This is how my resume should really look

Deborah Dendler
Living artist, not a zombie

Education

School of Hard Knocks
University of Bad Life Choices

Skills

Made more than 14,520 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches

Able to answer the same question hundreds of times, pleasantly

Raised two children who have turned into actual adults

Owned by Supercats Peter and Wendy

Plays with clay and colors with crayons well with grandchildren

Sees the humor of both a screaming 3 year old and/or a raging teenager

Cut up an onion at 4 PM to start dinner almost every afternoon since 1969

Accomplishments
Changed the oil on the lawnmower

Figured out why the slipcast reliefs were not drying

Figured out why the plaster molds were crummy

Goals

To be alive at 70

To be alive at 80

To be...

deborahdendler.com

www.facebook.com/DeborahDendlerSculpture

The imaginary world of the internet

Grimacing Man

The internet presence/public persona of an artist is all just make believe.  I think I'm an artist, therefore I am.  All the different social media are just different avenues of the big electronic imaginary playpen we're in.  Or is it a fishpond?

Full disclosure:  I spend an inordinate amount of time on the internet.  I don't mean wasting time at high speed on kitten videos and political rants.  I'm not goofing around, I'm working on stuff:  reading emails, researching exhibitions, writing, and posting on social media.  And here's what I think about that.

If Van Gogh had been on Facebook, I'm pretty sure he and Gauguin would have been friends, and Gauguin could have messaged, "Dude!  Not the ear!"

If Leonardo, the original poster child for ADHD, had been online, he would have accomplished pretty much zilch, because he would have been sucked into the vortex of Google, Wikipedia or OpenCourse lecture videos from MIT.

Shakespeare's Twitters would have more followers than Adele.

Botticelli could have Googled Savanarola and realized what a religious fanatic/nutjob the guy was and not burned all those magnificent paintings and drawings.

Mozart could have looked up his symptoms online and lived another 40 or 50 years.

Rembrandt would not have written an artist's statement, kept an organized résumé, or references, or any of that.  But his website would have kicked ass.

Michelangelo would have done nothing differently.  Well, maybe he would have found a few sources of marble online.

Ditto Cezanne - he would have just plugged away painting trees that look like fruit and fruit that looks like buildings.

See?  I'm not goofing around at all.  Seriously, I'm working on my blog!


Deborah Dendler website
Deborah Dendler Facebook page






 

Press release about my next hangnail

Frog

I spent the first thirty years of my life as an artist without writing a single press release.  I was brought up to be unobtrusive, to never call attention to myself.  The idea of promoting myself was so alien to me that I never even considered it.  My attitude to publicity and self promotion is perfectly summed up by Emily Dickinson's poem, "I'm Nobody."  But year after year, I kept reading press releases in the paper from an artist I don't know personally, but whose work I don't like or respect.  And every time this artist did anything, even something quite trivial, there was a press release in the paper all about it.  It was relentless, and it drove me nuts!  I finally decided that every time I get a hangnail, I would write a press release, too.  So that's what I'm doing.  I try to keep it down to once a month, and I only write about actual events:  awards, openings, national exhibitions and publications.  I don't make anything up.  I sometimes have to pack numerous nuggets of news into one release to keep it to once a month, but I don't want to overload the public.  Enough already!  I don't want to be a publicity ho.



I'm Nobody!  Who are you?  Emily Dickinson

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –  
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –  
To an admiring Bog!

Deborah Dendler website

Deborah Dendler Facebook page

The saga of my studio

Diogenes in my studio showroom

For years my studio was a closet, which severely limited what I could sculpt. Fortunately, in 1987, I found an ad in a local newspaper for a two-bedroom house listed for sale for $1 to anyone who could remove the one story building from a property on Main Street.  I decided it could be a workable studio, so I found a building mover, and he trucked the house to my land.  It was the best dollar I ever spent. For more than twenty five years, I've used one room as my showroom/gallery, one room as the casting room and the former living/dining room as my main work area, filled with sculpture stands, a kiln, drying racks, shelves and lots of sculptures.  A set of double doors opens onto a deck, so that trucks with heavy deliveries can back up right to the doors and unload heavy deliveries like, for example, a ton of clay.

Since I work both from my imagination and from life, I need privacy and enough room to pose a model. I need space to work simultaneously on both large and small sculptures; space for fragile terracotta sculptures in all stages of drying, away from children and animals. My materials are messy and need separate spaces: clay, plaster, epoxy and fiberglass don’t mix well.  Having adequate studio space has meant that I could accept sculpture commissions that would otherwise have been out of my reach.  My studio has also been a refuge in hard times.  Knowing I have an oasis of calm and quiet waiting for me has saved my sanity.

From the beginning, my studio was at the outer limit of what I could afford.  Years ago, if I'd had the money, I would have installed a well and septic field, but I never could afford to do that.  My version of "running water" in my studio is running for the bathroom in the house.  When I'm casting, I haul buckets of water from the house, which I think of as good upper body strengthening exercise.  But if there had been a well and septic field, I would certainly have rented it out as the two bedroom house that it is, rather than use it as a studio, especially during the single parent years when I was painfully low on money.  Actually, having no indoor plumbing turned out to be a blessing in disguise that enabled me to keep it as a studio.

This is the year I'm going to get the furnace up and running, not to mention hooked up to the propane tank, so I can work later in the fall when the weather turns cool.  Repairs to the studio are always kind of a crunch.  Right now it's extremely crunchy as I'm wondering how I'm going to get the siding replaced.  Brilliant ideas welcome!

Main work area; kiln to the right; sturdy easel for relief sculpture to the left

Casting room; buckets for hauling water and mixing plaster

deborahdendler.com

www.facebook.com/DeborahDendlerSculpture

  

Squeaking in at the 11th hour

American Woman

The internet has leveled some playing fields, and one leveled field is that some exclusive art exhibitions that used to be really hard to get into can be slightly more accessible now.  There are so many opportunities everywhere that sometimes a good show can have more room than you'd think.  Keep your eyes open.  If you see that a deadline for a juried show has been extended, enter it.  Chances are that the deadline has been extended because not enough people entered to run the show properly, so you have a statistically better chance of getting in.  Ditto when you get emails from shows offering you extra time to enter because you've already begun an application.  If they were full, they wouldn't be sending emails encouraging entries.  Enter.  Ditto when the entrance fee has been lowered or waived.

Unless, of course, you're trying to weed out shows to lighten your exhibition schedule.  Let's face it - you can't do everything.  Personally, I don't show my work in fairs, festivals, or any show that includes crafts.  I have nothing against crafts - some of my favorite people are potters - but the craft shows are not for me.  Eliminating those three types of shows cuts down on the huge number of opportunities for exhibiting.  I also don't usually enter purely local shows anymore unless there's a nonprofit organization I want to support.

Speaking of the internet, don't disregard online shows just because Monet didn't exhibit his paintings online.  Online shows can be great.  They can be refreshingly original and interesting, as well as prestigious.  For a sculptor, they are a gift from the gods:  no packing, no crating, no shipping.  It's still important to exhibit your work in "real" shows in actual bricks and mortar galleries, but you can sprinkle a few online shows into the mix.  See what happens.

deborahdendler.com

www.facebook.com/DeborahDendlerSculpture