Archives for January 2014

January 30, 2014 by Kat

Finding Your Artistic Vision

I had a thought-provoking conversation in the comments of last week’s Dealing with Disappointment post. Jack and I chatted on our capacity to deal with disappointment being correlated to our artistic vision. The gist of it: The stronger your personal vision, the less disappointments can effect you.

That rings true to me. The more I know why I create art and what I’m trying to achieve in my art, the less I care what other people think. Feedback from others is always colored by their personal values and opinions. If they have a different vision than mine for what art should look like, what it’s purpose is, then their feedback doesn’t need to be absorbed as truth. It can be registered and evaluated, then filed away if I decide it doesn’t apply to what I’m trying to do.

There is strength and clarity in having an artistic vision. It makes me sit up a bit taller, represent my art to others with confidence.

I have to admit, I don’t think I’ve had a clear vision of what I want to achieve in my art until sometime this last year. Or maybe I had one before and it shifted this last year. Either way, it’s taken lots of journaling, discussions with others, writing here, and looking critically at my art to help me clarify what it is I want to achieve with my art; to know what it is I want to express and communicate to others. I knew I had a vision when I could finally write an Artist Statement that rang true.

I certainly don’t always achieve my vision with the art I create. But it’s nice to have a personal standard I’m working toward. A goal for each piece. The artistic process becomes an ongoing cycle of “create, then evaluate,” deciding after the fact whether or not something fits my vision. I don’t want to mess up the creative process by putting too many judgments and filters on it up front, but I’ve discovered the pieces that end up in the long-term “keep” file are the ones that best fit my vision. Every time.

So, do you have an artistic vision? Do you know why you create what you create, and for whom? How did you get there? This is a worthy topic to give some thought to.

January 28, 2014 by Kat

Sharing a Success with a Giveaway

Life is funny. It really is. If we can learn to laugh at ourselves and the situations that life throws at us, we can respond to almost anything. Of that, I am convinced.

Why is life so funny, you ask?

After baring my soul, sharing my response to a disappointment last week, just two days later I experienced a really nice success. I found out that I received an Honorable Mention in the 2013 Mobile Photography Awards, in the Travel category for my image The Last Tree. Thousands of people apply to this international review and traveling exhibition of Mobile Photography. It’s juried by some fantastically talented people in the photography world. And one of my images got noticed. How cool is that??

So, yeah. Back to last week. When I found out about the Honorable Mention the disappointment I was feeling suddenly evaporated. It’s almost forgotten; replaced with a new success to celebrate. Life is funny that way, with its ups and downs. The whole experience made me laugh at myself, at my short-lived drama, and reflect in my newsletter how life as an artist is like one big roller coaster ride. It’s different every time we get on. There will be more disappointments, more successes too, as long as I keep getting on to ride.

So now that I’m on the upside, it seemed only fair to share my new success with you, after you listened and held my hand and provided such lovely encouragement through my disappointment last week. Thank you, thank you, thank you for that.

I invite you now to share in my little success. And maybe shake your head and laugh with me, at how funny life can be.

GIVEAWAY TIME!!! OK, so to celebrate this success, I’m going to give away a signed print of The Last Tree. Printed size will be the winner’s choice (up to 13×19″). To enter, leave a comment by the end of the day on Monday, February 3rd. I will draw in the morning PST on Tuesday, February 4th, and announce the winner on my blog.

Thank you for being here, sharing in my successes along with my disappointments. I appreciate all of you!

January 23, 2014 by Kat

Dealing with Disappointment

Yesterday I found out that something I applied for, related to my photographic art, I didn’t get. It’s one of those things… Lots and lots of people applied. Only a few were going to be selected. The odds were low. The selection process is always subjective with the jurors. The other work submitted was amazing. There are so many reasons I wasn’t selected. I can list them all.

Yet… I’m still disappointed.

It always happens when I hear I wasn’t chosen for something I applied for. Even though I know the odds are really low in anything art-related, I always apply with hope. There is always a piece of me that believes I have a chance at whatever it is. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t spend the time, energy and (sometimes) money to apply.

And so, there is the disappointment. It’s usually short, but it’s there. I feel the anticipation and excitement of receiving that letter or email or phone call… Hoping for the answer I’ve dreamed of… Only to get a sinking feeling in my gut as I find out the real results. It’s not me. I wasn’t chosen. As my dream world reconciles with the real world, the disappointment sets in. For a brief time, my inner child comes out: Why not me? What’s so great about this other work? What’s the point of it all? I hate to admit it, but that is almost always the first reaction.

And then… I take a step back and look at it more objectively. I turn on my mother voice, to talk to that petulant child… Now, you knew the odds going in. These things are subjective. And wow, isn’t the art that was chosen amazing? See what you can learn.

So I mentally pick myself up, brush myself off, and start all over again.

Such is the life of the artist. If we are going to put our work out there, if we are going to submit, there will be disappointment. The funny thing is, we usually only share the successes. So on the outside it looks like it’s smooth sailing. That someone is blessed, getting everything they want. I tell you, from the very real inside, that’s just not true.

For every success I share here, there are five times… no, make that ten times… the number of disappointments. For every step forward I make, the are many, many more steps back. It’s only because I have some inner drive, some passion for what I do that I continue on through all of the disappointments. I have belief in myself that I can succeed. And so the disappointment is all the more real.

Being an artist is not for the faint of heart. We put our selves, our soul, into the work we create and then we put it out there in the world. We open ourselves, knowingly, to the possibility of hurt. By the very nature of a selection process, we open ourselves to the likelihood of hurt. And yet we do it. Over and over again.

It takes both courage and resilience to be an artist. I’m calling on both today, to deal with my disappointment.

January 21, 2014 by Kat

A Return to Italy

This weekend we returned to Italy – in a virtual way – by seeing the Italian movie The Great Beauty (La Grande Belleza). It was a thought-provoking movie and today I want to share a bit about it, so I revisited Italy in my photographs as well, finding an image from Rome to share with you.

The Great Beauty tells the story of Jep Gambarella, a 65-year-old writer living in Rome. For forty years, after publishing his first and only novel, he’s been in Rome living the “high life” of the beautiful and rich. With the passing of his 65th birthday, he starts to reevaluate how he’s been living his life and why he’s never written a follow up to his one great novel.

For forty years, he’s been seeking the great beauty, the thing that will inspire him to write again, and has yet to find it. He is driven to revisit places and relationships, some by choice and others by circumstance, seeing things in a different light. Ultimately, he comes full circle, accepting where he is, and understanding that he already has what he needs in his life to write the next novel.

Throughout the movie, there is only a little bit of internal narration, and most of his evaluation is played out through his interactions and choices. Things aren’t always spelled out for us, the viewer, and that can be confusing. There are moments of surreality thrown in here and there, and I found myself scratching my head. But after the fact, as I thought about the movie as a whole, it all worked together in the end.

Looking at what was playing, I was intrigued when I saw it was an Italian movie and I was sold when I saw the trailer – it is visually stunning. I especially loved the view of early morning Rome that Jep gives us as he wanders home from his night exploits. Unfortunately, reading the subtitles meant that I didn’t get the full visual impact of the movie. I was paying attention to the words so I could follow the story. Not only that, I was listening to the Italian and comparing it to the English subtitles, trying to match up what I knew. It would be easier, for me, to watch a movie in a language I had no familiarity with than Italian. I plan to see it again, now that I know the story, and really watch the movie instead of reading it.

I share this movie with you today because it made me think. I’m not sure everyone will like the movie – it contains drugs and nudity and a lifestyle most of us wouldn’t choose – but it will make you think. Everyone might take something a little bit different from it, but what I took away was this: We don’t need to seek some grand thing in our lives, some overarching purpose. We need to look for the small moments of beauty and grace that come to us. It is treasuring these small moments, through the course of a life, which add up to the great beauty.

It’s worth a watch. If you go see it, come back and share your thoughts on it here.

January 16, 2014 by Kat

Adding Color (A Mobile Tutorial)

One wonderful thing about being an artist: Adding color to a black and white world. Isn’t that awesome? By the way, that statement is true in more than one sense. In the literal sense, as in my photograph today, as an artist I get to choose to add color to my work or not. I can leave my photograph as a direct interpretation of what I saw or I can change it, just with color.

And in the figurative sense, artists often add color and move outside of the lines of conventional rules of life. Who challenges the cultural norms of how we are supposed to act? To live? Historically, it’s the artists. And that adds color, lots of color, to a world that can otherwise seem black and white. You may or may not like the color, but that color enables our culture to continue to evolve and grow.

But enough of these deep thoughts… how about a mobile tutorial today, hmmm? It’s been a while! I created this piece a couple of days ago and thought it would be a perfect one to share with you, both for the relative simplicity of the steps compared to many of my edits, as well as I can share a new app I’ve been enjoying.

We start with the photograph, captured using ProCamera 7. As I mentioned in my blog post on Tuesday, I was feeling the urge to get out and photograph, and Tuesday morning was wonderfully foggy. I left for work early and spent some time photographing the trees in the fog on campus. There was this little tree with interesting lines I had never noticed before:

The photo looks a bit underexposed, which often happens in fog, even with the exposure control I have in ProCamera 7. The first step of the edit was pulling it into Snapseed, where I increased brightness and used the grunge filter to add color and texture. The nice thing about the way the grunge filter works, the bits of trees along the bottom, which are a bit of a distraction I thought I might have to clone out, end up blurred so there is no cloning work required. Bonus! And this is the first step to adding color, with the purple tint.

Next, the image went into Distressed FX. There are some great filters in this app for adding color! I use it all the time, playing with the different options and seeing which looks best. I love the range of color blends after using Distressed FX:

The next step is running the image from Distressed FX through a couple of other apps. First, the Autopainter app (I use the HD version, on my iPad) using the Benson filter. The great thing about this app is that you can stop it mid-processing to get different effects. I stopped the app at the end of Step 2, before Step 3 where all the detail strokes get added. It gives the image a rougher, more painterly, feel.

I also took the image out of Distressed FX, and ran it through a new app I’ve been playing with called Waterlogue. This simple app gives fantastic watercolor effects! I used the Soaked filter, set to Dark, and turned off the border. Love it!

The final step is blending the two images in Image Blender, to get more softness in the branches and a greater depth of color. I believe I used the “Darken” blending mode.

And that’s it! A very simple edit, but a wonderful result, adding a great depth of color to the black and white world I experienced that morning.

I’m going to be adding something a little extra to these mobile tutorials in the future! A map of the process I used, which I’m calling a “mobile recipe,” so that you can more easily follow the steps and try them out on your images. You can save these recipes and refer to them in the future when you’re looking for a little editing inspiration.

I know I’ve said there will be a Smartphone Art eCourse this year, but writing an eCourse takes a lot of time and energy, and as I move into 2014 I’m just not seeing when I will have that much available time and energy. So instead of a full-on eCourse, online I’ll be continuing these mobile tutorials, and will help you use the resources I already have available to learn more about mobile photography. Stay tuned.

And in person, I’d love to bring the Smartphone Art workshop to your area! This is such a fun class, and absolutely the best way to learn this material is in person. I’ll be adding a second day with more great content and we can make it a weekend thing. Contact me and let’s chat!

January 14, 2014 by Kat

Redefining Creative Achievement

The Exercise in Alignment I shared last week has got me thinking about lots of things. While I’m not surprised that I’ve been challenged to think, because getting into my heart and head this way always generates some good thought, I am surprised at where the thoughts are focused: Achievement. Finally admitting to myself that this is an inherent need I have and accepting it, and not viewing it as a frustration or annoyance or something to be changed about myself, turns out to be kind of important.

Now, you might be thinking, why is having the need to achieve so bad? Why would I even think this way? I think it comes from the sense that I have this driver, Type A side to me that I want to minimize. Not because it’s inherently bad, but maybe because of my approach to it. Up until a few years ago, I seemed to blindly follow an established path to success. I didn’t stop and ask myself what and how I wanted to achieve, I just sort of picked up the achievements laying around. These were achievements left there by people I cared about and respected – colleagues and managers and teachers – but they weren’t defined by me.

So maybe that’s really been the work the last few years — redefining achievement. I thought maybe I was trying to change my need to achieve, but really it’s about changing what, how and for what purpose I’m achieving. That feels about right.

So as I look at this need to achieve the last few days, I’m realizing I’ve picked up goals and requirements on my creative journey, too. I seem to have set up internal frequency limits for a number of things – creating new work, blogging, sharing through social media, hosting online classes, etc. Some of these started as my own internal goals, and some started as things I heard worked for others with similar interests. Regardless of where they came from, when I’m not meeting them, I feel this internal tension. I feel that I’m not achieving.

There is a really good thing that is coming out of this line of thought — I’m recognizing the tension I sometimes feel around achievement, or NOT achieving, is a good indicator that I need to examine my definitions. When I feel this internal stress from “missing” an achievement, I can stop, set things out in front of me, evaluate and start the process of redefining.

I’ve already done that in the last week. I was feeling a tension around creating new photographic work. I really haven’t photographed or edited much in the last month. Even though I’m out of the dark time of December I haven’t been spending my time creating new photographs. But in the process of examining this, I’ve recognized that this is a “false” goal or achievement. I’ve been doing a LOT of creating in January – I’ve been preparing presentations for several photography talks I’m doing at a regional photography conference in the spring – it just isn’t along the lines of new photographic work. So I took some time to consciously redefine, or reinforce, what encompasses “creativity” to me. It’s more than new photographic work, since I have multiple creative outlets. It’s ok to take a step away from one creative endeavor to support another for a while.

It feels good to redefine what leads to creative achievement. I keep the goals I have, creating on a regular basis, but I get to honor other types of creativity as much as my photography. I get to see the creativity of pulling new thoughts together, writing and sharing thoughts with others as just as important and fulfilling as my visual work. I’ll be honest, as much as I’ve done it over the last few years, up to now I haven’t viewed the sharing of ideas and writing on the same level of importance as creating new photographic work. It’s played second fiddle in my goals. It’s time to rearrange that. Make it equal, at least some of the time.

I think there was always this worry, somewhere deep inside my psyche, that if I took a break from one form of creativity I’d never go back. So if I wasn’t really photographing regularly, I’d lose my interest. Maybe this was rooted in my past, where I tried out a lot, and I mean A LOT, of creative activities to see if one would stick before I really fell in love with photography. I think I’m beyond that with photography now, don’t you? It’s going to stick, even if I take a few weeks off. And when I come back, there’s a good chance it will have changed a little bit, because I will have a different perspective from my other creative endeavors.

Even as I write this, I’m feeling the urge to get out and photograph again. Not only for creative achievement, but because creative space has again freed up. Last night, I wrapped up the first draft of the photography talk I’ve been working on, which means that I’ve finished something. Creative achievement? Check.

As I step away from the keyboard and look outside, I’m seeing a whole world of bare trees waiting for me. I think it’s time to go photograph a few.

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