Good customer service should mean everything in business. Making and selling art is a business. Customer service represents trust and valuation of customers. I work very hard to please my customers, whether they are strangers or old friends. My customers mean everything to me. They make my career possible and I am grateful.

The fastest way to lose me as a customer is to treat me with neglect. There is a small company who sells paper making supplies. I wrote to them once with a question about using their product. I was never  answered. Will I use their product? Probably not. If they don’t have time to answer a simple question, they don’t really care about their customers. Whether that is true matters not. That is the impression they gave.

A business can have a hundred good reviews, but just one bad one will spoil your reputation for many. I think about these incidences in relation to how I respond in business. I always want my collectors to be happy. Communication is free these days. There is really no excuse for not answering customer inquiries.

Country painters love their collectors…..

No successful artist gets there without help from many others. Some arrogant artists forget where they started. I try never to do that. You never have true security as a full time artist. Living in your car is always a possibility. When bad economies come, we are the first to fail.

When I was a child, my mama and daddy allowed me to take art lessons. They took me to the local galleries and museums because they knew how much I loved them. Along the way I received lots of art supplies and an attic studio, put together for me by my daddy. My teachers encouraged me to paint and draw as I journeyed through public school. Then came art school for years. 

During the hard years with two children to raise, I received help from both of my sisters, my mama, as well as gifts of supplies from collectors. To this day, I have wonderful collectors who continue to support me, by buying my work to give as gifts, and for themselves. Others share my work on social media and with their connections. There has never been a time when someone didn’t reach out in some way to assist me. Artists are the dreamers of our world. We exist and succeed because others won’t let us fail.

This country painter is so grateful for all who support me in so many ways……

Two paintings came back to me yesterday from the senate office of Senators Bradley in Tallahassee. Mr Bradley showed my work in his senate office in his term and Mrs Bradley during her term. I am so grateful to them for their support of me and other Florida artists during their term of office. I am also so glad they are strong supporters of our Florida farmers, ranchers, and our wetlands.  

Thank you to Miss Tonya who picked up and delivered my paintings from Tallahassee to my studio. We had a wonderful chat over a cup of tea. She is retiring soon and I congratulate her on a job well done. She left me a very large shipping box. If any artist who reads this would like to have it. Come out to my studio for it. It is a nice U-Haul TV /large painting box. 

Thank you so much to those who toil for a better world. This country painter is so thankful…

There is something magical about painting. I believe it is the transition from being ugly first and ending up the prom queen at the finish, if you are lucky and skillful enough. 

Most times I will start a painting and it looks really awful for awhile. I think to myself, this is a disaster. It looks like a bad cartoon. I feel a bit let down. Sometimes I will just leave it for a day and come back to it. The next day I’ll face it and begin to learn its secrets and progress through the mystery. After that the magic begins. The transition from a waste to a better painting than I thought possible is the magic.

Once at a paint out, I sat around a table with several painters. We discussed how our paintings started with an ugly stage. One of the painters declared that her paintings always looked good at every stage from beginning to conclusion. Later that day I made my way through trees to take a look at her painting in progress. It looked just as bad as ours did! Ego was not her friend. 

Country painters are learners…..