Chris Simonite's Cubo-Weirdism Blog! A Blog about Chris Simonite's Art by Chris Simonite. Who the Hell else?

I was gonna do it. I really was! I was going to take a one week break from this here blog here. But then I wrote the latest issue of my newsletter and decided I wanted to expand on it a little more. So here goes. One thing you may not know about me is that I love science. I love reading popular science books and listening to science podcasts. I often listen to popular science audiobooks when I paint. Right now I'm listening to a kind of science/philosophy hybrid called The Big Picture by the physicist Sean Carroll. I actually read a hard copy of it a couple of years ago, but it was so good I thought I'd listen to it too. I can't recommend it enough. And the best thing about it is, I got it through my library, so it didn't cost me anything! [...]

As we head into Christmas week I had to think long and hard about what I wanted to write about in this here blog here. There was a time when I used to make my own Christmas card with a funny cartoon on it. I think I stopped because it got harder and harder to come up with something sufficiently amusing and original. But my excuse was that I just wanted to keep painting and having to take a break from that to do some cartooning felt wrong. Somehow. I guess I wasn't into writing funny comics/cartoons anymore. Maybe I'll get back to it one day. I still love funny cartoons! Of course, because the source of most of my current work is pop culture, I did do a painting of Will Ferrell as Elf back in 2019 as well as one of the Grinch in 2020. Now, I started this here blog here in February of 2020 so I'm pretty sure I've never shown the Will Ferrell painting on this website. So there it is above. Consider that there image to be my Holiday e-card to you! Have a great holiday! [...]

One thing you learn in this here art business, is you never know what is going to sell. Well, I will say that sometimes I finish a painting and I'm pretty confident I will be able to sell it. That doesn't mean it will sell right away, of course. Case in point, my painting of that iconic moment in The Shining when Jack Nicholson says "Here's Johnny"! You know that scene. Anyway, that painting sold at the Manitoba Art Expo in October. It took a while, but I knew as soon as I finished it that someone would buy it. I was also confident that my paintings of Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, Neil Young, Mick and Keith from the Stones, and David Bowie would find good homes. But I also knew that paintings of iconic musicians was a common subject matter for painters. So I did think there would be a fair amount of competition. But sure enough I didn't have to wait all that long to sell all the above mentioned paintings. Okay, some took longer than others, but they are all in private collections. [...]

One thing I don't normally do on this here Cubo-Weirdist Blog here, is to try to directly sell to my reader(s). I utilize this blog as a means to show you my new works (which are almost always available for sale) and to muse about the day to day life of a full-time Cubo-Weirdist. I try to keep it interesting, though I know I often fail. It's not that easy to write about something different every week! Anyway, this week I got to thinking about the stress of Christmas shopping that many people experience at this time of year and how I could offer to alleviate that stress. But I couldn't come up with anything. No matter how hard I tried. Yup, nothin'. Nada. Zilch. Okay, if you haven't figured it out, I'm being facetious. I mean I talked about selling to my readers in the very first sentence of this blog post! Pay Attention! [...]