When you’re not sure what to do, don’t you ever wish that God would just come out of the clouds like in Monty Python and just be like “Hey! You! Do [insert thing here]”

Because if that happened, I would just totally be like “Okay!” and do whatever sort of quest he told me to do.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work that way. 

I’m really unsure about a lot of things right now. Long story short, I’m going to be taking a sabbatical from photography and art for a while.

Runes

I had the pleasure of visiting Asheville this past weekend, and in one of the ceramics studios one of the artists had made some runes, which are related to Norse Mythology. You could pick your rune and read your corresponding ‘fortune’ for lack of a better word. 

I picked one called Lagu or Laguz, that looks like this:

It symbolizes water and everything connected to water. So I was reading about how water symbolizes emotions, intuition, the subsconscious, and flow of energy streams. So I was like “Great! This makes me life sound awesome….”

Then I got to the end and realized there was another option for Lagu Reversed.

It then dawned on me that when I picked up the rune, it was facing the opposite direction and I had turned it to identify it.

So… my fortune ACTUALLY meant something along the lines of…

“You are not listening to your own intuitive impulses and missing out on the message. You are trying too hard to please everybody all the time, and have let your own emotional and spiritual well being fall into neglect.”

It also touched upon some other lovely things like…

“a repressed flow, inhibited emotions and drought… stagnation and blocking our creative flow…  being overwhelmed by the flow of events.”

Great. That ‘fortune’ was much more dismal… but also much more realistic. Very on point. This has been an issue in my life recently. Not listening to myself, my judgement, or my intuition. Trying too hard to please other people and being swept away by other peoples’ expectations rather than my own.

I’m not necessarily saying that I believe in the magical power of the runes or that I’ve converted to the Norse religion, but I think it was an interesting thing that happened.

How long does it take to make a piece of art?

I get the feeling that a lot of folks don’t really have a grasp of how much work and how much time goes into making art. If you’re not involved hands-on, or if you’re not that experienced yet,  I can understand how it would be difficult to understand at first. 

If you happen to walk into a gallery, and you see a nice photograph on the wall, it might be pretty easy to think “This is nice, but all you did was go *click*, right? It took all of less than a second to create that photograph… right?”

When looking at the finished product it’s really hard to imagine the creative process that went on behind it. I really think it’s important for the general population to at least have a vague idea of the process, so I’m going to give you an inside view of how art is made, from the conception of the idea to the execution to the final product.

—————————

I consider this to be one of the fastest projects I’ve pulled together. Conceptually, it took about 14 months for the idea for the project to come together. Once I finally had determined the parameters, it took It took 12 days and 98 exposures to end up with a series of 5 photographs that I felt worked together.

It’s five black and white pieces that go together as a series. But how did I end up here?

—————————

January 2011, I started taking double exposures of people and nature. First on Polaroid film, and then on 35mm color film. 

March 2011, I started working on something I’d never truly tried before: landscapes. I focused on night-time landscapes and had a lot of fun.

Summer 2011, I started shooting landscapes with the Holga camera, and started to experiment with panoramic ‘Holgarama’ landscapes that I really liked.

August 2011, I find a roll of expired B&W film, so I go out to a wooded area and shoot a roll of double exposure landscapes in 20 minutes. I got some interesting results, but I sort of dropped the idea and didn’t pick it up again. 

December 2011, While shooting a bunch of pictures, I take this shot that I really like. I keep this one in the back of my mind for a while.

January 2012, While looking at other artist’s work online, I realized that I am captivated once again by black and white, and also by some really stunning black and white landscapes. Here are examples of work that caught my eye and inspired me. (link, link, link)

February 2012, I was working on two different things at once that danced around the idea, but weren’t the idea. On one hand, I was taking color landscapes with the Holga and on the other hand I took some really dreamy-looking black and white landscapes on 35mm that had chapstick on a filter on the lens to make it seem surreal.

March 2012, I realized that I loved the stunning contrast of black and white to make landscapes have more depth, and that the unpredictability of both the Holga camera and multiple exposures could give me that surreal, dream-like quality. So between March 10th and March 21st, I shot 8 rolls of film that totaled to 98 pictures to end up with the final 5 photographs. 

—————————

One of the things to realize is that at no point did I ever know what the final product was going to look like. I never really knew exactly what I was working toward. If at any point in that process someone jumped out of a time machine and said “Stephanie, in March 2012 you’re going to submit a body of work to a gallery. What are they going to look like?” I would have had no clue how they were going to end up. All of the projects I have worked in the past year have contributed to the process, though at the time I had no idea what creative seeds were being planted in my mind. All of the parts of the process, no matter how seemingly unrelated, contributed to the final product. 

It reminds me of a story I love about Pablo Picasso. 

“Picasso was sitting in a Paris café when an admirer went up to him and asked if he would do a quick sketch for him on a paper napkin. Picasso politely agreed, did a quick sketch and handed back the napkin — but not before asking for a rather large amount of money. The admirer was horrified: “How can you ask so much? It only took you a minute to draw this!” “No”, Picasso replied, “It took me 40 years.”

sometimes a lack of money can really suck when you’re an artist.

To create great art, you can’t be afraid to ‘waste’ paper or ‘waste’ paint or ‘waste’ film. To make any sort of progress you have to take a few risks and be willing to make mistakes. You won’t create content if you’re saving your materials for that one great artistic epiphany you’ll never have.

You have to shoot now. You have to shoot a lot.  No matter what, you’re going to have to shoot a thousand bad pictures before you get one good one. So you might as well get them out of your system. 

But then there’s that tricky part where things cost money. I have to be able to shoot as if I have infinite rolls of film when in reality I only have 4 and I can’t afford to buy any more. But I can’t let that show in my pictures. I can’t let each frame be some really safe anal-retentive snapshot and I can’t let a roll of film sit in my camera for 6 months just because I’m trying to be thrifty. 

Gotta keep shooting.