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Wendy Edsall-Kerwin is a jewelry artist and metalsmith who showcases a different artist each month on her blog. I am honored that she named me her July Artist of the Month. It is always fun and informative to seeing your work through someone else’s eyes. I love the way she described my work:
His photographs are ethereal and remind me of some of the Hubble images from outer space. They are delicate and flowing and you’d be hard pressed to know exactly what they are actually of.
What can I say, she nailed it. I often think of my work as the Hubble in reverse: seeking out the mysteries that exist, not out there in space, but right at our feet. I just began to watch Carl Sagan’s Cosmos again, for the first time since I was a child. I am amazed at how much Dr. Sagan’s worldview has influenced me as an artist. But I’ll have to write more about that another day….
An abstract macro photograph of a leaf that has begun to dry and decay.
I’ve been spending some time this morning revisiting some older photographs of mine. I had stumbled across one from a couple years ago, and my first reaction was “Bleh! I can do better than that!”. So I went to the archives, pulled out the file, and began to work. That’s one of the joys and creative challenges of working in digital photography: it is a constantly evolving art form. Within a couple hours, I managed to bring more life into the photograph, and made it feel more like I originally intended. I improved the color, brought out more details, and added more focus on the acorn itself.
The old flat, muddy version of this photograph
The new, revised version of this photograph. Whew, much better!
Ansel Adams said that the film is the score, and the print is the performance. This is especially true in the digital darkroom. I am constantly learning, changing and evolving. My vision is refining and maturing. My tools get more sophisticated and more powerful. And my ability to pull that vision out of the pixels is always getting better.
Oh course, the challenge is to avoid what you might call the George Lucas Syndrome. With digital never having to be finished, there will always be the impulse to constantly change things, simply because you can. But that is just one more lesson I need to learn as an artist: when to improve, and when to leave to good enough alone. So when I get tempted to mess with an old photograph, I need to take a step back, think about if my additional work will add or subtract from the piece review. And always remember: Han shot first.
I’ve been working on my art each day for the past couple weeks, working my way through a collection of leaves, seeds, and acorns from last fall, trying to find one that captured my imagination. While most days yielded little progress, I kept at it, and yesterday, I stumbled on something out of the blue.
Dragon (an abstract of a fallen leaf) by Daniel Sroka
This green and yellow maple leaf caught my eye, specifically the way one side of the leaf had curled under itself. When I explored this area through the camera, I noticed how this curl of this edge contrasted with the soft ripple of the rest of the leaf. This caused a slight tension, and a sense of motion.
It has now been around ten days that I have been trying to make some art every day. And so far, it has been a success: you can follow my progress on Twitter. A lot of other artists on Twitter are also trying to get back into the studio and make art. Check out Lori Woodward Simons’ #20hourchallenge on Twitter. But I find that for me, setting a quota like 20 hours a week is too time focused — I just don’t work well under those kinds of constraints.
The business side of my life takes a lot of time, not to mention my family, so finding 20 hours free a week is nearly impossible. Even if I could find it, those other demands are always there, and I feel a little guilt for not spending more time on them. If I want to further my art career (and I do!) that means spending a lot of time on marketing and publicity. Work that I find difficult to do, and oh-so-easy to procrastinate on. So each hour in the studio, making new art, is another hour I am not focused on getting my existing art in front of potential buyers. And then there’s the kids. It’s hard to justify spending another hour in the studio when your 5 year old son comes in, with that sad face, and says “…but we haven’t had a chance to play yet today…!” Maybe other artists are made of tougher stuff, but that just melts my heart. So away goes my work, out comes the old camera, and we play. The art can wait.
My son visiting my studio, and trying his hand at a self-portrait.
But making new art is important – it is vital to who am I and what I am trying to do with my life. So I have realized that I need to find a sweet spot, the “right amount” of time to spend in the studio. One that gives me enough time to be creative, to keep my creative engine constantly cranking away, without impinging on all of the other responsibilities I have. So instead of setting an arbitrary time limit, I am just trying to commit to just making art every day: doing *some* work in the studio every day. It can be hours of shooting new works, or just a few minutes of tweeking old photos. It can be working in Lightroom and Photoshop massaging raw photos into something worth showing, or just a few minutes playing and daydreaming new ideas. My goal is to keep my artistic momentum constantly moving forward. To not let myself stagnate. I don’t have to become some raging river of creativity — I’ll be happy with a swift moving stream. But just keep moving forward.
Ah, some good news for the middle of the week. I have learned that my photograph “Mask” was nominated in the Abstract catagory for this year’s Photography Masters Cup.
This has always been a favorite photograph of mine. It is an abstract of a fallen leaf that has dried into a tight curl (see the leaf below. And yes, I do save all of the leaves that I photograph!). The photograph was taken from the right side, looking along the length of the leaf. The “eye” of the mask is the small opening right by the stem.
When I was photographing this leaf, I was amazed at how this image of a mask jumped out at me. It literally spooked me, suddenly seeing this half of a face staring at me through the lens.
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