Artist Life

Posted on Posted in A Symbol Life, minimum daily requirement

Reset the clocks. Run the short loop. Walk the long way back.

Breakfast is grits and sweet potato. Veg sausages and espresso

Off to the garden shop — bags of mulch, compost; no seeds. They’ve already come from online stores. Skip the starter plants. They always tempt, but they never grow as well as from seed, or direct planting in the yarden.

Put prints from yesterday into flatten press.

Into the darkroom. Re-print yesterday’s negatives using softer developer. Ilford Multigrade and 1+9. Simple, reliable. Spend time testing imagery not chemistry.

Prints looking good. Mix scones. Bake scones. Lunch. Rice and yogurt. Start new rice. Back to darkroom

Go to next negatives on list of ‘print for edit’ — always 8x10s. Keep process simple, repeatable. Expand other areas of praxis.

Prints washing. Read some. Avoid the dead-enders, the freezer geezers that dominate the Web Forums.

Set prints drying. Cut veg for dinner. Plot out midnight readings.

Seek out Winogrand Color book? Not published?

Oh, write this and post. Do more. Do more often.

art daily

Bird is the Wird

Posted on Posted in overnight notes

An assignment for EXS students in the 70s. This time of the year, thanksgiving break, the freshmen had gotten to the point where souping and printing film was comfortable. they’d begun to acquire a vocabulary based upon the history of art; photography being an extension of realist drawings. As a stretch exercise, I told them this week they would do the dreaded ‘figurative’ work. Since they would be back home, with access to friends not at Syracuse University, they could do a ‘nude’ study.

Several years into the assignment, I got the image I’d always expected: Turkey.

It spread. Next year, the assignment was blown. Everyone did something with a turkey. The best shot though was a group of naked people seated at a Last Supper with the Bird in Full Pilgrim attire. don’t know where she went. I hope she did well

put the camera down

Posted on Posted in art school, overnight notes

I’ve been doing pictures my entire life. When I was younger, I thought everyone could draw. I learned they can’t; they’re too afraid. Many people make photographs because they can’t draw, yet they want to make pictures, express themselves. It was a while, maybe 3 years, before I realized that the lousy photographs were made by those who were the worst at drawing, those who were most afraid of figuring out what a picture looks like, what a picture is about.

Please, if you can’t draw, are afraid of making pictures, put the camera down and take up golf.