Be Energetic...
Practice, practice, practice
I took a break from blogging earlier this year... which was probably a mistake. You don't get better by not doing... and you may not get worse by not doing... but as Brooks Jensen wrote recently in LensWork, "There is a great deal to be gained in sheer volume - not that volume itself is any virtue, but practice is." He went on to say, "Speaking of volume, if you are not throwing out ten finished prints for every one you exhibit, you are not being critical enough." And then the punch line came, "If you are not shooting 100 negatives for every one you print, you are not being energetic enough."
Of course, the same applies with "art" work. I can study the few remains of my college work for hours... but I don't gain or improve my practical skills by doing so. To do that it is necessary to touch a receptive surface with a tool to make a visible mark... my creative mark.
I've started using again some of the tools I bought at college and am enjoying the freedom they allow... a freedom often hard to find when using the photo-mechanical/chemical workflow of photography. Things will switch around again... see-sawing... yo-yoing... and at times I'll drift along... at other times be swept energetically with the force of the current... and sometimes, unexpectedly maybe, swim against the stream and find a new theme.
Incidentally, my drawing above is from an ongoing project depicting classic chairs... here one designed by Verner Panton for Vitra. The basis for my original early 1970s artwork (now lost) was a grid design of random photographs of one of his chairs... over a long period of time redrawn with and on various media... here coloured and soft lead pencils on overlapping tracing and cartridge papers. I'll be expanding on this theme another time.
11:08:01 PM 
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