Postcards from the Creative Journey

Art is Not a Spectator Sport

Ansorge Hotel,
Curlew, Washington

Art is not a spectator sport. You have to create. You have to do it all the time. Spending two hours on a Sunday afternoon trying to find all the parts to your easel, hunting down the paints or sharpening your chisels before you have to fix Sunday dinner is not an effective use of the time devoted to your art. You really can’t be a once a week artist.

If you want to be a better artist, then you must choose to dedicate a larger portion of your existence to art. You can’t be an artist once a week and expect to be good at it. If you practice your art more often you will become better. Do it every day and you will get very good at your art. But you say, “Joe, I can’t paint murals every day. I work in a cube.” So do I dear reader, and my favorite places to photograph are hundreds of miles from home. I can only get there once a year, at best. This is the problem with fitting Art in around the edges of your life. There is only so much time in the day. You can only be in one place at one time. You have to figure out how to fit your art into that space at the edge of your life.

I think the issue boils down to making the time for Art you like to do versus the Art you have time for.

It takes a conscious effort to be creative. Too often that part of your life is relegated to the edges. What I am advocating is the use of smaller segments of time in your life to create a complimentary form of art that makes your primary art making time more productive. An alternate creative activity would serve the purpose of a priming pump for your primary medium so when you get the time to work on what you love to work on, you need to spend less time getting yourself in the creative groove.

The Secret Language of Post-Modern Photography

Kitchen, Ansorge Hotel

Curlew, Washington

In last week’s post I posited the thought about the necessity of learning a photographic language to understand (and possibly enjoy) post-modernist photography. I wondered if there is a guide to understanding the post-modern photograph that would allow me to gain an appreciation for what is presented to the viewing public. I went down that rabbit hole to see what there was to see.

Oh my.

If there is anything less understandable to me than the post-modern photograph it would be the writing about post-modernist photographs. It’s as if this entire artistic discipline exists in a completely other world that speaks its own language and makes it extremely difficult for non-insiders to truly understand what the artist’s intent is for the work. I cannot fathom the dense, imprecise prose surrounding these efforts. It’s like the authors and artists dare you to try and understand what the meaning and motivation are for the art. The meaning of the work and the critical assessment might be well understood in this fraternity, but alas, I am an outsider.

I wonder if I am missing out on something by not being able to interpret the cryptic writings of post-modernism. Or are the rest of us left out on purpose?

Language of Creativity

Kitchen, Ansorge Hotel

Curlew, Washington

Artists develop their own language of creativity. If you listen to Bach’s music, you learn to recognize his music. If you hear some music you might be able to identify the composer after hearing only a few bars. The same applies to painters. They have a style and a palette which are recognizable.

Photographers also have their own visual language and recognizable style. I think we are moved by some photographs and not by others because we don’t “speak” the same language as the photographer. As you learn photography, you pick up these different languages and adapt them to your own use. My photographic language is a hybrid of modernist and American Western Landscape with an FSA documentary accent.

Post-modern photographers have a completely different language I cannot understand. The closest I can come to describing this situation is my first trip to China. I know some French and Spanish and can make a good guess at words in other European languages, but Kanji characters baffle me completely. I feel the same way about most post-modern photographs. I can see the images, but they speak a visual language that I cannot decipher. I can’t understand the message because I cannot read the image. If you can’t speak the language or understand the message, there is just not very much there to hold your interest.

Doing It Over Means Doing It Better

Shoshone Building,

Wallace, Idaho

A few posts ago I was agonizing over having to re-do several folios that were ruined by my ignorance of the finer points of Adobe InDesign. Learning from my mistakes, I undertook the project of recreating the folios using proper technique. The work was nowhere near as onerous as I thought it would be and in fact, it became easier as I progressed through each folio. Ever the engineer, I thought it would be a good idea to write down each of the steps I took in the process in order to insure that each of the reworked (and future) folios would be identical. I now have a checklist of things to do to create and print a folio. I have proof of how easy it is to create a folio. Reducing this task to a list makes it much easier to accomplish.

Here is something else I discovered during the Do Over. The reworked images look better than the originals. My improved skills plus improvements in software, hardware and materials resulted in a better looking photograph. The lesson is, the more you practice your craft, the more likely you are to produce better images. Here is the conundrum. Later work is much better than earlier work. Yet, collectors value the vintage print over the modern version. Fortunately for me, this has yet to prove itself to be a problem.

It’s always a difficult task to select photos to illustrate the weekly blog posts.  Several photographs published on this blog are noteworthy in that they are prize winners in the Cary Photographic Artists (CPA) annual juried exhibition. The photograph at the top of this blog was selected as “Best in Show.” This one was selected as “Best Black & White Entry.” This one was also juried into the show. That's a pretty good showing.