Art for Art's Sake

If you avoid the morons and don't spend too much time there, message boards are motherlodes of information and contacts. I love message boards for one reason - unlike blogs and FB, you are completely accessible. Everyone can see everyone else and that can't be a bad thing.

On the Amazon forum (which, apparently, has its fair share of dribblers and narcissists), I met Dawn Smith, an Arizona writer and graphic designer.

http://dawnsmithbooks.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/lets-talk-marketing-and-blog.html

I asked her to run the rule over my blog and my covers in particular and she offered some constructive advice. She's agreed a commission to redesign all the covers. As someone who received a CSE Grade 5 in Art*  the help is badly needed and I guess I should have done this earlier. 

She's a top lass too. I envy her all that sunshine. Bloody horrible here today.

*Once, my O'Level art class were asked to present their exam work in a galleria style and our teacher, the Milfy Miss Mace/Mrs Dowell, went round the canvas presentations and criticised each piece in front of the class. I painted an abstract work of a flower stem reaching into a cobalt sky. It was meant to represent joy penetrating the emptiness and the void. 

Twenty seven people watched her approach my canvas. To this day, I've never forgotten that look on her face, a combination of tilted-head pity and abject scorn. Teachers aren't allowed to humiliate schoolkids any more, more's the pity, because that single look cured any illusions that I might spend time painting summer landscapes by the side of a river. Or designing book covers without help.