thumping Baptist can compete with. Believing in talking snakes and magic apples is easy compared to believing that one can actually make a decent living as an artist.

Well, I'm proud to say that I am a true artist. After decades of climbing, struggling, learning, forgetting, falling down and getting back up again I still believe it. Call me a deluded fool if you like, hell, call me anything you want, but for god's sake buy my artwork. After all, I'm going to be famous one day and it might actually be worth something.

DW

© Dave Wilder

Santa Drives a Jeep

Watercolor • 14x10"

Because there are some places a reindeer just can't go...

Just finished the artwork for this year's Christmas cards. They go off to the printer tomorrow and the completed 5x7" cards will retail for $3.00 ~ $4.00 each.

© Dave Wilder

South of the Border • work in progress

"South of the border,
Down Mexico way.

That's where we fell in love
As stars above came out to play..."

Sometimes songs just get stuck in my head. Sometimes they result in new paintings too.

For a long time I've been wanting to do a follow-up to my piece, Home on the Range, and I think this image will fit the bill nicely. I've always had a weakness for classic VW buses and other ghostwagons, and somehow that fondness got all mixed up in my head with that darn "South of the border" song. That, along with my usual fall/winter yearning for the beach, resulted in the above sketch.

Yes, there really are places down in Mexico where the Sonoran desert comes right down to the Sea of Cortez; where seagulls and scorpions share the view. I've always found those places to be imbued with a certain magic. A magic that is most potent after a long hot drive, a sip of tequila, and a sunset dip in the warm ocean waves. Just watch out for the jellyfish.

The finished watercolor will be about 14x20". I'll keep you posted.

DW

© Dave Wilder 2009

Finally Finished or "The Curse of Red Rock Crossing"

Just Visiting • watercolor, 14x20"

One question I am often asked is, "how long did it take you to paint that?"

My usual answer is, "47 years" (or however old I happen to be at the time), but the truth is that some paintings take a lot longer to get done than others. This one took awhile.

I started this piece way back in March but only just finished it last week. Actual painting time was probably only 30 hours but I rarely keep track of that kind of thing. I don't usually take anywhere near this long to get a painting done, but as the great John Lennon once said, "life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans."

First of all, I've been working on a lot of other stuff too (stay tuned!), and second, I believe that this painting got moved to the back-burner because of something I like to call the "Red Rock Crossing Curse."

You see, this scene has been about painted to death. And the unrepentant pagan deep inside of me thinks the Rock knows it.

Every would-be, plein aire, landscape scribbler who comes to Arizona wants to take a crack at Cathedral Rock's over-the-top majestic grandeur. And who can blame them? The light around sunset time turns this scene into an almost impossible to believe Technicolor wonderland. Especially in the fall when the the clear high-desert air outlines everything in crisp detail and the cottonwood and sycamore trees turn the color of Aztec gold. Yes, folks, this is the stuff that Southwestern dreams are made of. Even without the UFO.

So the Rock gets painted. A lot. I myself have painted it at least four times. And don't even get me started on the photographers. My veracity challenged tour guide friends tell me that Red Rock Crossing is the most photographed spot on the planet. I believe them.

I also believe that the Rock is tired of being painted and photographed and just wants to be left alone at this point. So it sends out its oh-so-subtle-yet-powerful vortex energy to infect the minds of artists like myself with a desire to procrastinate almost indefinitely.

But I have fought the curse and won. The painting is finally finished and you can even own it if you like, just drop me an email and we can haggle over price. Or, you can get yourself a print here.

I think this may be the last time that I ever paint Cathedral Rock. If the urge strikes again, I plan to lie down until the feeling goes away.

Thanks for looking.
DW

© Dave Wilder

Just Visiting

No, I didn't paint this, but it did serve as inspiration for a new piece I'm working on:

The working title was originally "Gone Fishing", but as I was transferring the sketch to the watercolor paper I decided to leave out the fish (better to keep things simple). "Just Visiting" is the new title and the completed watercolor should measure about 14x20".

If you've never been to Sedona, Arizona you may be surprised to learn that the area is a veritable hotbed of UFO activity. At least that's what all of the crystal enlightened and oh-so-groovy New Age folks tell me. I've never actually seen a UFO myself, but I will take their word (or the word of the angels they are channeling) for it.

The above sketch is my humble attempt to depict such an alien visitation over the famed vistas of Red Rock Crossing. My tour guide friends tell me that this is the most photographed place on Earth and I have no reason to start disbelieving their lies now. However, given the shear mass of photos taken there, and the incredible volume of UFO activity in these parts, it does seem remarkable that no one has ever snapped a clear photo of a flying saucer over this locale.

Oh, well, the advantage of being an artist is that you are free to fill those inconvenient gaps in reality.

What I want to know is why an advanced space-faring alien race would want to visit a cultural backwater like Sedona anyway?. How come they never go to London or Paris? I can only assume that it must be for the pretty scenery.

Thanks for looking.
DW

© Dave Wilder

...And Dance by the Light of the Moon

I have been carrying this little doodle around for years.

I was at one of those outdoor art festivals in Santa Fe some years back and sales where pretty slow. I'd picked up an earworm somewhere and couldn't get this silly old song out of my head:

Buffalo Gals won't you come out tonight
Come out tonight
Come out tonight

Buffalo Gals won't you come out tonight
And dance by the light of the moon...

And on and on it went (I've since learned to play it on the ukulele). So it got me to thinking; just what the heck is (or was) a 'Buffalo Gal' anyway? I started doodling in my sales book and came up with the sketch above. I liked the composition right away and thought it might make a nice painting, but, one way or the other, I didn't get around to painting it for another five years or so.

It finally came out of hiding last winter as I was preparing for a solo show up in Jerome (cool little art town - well worth a visit). The finished watercolor painting is 20x28" and follows that original doodle pretty closely.


I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out, and as is often the case, I only figured out what the painting was about long after it was finished. I think these ladies are spirits of the open prairie - they personify freedom, feminine strength and the strange, wondrous things that can happen in the wide-open spaces under a full moon.

You can find prints of this painting at my website: www.wilderarts.com

© Dave Wilder