inthestudio
I was trying to grow something suited for shade in the sun, and sun in the shade. By rearranging my pursuits to fit my actual (newly-discovered) values, my life felt more livable. I could still cram my time to the brim (a bad habit of mine), but the things I pursued didn't really feel like work. It was just what I did.
Read MoreMy #31daysofimagemaking project has been quite the challenge. Making myself create a specific kind of thing with specific parameters never felt so hard before. (See, I thought it would be a lot like client work, except in this case, the client was me.) In this case, the daily project was to create a work on paper that featured a beloved line of poetry.
The daily deadline revealed this about my work: I prefer to let things sit and simmer when I'm not sure where they're going next. Many times it's felt as though I haven't quite finished with them, but the day is ending and I have to "call it." The daily deadline means that I need to move really fast—to say goodbye before I felt ready.
The daily deadline also gave me a clearer sense of how much time I actually give myself to make art in a single day (it varies, but it’s limited). During the project, my children were on spring break, which changed the shape of my timeon another level as well (many times, they’d watch me). I re-learned something I already knew: the daily practice happened best if I made it a first priority (even if that felt at odds with the pressures of the laundry piles).
Before beginning, I imagined that cyanotype would figure prominently in the project. In practice, the length of time required to expose, rinse, and dry a cyanotype meant that it ran up against my limitations of time. I learned that if I insisted on using cyanotype for the whole project I may not actually succeed in making something at the end of each day. So I had to pivot, and found that watercolor, ink, oil pastel, pen, and pencil all became my daily tools.
The biggest surprise for me was how much I disliked the things I made. Why? Because the daily deadline imposed unexpected parameters on my medium. The daily deadline meant to say goodbye before I was ready.
I'm most grateful for the work done weeks prior to the beginning of the project: finding novel sources of poetry, by asking friends, my newsletter readers, and subscribing to a poem a day via e-mail. I know that letting the poetry simmer, re-reading my choices and seeing them new each day helped me to find excerpts that resonated. It also served to reconnect me with my love of written language.
In the end, whatever the #31daysofimagemaking project looks like, it has been a fruitful garden of growth and opportunity.
I love that instant photography (while expensive), gives you all the gratification of digital, but way more unpredictability.
In that sense, it's a lot like fishing. You go out, hoping for a wonder of wonders, maybe coming home with nothing, maybe coming home with just enough to feed you to keep going.
But it's not like fishing, because you can come home feeling like you've caught nothing, only you discover later on that there's this one that grows on you more and more as you look at it.
Not to mention the ones that just set your heart afire, nearly instantaneously.
And then there are the ones that long to become something else, or a part of something else. They long to be transformed.
Those are magical.
Things I do in my artmaking process because I want to honor the beautiful Earth I call home:
A lot of artists are resourceful this way. Share your ways of being more earth-friendly in your art practices!
The beach is one of my favorite places to take photographs with instant film. What's even more lovely is when I bring the prints home and then work them over. Each of these is made up of two individual emulsion lifts; the print is cut open, soaked in water, and then the image slowly releases from the plastic, floating like a jellyfish in the water.
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