[Debra Jones]

Well, lets just say I am trying to quit my day job.

I am not selling anything. Portraits or gallery. I know the economy is bad, but I am trying to get a marketable product, whatever it may be. Apparently the studies I do weekly, often twice a week, from life are honing my eye, but not my marketablity. I have full walls of strangers staring down on me and am the darling of my models, but I am not getting business. The open studio work I do is like staying in shape. I went to flab for a long time and will not stop working on my skils but I have got to get some of these out of my house.

Since people are my thing, I am trying to make more interesting pictures. IF I can get figurative out into galleries, then the wider exposure should help lure in commissions, but either will make me happy.

I don't enjoy working from photos as much as working from life, but as this little economic bind is keeping me in my tiny appartment awash in canvas and boards and mats and frames and boxes and paking material, I will have to figure out how to make the seed money to either get a studio or challenge myself to do a wider range of snapshot renderings. Ok, that is low. I need to get more creative in my whole composition for more of those kids sitting on the grass and leaning on window sills.

As I will not stop painting, it makes me very squirrley, I know it is some sort of leg work thing, wandering the streets with pictures and brochures drumming up business, I paint in every spare minute and keep going to the shop in the day. Something has got to give.

Desperation? Maybe that is my best answer.