Rikcat - The Art of Rik Catlow

I’ve built a new RSS Feed for new paintings in the store. The feed will keep you up to date on any new pieces added to the store.

Also, I’ve been doing some experimenting with new techniques and will include some of these pieces to the artwork and store areas of the site. I’ve been working on pieces that have a light, eerie narrative with more muted color tones.

My computer habits have changed in the last year. I’ve noticed that I’m using more web based software. I find data portability to be the over riding factor in the products I use. Last year, I changed from using Apple’s Mail program to using Google Apps for my email, calendar and documents. This gives me amazing flexibility. I’m able to get my email

People often ask me questions about the techniques I use to create some of my work, particularly the smashed beverage can paintings. Hopefully, this post will address everyone’s questions and shed some light on my overall process. I tried to be as complete as possible in my description, but if there are questions please leave a comment

From time to time people ask me how I learned how to hand code HTML and CSS. I learned by reading a bunch of books and from lots of trial an error. Below are a list of books I recommend for someone who wants to start hand coding HTML and CSS. If I was just starting I would start with the HTML Dog book. If I had some coding experience and just wanted to learn

I’ve upgraded my Wordpress install to the current version 2.1 and everything seems to be okay. If anyone notices anything not working either make a comment or send me and email . Really like some of the new admin features with this upgrade.

Also I’ve posted a new pieces in the store called Amputated that I completed this weekend.

In December I participated in a show at Compound Gallery in Portland, OR called Mike Burnett’s NeighborWood. Each artist was given a wood sculpture to paint and decorate in there own style. Well, the show was up for a month and my piece didn’t sell and the gallery sent it back to me. So i’m putting it for sale in my store if anybody is interested.

Over the last two weeks I’ve been using Last.FM and discovered it’s quite addicting. It’s not that I need a twelve step program or anything but Last.FM does what it does very well and really helps you find new music.

On the surface Last.FM is a recommendation engine that tracks what you’re listening to with a little downloadable application, but it does a lot more.

I’ve added two new smashed can paintings to the store. Both have the same character in them, but with different collage elements around them. Forcast is in red tones and Goodluck is in blue tones and each is $120.00 + $5.00 US Shipping.

I’ve also resolved to do a better job photographing and documenting my work this year.

About a two weeks ago I had the idea that it would be great to have a new site for the new year. So I started comping and settled on a design pretty quickly and jumped into coding. I knew I wanted to use Wordpress for CMS. I’ve done a couple projects with Wordpress in the past and had some experience with the template tags and liked the capabilities.

I’ve made available a digital piece called Digital Messin I did this week as a poster on Cafe Press. I’m not totally sure of the quality of the printing but Cafepress seems to be quite popular so I decided to give it a try. Here is a nice clear uncompressed version of the piece on Flickr.