Here’s a new type of scam that I came across yesterday. I received an email from what looked like an artist that I listed in an art directory that I look after. I was suspicious immediately, but they did a lot of things right, which could have fooled those that are new to the internet (or much more trusting of people than I am).

The artist (Linda Blondheim) was using a Hotmail email address, which was hacked and stolen by scammers in Nigeria. The scammers then set out to scam her friends and contacts using her Hotmail email address, asking for money as she was stranded in Africa and needed $2300 to get back home.

It’s easily one of the cleverest scams I have received from the idiots. I was familiar with the name of the artist and they were using her real email address, but the mention of “Nigeria” and “Money” in the same email gave the scammers away. Legitimate businesses in Nigeria (if there is such a thing) must have a lot of problems dealing with international clients/customers as these scammers have given the whole country such a bad name worldwide. I know it’s wrong to generalise, but I wouldn’t deal with anyone from Nigeria as I don’t trust them.. and for good reason.

Here’s the email that I received..

Subject: Reply Soon…From Linda

How are you doing today? I am sorry i didn’t inform you about my traveling to Africa for a program called “Empowering Youth to Fight Racism, HIV/AIDS, Poverty and Lack of Education, the program is taking place in three major countries in Africa which is Ghana , South Africa and Nigeria . It as been a very sad and bad moment for me, the present condition that i found myself is very hard for me to explain.

I am really stranded in Nigeria because I forgot my little bag in the Taxi where my money, passport, documents and other valuable things were kept on my way to the Hotel am staying, I am facing a hard time here because i have no money on me. I am owing an hotel bill of $1050 and they want me to pay the bill before checking out,Else they will have to seize my bag and hand me over to the Hotel Management.

I need this help from you urgently to help me get back home, I need you to help me with the hotel bill and i will also need $1250 to feed and help myself back home so please can you help me with a sum of $2300 to sort out my problems here? I need this help so much and on time because i am in a terrible and tight situation here, I don’t even have money to feed myself for a day which means i have been starving so please understand how urgent i need your help.

I am sending you this e-mail from the city Library and I only have 30 min, I will appreciate what so ever you can afford to send me for now and I promise to pay back your money as soon as i return home so please let me know on time so that i can forward you the details you need to transfer the money through Money Gram or Western Union.Hope to hear from you.love,Linda

Advantages to Visiting Linda Blondheim’s Studio

Patron Club members receive excellent pricing on in studio and web site purchases.
Gift wrapping and gift cards are complimentary to patrons.
Delivery of larger paintings to Lake City, Gainesville, and Ocala areas free of charge.
Studio gift certificates for new patron referrals.
Commissions welcomed.
Enjoy a cup of coffee and visit with a professional established painter just minutes from Gainesville.

Email: lindablondheim12@hotmail.com
Web site: www.lindablondheim.com
Blog: http://lindablondheimartnotes.blogspot.com/

Note: The email above was Linda Blondheim’s real email address used for this scam, but she has since changed it. See her website or blog above for her new contact information.
>> Art Scams, List of Thieves

After having a vent yesterday with my “Ten Things I Hate About Having an Art Blog” list, I realized that I don’t hate having an art blog at all. Actually I struggled to come up with ten things, but I couldn’t stop at six or seven things as it would have looked like I wasn’t trying hard enough.

So, as a counterweight, here’s Ten things that I love about having an art blog..

1. Comments – Comments featured prominently on the list of things I hate too, but I was just talking about the comments of spammers and retards. All the intelligent things are said in the comments on Art News Blog, so if you just read my posts, you’re missing all the interesting stuff in the comments. The comments that disagree with me may be wrong (as I’m always right), but they still interest me.
2. Keeping Up – I like to know what’s happening in the world of art. It’s a big world and there’s lots happening. I wish some one would hurry up and make a teleporter so I could go to some of the exhibition invites I receive from around the world.
3. Appreciation – My favorite emails are from artists explaining that my little list of wicked scammers prevented them from being conned.
4. I can say what I want – Freedom to say almost anything I want. I don’t have to report to Rupert Murdoch or an editor in chief to see if my opinions are valid, I just click “Publish Post” and I’m online.
5. Vanity or Ego Stroking – I shouldn’t mention this publicly, but I like it when I’m talking to some one and learn that they read Art News Blog. It’s a small world. People expect me to have really strong opinions on everything after they learn that the blog is mine, but my opinions change with the weather.
6. People – I have met some interesting people because of this blog. Some in person, some through email, some on the phone, and some through comments.
7. People Send me the News – Most days I don’t even have to go looking for art news as it finds me. I must be on a few mailing lists as the inbox fills up with news each day. So don’t be offended if I don’t mention your exhibition opening or reply to your press release as I’m just one person.
8. Freebies and Bribes – Mostly small things like books and magazines. I don’t receive much but I love getting surprise packages. If I start making weekly posts about how wonderful Ferarris are, you’ll know that I have been bought by a Ferrari dealer.
9. Talking About Art – Most of my friends in real life wouldn’t know a Francis Bacon from a Jackson Pollock. Which means that I talk about art online with people that like art as much as me, rather than forcing my art-ignorant friends to listen to my rants about the importance of art.
10. Learning – The blog forces me to learn new things and be open to new ideas. I can still be narrow minded at times, but I try widen my world view a little bit each day.

I was writing about 3 weeks spent of a friends boat on lake Erie recreating watercolors lost in Argentina. A day or two after we got Alan’s boat in the water I helped Markus get his new/old 40 foot + wooden sailboat over to his slip with no mishaps. A few days later he called me back and said he and a friend were going to take it out for a little shake down cruise. It was a fairly blustery day, sunny with 3 -4 foot swells. I hadn’t actually made any watercolors yet and wanted to get started but decided I wanted to go with Markus on his new boat instead. It’s a beauty for sure. Newly restored after an Ohio winter’s worth of work in the back yard scraping, sanding and painting the hull and redoing much of the interior. I was supposed to help with some of the hand work but could never get free when Markus was able to work. So Markus did it all. I’m always impressed at his industrious nature, his knowledge and creative resolve. He did nearly all the work himself from bending wood to repair the hull breaches, painting and re-stitching sails. He’s an ace at maintaining a motor and has refit his diesel to burn 30 percent bio-fuel. Remarkable! Normally I’d simply call this green thinking but in this market any saving is appreciated with the price of diesel often above $4.50 a gallon.

We had a little trouble with the boat turning into the wind with only the mainsail up once we left the marina causing the sails to lose wind or luff. Markus jury rigged his working jib. It wasn’t quite the proper rigging. There was an unnatural scalloping along the luff or front line of the sail as it attached to the bow sprit up to the line that kept it to the main mast. Markus said he didn’t have the right fixtures attached so he made it up as he went along. Out of Irons refers to the tri-point or ‘Y’ shaped wind direction device on top of the main mast. A sail boat cannot sail less than 45 degrees against the wind or into the wind. When the directional is between the rear two metal points one is ‘In Irons’. Creative sailing…I love it. And it did the trick of keeping the boat out of irons even if it lead to a rather rough sail. At time we were nearly healed over at about 30 degrees which means the rails or gunnels are nearly in the water. That can be rather exciting on such a large boat. We also had a little trouble keeping the inflatable dinghy from cupping water behind the boat. The rigging tying it to the rear davits was a bit loose so it hung too low to the surface of the water. We eventually tried tying it up tighter but even that failed us a little while later. But it was such a windy day and there was a slow leak that had Markus flustered. We brought her back in after a rather exciting 3 hour sail.

I managed to get my first watercolor started the next day. It was a reworking of the first watercolor I did in Cordoba in 2004 from my hotel window. Originally done in a book of rice paper, the papers in the new book gave a much more vibrant range of color. Rag paper does that, while rice paper tends to absorb the chromatic intensity. I’ve included images of both the original and the new version.

Interestingly I realized almost right away that while I had photos of a number of the works done in 2004 and some of the earlier works done in Buenos Aires in 2001 and 2003 I couldn’t just copy them. Maybe its me. But a work, even if it is only a preparatory sketch is also a complete idea in and of itself. There is no copying stroke for stroke. There must always be a new bit of creative response in any work whether directly from life, from imagination or from a preliminary study. In the case of these re done images I began to take a lot of liberties with the color, shaping and broshwork even when there was at the same time a certain loyalty to the original image. While I tend to like both versions of each image I must say that the reprised images have a very different energy to them.

I also quickly realized that to mentally get into each image I almost had to do the same process as I had originally done on location. I often did a small postcard sized image from life, returned to the hotel and then did a larger version from the study and memory and sometimes an even larger variation. I began doing the same thing while working on my friends boat. I’d start a small study, then rework it again at a slightly larger size and finally, if all went well a larger version in the bigger book I’d purchased for the project. Each variation had its own qualities…none were exactly alike, none were ultimately better just different in my mind with perhaps a couple of exceptions. But the process began to unlock certain visual memories that carried me much further than simply copying a photograph would have.

Ultimately I did so many variations on the Sierra Chicas that I felt I could do them blindfolded in my sleep backwards…to the point that I almost sense that this is the ultimate Argentina in my mind. But in the case of the Del Dique (the dike or the dam) works, I had only a color photograph and a pen and ink sketch to work with. The photo wasn’t very large format so much detail was gone. I had to work primarily from memory and what the image gave me to spin off from.

In a week or two I will return to Alan’s boat to continue my journey into the memory of my Argentina. Now I have a better sense of how to work…a more efficient process to access my memories and create a body of work in the shortest amount of time. I have approximately 50 more works to recreate. I hope to get perhaps two thirds of that number accomplished this time if I work with some discipline for about 5 or 6 hours everyday. I think I can create about 4 or 5 images or variations on images every day given that I can work every day. Weekends will be hard as Alan brings friends to the boat. I’ll have to pack things away from Friday night to Sunday evening each week. So I have about 10 days to do 25 – 30 works. It took me 15 days to do 27 works the last time. And that included several days during the middle of the week when Markus came up to sail. I know this sounds like quantity vs. quality. But it is not unlike when I worked as a commercial illustrator. I had to punch a time clock for each project I worked on any given day so my boss could bill for creative time. I became very disciplined during those years. I don’t often practice those disciplines as a fine artist. But in this case it seems to be the right approach. After all I’d already done these works once before. They are now in my head. In that sense they become somewhat like the works I do from imagination in my studio. While the inventive works are also in my head as an idea when I begin them and begin to verge toward and merge with extrapolations as I go these have begun to do the same thing even though they began as simple works from life. It’ll be nice to finally release them and the entire experience which caused me to have to recreate them.

Markus, another of his sailing friends and I went out once more for a second shakedown cruise before I finally came home. We sailed half way to Kelly’s Island. He’d rigged a larger jib with the proper fixtures so it was a much smoother sail. But the leak was still bothering him although the bilge pump seemed to drain it quite nicely. A day later he finally got the leak sealed, at least for the season amd shortly after that I drove back to Columbus. I must admit it was hard to come home to mowing the yard, and the mundane everyday things one does to get by. The solidtude of being on the boat by myself most of the week was itself theraputic. But as I said in another week or two I’ll be back up on the boat painting away. And maybe I’ll manage to get up there a few more times before the summer turns to fall and then time to take the boats out of the water for the winter… at least for a couple of weekend cruises.

Created by Walter King On 07/24/08 At 10:37 AM

I suppose the following is a fair comment to this and to that:

More about The Leave Me Alone Box here.