Updating website; long overdue. Fatcow's new file-editing beta system is giving me no end of headaches. Argh.

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Going through the black and white negatives I shot with my Holga, it's frustrating how many of them are poorly printed. In a few weeks time I will have my darkroom set up and I will be able to (re)print them at a larger scale and with more attention paid than commercial developers can afford to pay. I expect to bungle the first few attempts, but I believe that familiar bicycle adage applies. It will be fulfilling to see the photographs that I intended to be more than snapshots exist as something more than snapshots.

The reason for postponing the set-up of the darkroom is that I want to wait until after my upcoming trip to upstate New York. Staying at a relative's beautiful farmhouse on 200 or so acres with nothing specific to do is going to be a wonderful opportunity to indulge in a bit of photography. I'm looking forward to doing some night work especially. Hopefully the weather will be clear enough to shoot star trails, but an eerie nighttime fog is welcome as well. I also intend to record a bit of family story-telling for vocolo.org practice, as well as record the shapes of objects on the solar-print paper I used to love as a child.



I didn't realize the solar print technique was used by the military to make quick copies of strategic maps drawn on tracing paper. This gives me a bit of an urge to use it in making drawings myself, or contact prints of photographs.

While coming out of a dream this morning, it occurred to me that these two objects might occupy the same space in their respective cultures.

Catch(up)all

Greetings, negligible amount of blog followers!

I have been incredibly lax in maintaining this blog, but I take solace in a statistic pulled from Harper's: “Estimated percentage of all existing blogs that have not been updated in four months: 94%”.

I have been spending my time starting and soon after aborting several large-scale paintings and drawings. Something doesn't feel right about the size. I think I'm going to pack them away temporarily and for the time being focus on pieces of art that are small enough to be held in my hands while I work. I'm certainly out of practice at large-scale image-making but I don't believe that to be the real root of the problem. I'm feel myself at a transitional stage as far as imagery is concerned and it feels disingenuous to be making larger, more confident pieces.

I'm also at a point where I'm looking to be less of a painter. To put it perhaps more accurately, I'm NOT a painter. I'm an artist who paints (occasionally) and doesn't do much of anything else at all. I don't especially identify with the history of painting, though I find it fascinating, and refrain from making work in other media largely because of the difficulty of working in unfamiliar ways. Through the help of a friend I'll soon have my darkroom set up and hope to develop and improve my photography skills. If not an end in itself, I've always found photography a good way to improve my visual thought processes and a good way to test out ideas.

I'm also making small steps toward audio work, though I must emphasize the smallness of these steps. Vocolo.org is an offshoot of Chicago Public Radio (my local NPR station) which has an open format where listeners and producers of audio occupy the same space. I've been playing around a bit, trying to be a bit more literal in my storytelling as I try to be a little bit less narrative or explanatory in my visual work. As a side note, I've also been listening to old podcasts of Radiolab, which I highly recommend.

All in all, the summer has been extremely busy and only moderately productive. Part of this is my own willingness to socialize rather than work, part of it is the seasonal nature of making one's money doing wedding decor. I find myself looking forward to winter. After this comparatively chilly summer, it doesn't feel like it will be much of a transition (though, of course, it will). But I hope to make a trip to San Francisco to look at grad school options there and (though dreading the lack of income) look forward to working less and having more time to focus on creative endeavors.

Also, here's this: