A bored artist is sometimes a careless artist. Very talented guy. But on January 6, 2015, Gourock artist, Wil Freeborn posted a competition on Instagram, (he cascaded the offer across several social media platforms including Flickr, Facebook and his eponymous blog site). He received a respectable number of entries from around the world. He picked two winners and announced their names on Jan 16. My friend was one of the winners. Freeborn is a professional artist, working on commissions and media projects. From what I can piece together he received an artist in residence invitation soon after he posted the competition and lost his appetite to provide work for free. My friend, a longtime fan, was beyond happy about winning. Today I found out that after only the second email inquiry about the promised prize (a watercolor painting) Freeborn threatened to cancel the prize because he didn't want to be bothered by further email contact seeking the prize. Shocking. Freeborn is a well known artist and it has been almost four months since the contest ended. Honesty, that he had a change of circumstance and/or change of heart would have been the best strategy here. Instead he lost a fan and customer (my friend had purchased a few of his pieces over the past year) by sending a rude email in response to a person who was only excited by having a promised piece of his work. A sad but true story. read more