Diary of an Emerging Artist

Chapter One

Pickle in the middle

After thirty-one years of teaching others how to create art, I’m concentrating on making art of my own. In public education there is no requirement for faculty to publish or produce, no expectation of direct professional performance outside of the classroom. Being the lead in a yearlong revolving harmonica band is work enough. So now I’m 67- soon to turn 68, and for the first time since my mid-thirties, I’m an emerging artist, wondering who I am, what I am, and what my art is about- its point and purpose.

To date:

Who-    aging, educated, inciteful, curious still, hopeful.

·What (1)- photographer by trade, frustrated painter, decent writer

What (2)- images/artworks that combine elements of photography and painting, depictions of the passage of time, the act of aging, depictions of the nature of memories and all its           misinterpretations

Photographs as not necessarily an endpoint, but instead a scaffold to which to support a bigger build.

So…

Just like every story I’ve ever told this one begins in the middle, or more correctly, the middle of the beginning. The beginning of the beginning begins early in 2017. A fellow art faculty at the junior college where I teach as an adjunct exhibited two heavily altered photographs at that year’s faculty exhibit. They were extraordinary- hugely drawn upon and colored with crayon and charcoal, obliterating the image underneath. The gallery’s director was less impressed, but I was devastated. How could so much passion and energy be available to some- but slide by others like a stranger in a crowd? How had I never seen that possibility?

For a full eighteen months after I courted that muse and caught glimpses here and there. I drew and painted on my photos. I learned to paint still life with cold wax medium- I made 6x6 sketches and 48x48 cradled panel abstracts with media I invented. All told I had twenty-three finished, exhibitable works of photography, painting, and mixed media. It was the most productive period of my artistic career in thirty years. I didn’t find my muse, I built it.

Then in 2019, I retired.