#studio art

Michael A Davenport, 3,090 Degrees Fahrenheit (Oil on canvas, 2025)

FISHBOWL, 2026, 24”x24”, acrylic on canvas

I compressed the last 18 months or so of my artistic studio journey into an admittedly too-long and possibly overly self indulgent blog post.

I write those last words here, as a descriptor, as a way of looking into the eyes of ten billion strategy items I have read over the last 400,000 years.

Why is "overly self indulgent" a criticism instead of a genre for everyone except Quentin Tarantino? Isn't it funny, that aside from a select few, so many of us look at something and say:

"...pfft, the artist/writer was having fun and doing exactly what they wanted to do... how grotesque, how droll..."

As a dual mission: this ends for me immediately, having laid this willingness to accept that criticism to dissintegrate.

The short pitch from me to you to read this essay:

I always found artistic constraint repugnant. Now I am seeing it as a mechanism somewhere between safety valve and salvation.

By narrowing my focus into a select few lines of art, there is more space in my life to embrace the work made by others.

By removing the need to make everything myself, I can instead focus my energy on supporting other arts and crafts.

I have never been shy about either. But I had never realized quite how large that blindspot in my life was until recently.

This is the first official post of diner academia.

And in the spirit of it, please send me YOUR blog posts, your social posts, about YOUR journeys in art. Of any kind!

Please invite me into your overtly self indulgant wonders and experiments and mistakes and learnings and findings and rambles.

What are you making? Where are you succeeding? Where are you failing?

What are you plunging into with artistic recklessness? (But with proper physical protection… I love and support personal protective equipment! Ventilation, stretching, gloves, aprons! More more more!)