REHAB WALLS - a step forward
Hello! I just finished another project. It rides the heels of my Home Project and is another, if not more, important piece of art for me. I am still a little surprised at myself that I even put it in such a public space. But such is the growth I am learning to let into my life right now. A year ago I would’ve never put a piece online like that. I was afraid of myself, afraid of how it is perceived by others, and afraid of how it would make others perceive me. At the end of the day though, it is me, the whole me, the real me, not the me that was tucked away for so long, hiding. Anyway, it is scary to be vulnerable, and I am trying to be more, here, in my relationships, and with myself most importantly.
These past two projects are a step toward finding that home more and more. And how this hard and scary process has torn me down to the bare sapling under the old overgrown, dying branches covering me up. I will be making a lot of art about this. I find it the easiest way for me to process the things that make me build up the tough twiggy shell that had been keeping the sapling so safe, but now is keeping it from growing, from getting the light it needs. I also want to take a quick moment to say that I do not want these projects (ones in the future as well) to be taken as a romanticization of addiction, mental health, or anything like that. It is my best way of finding myself through these struggles.
Lastly, I am trying to gather some of my most meaningful projects up and curate them into a magazine. This be, if it works out well, something I want to make available to buy. I will try my best to keep the price as low as possible to make it as accessible as possible. So yeah, excited for that, but it is a slow process and I will post the project when it comes!
Ohh and PS if you happen to see this, you can buy prints from this website by contacting me! Go to the more page to see less artsy photos of nature and other cool things!
A fun little experimental selection that felt fitting for this post:
the home project + more!
Hii! It’s been a while! A lot has happened, as well as a lot of art! I will probably make a more detailed update post when I finish the big project that I am working on. But for now, this is a little project if finished right before the new year. I never really came up with a good title, because titles are hard, it has been one of the most meaningful and special small projects I have made in a while! You may have seen it on the instagram already but I want to put it here now that I am feeling a bit more able to put my time into arting! Or at least a bit more time to publish my arting. So here it is:
I don’t know how I feel about artist statements, is it the artists responsibility to make a statement of intention or meaning? Or even a description? Or is it just the audience’s responsibility to interpret, make meaning, and see it for themselves? I have no idea… But I do think that I want to add a few words about what it means to me.
This project was a few months in the making and was constantly on my mind the whole time. I made all of these images in the fall of last year (2023) back home in silverton. I had just gotten back from a summer in Idaho raft guiding and a Grand Canyon trip in September to cap it all off. It was a relatively short stay back home, only a week and a half, but was very insightful. I realized that I hadn’t felt at home in my old house, and in the place I still called my home for a while. Not only that, but I hadn’t felt at home in myself for even longer. It has been, and very much still is, my journey of finding this home inside for the past almost two years, and even beyond. I have been on that rollercoaster without a break since. It has completely broken me (to be explored later), but in the process has revealed the home inside and the security, joy, and contentment that comes from finding this. I have a ways to go, but now finally have more direction. Yay!
On that note I also want to include a quick afternoon project I whipped up on Christmas day. It tracks very well with this vein of thought and is another recent favorite, and can be found pinned to the top of my instagram.
I am excited to share more hopefully soon (you never know…) and put out a project I am really proud of. Lastly, I am also excited to see where my art takes me and how my style changes and morphs through the next bit. It has already changed a lot :)
Oh! Lastly, lastly, I may make a more convential photo page for the popular outdoors photos that I have made and that are gaining popularity in a few places as prints… See ya!
intuition and art
Intuition…. I feel like I am surrounded by this word, in a probably good way but nonetheless. And a place it’s been coming up is art. Of course! I first started thinking about art and intuition in May 2022. I watched a Todd Hido lecture then and he talked about his process and the role intuition plays. I even wrote about that lecture before, May 24, 2022, but regarding narrative in photography/art. I recall wanting to write this but obviously, it wasn’t the time yet… And now is apparently.
This winter I quietly finished a project that was very much an out-of-the-blue thing, that has turned out to be one of my favorites, as well as one of my most complete. In late January, I had three extra days off surrounding my weekend so I decided to fly to Portland and vacation. It was dual purpose, one of my favorite bands was on a very rare tour, stopping there, and I could relax away from the snow and mountains to just art for the weekend. This project was birthed from that.
Stills from an Unmade Film is a two-piece project, with a 52-second video and a series of photos. Both the video and photos have a 2.37:1 aspect ratio, the same ratio as many movies. I also tried to make the editing look like a film, not just digital. But those are just some of the technical parts of the projects I did. We are here to talk about intuition.
Through my adventures about the city of Portland, I had my camera with me as much as possible and took as many photos as possible. This enabled me to follow my intuition day and night in what I captured, being spontaneous and constant in my compositions. I’ll revisit that last statement shortly. But in Todd Hido's lecture, there was a part when he was talking about a photograph from his third monograph, Roaming, I believe, and how intuition played such a huge role in his work. It was one of the forces that drove him to decide when to press the shutter and how to compose the image. In another part of the lecture, he connects the idea of having media constantly surrounding him to its influence on his work because of its effect of sinking in and being used subconsciously in creating his own art. We know that intuition is very reliant on pattern recognition and matching to deliver judgments in the moment, without conscious deliberation, by using long-term memory and present senses to identify and compare similar situations. By doing this, our brain has a lot more access to stored memory, impressions, emotions, and judgments about previous situations. And by surrounding yourself with photographs/art, and by taking photographs/making art, you get, at least I believe, better at using your intuition.
So by keeping my camera with me the entire trip, taking photos a ton, as well as editing old photos, looking at art books, and staying curious (a topic for another day), I created a space where using my intuition to make art was a lot more open and accessible. Compositions arose from street corners on a walk. Lighting spilled into the train window at the right moment, lifting my camera to my eye without much thought. As I said above, I could be spontaneous and constant in my photos. This cultivated a style of movement, continuity, and ease in the photos. This is what tied the photos to the idea of a film for me. I don’t know what film these photos were from, but they were just stills in a sea of moments in a life. And lastly, I liked having the train video to help bring in the idea of a film, but unlike the photos that exhibited motion and liveliness, the film is very static. Not literally, there is actual movement the whole time, I was on a train. But the framing and subject is very static, the editing is kinda flat, an attempt to role reverse the still and motion pictures. All of this arising very much in the moment, with no part of this project being planned or premeditated. I actually almost entirely sequenced and assembled the project after I had got home, not realizing the potential of the photos until then.
So it goes, some of the best work is semi-accidental, creating an artwork more honest and true than many of my premeditated and carefully planned ideas. I have since made intuition a huge part of my workflow, rarely ever planning a shoot and using my phone camera more often. And because of this, my work has also shifted a bit in style, feeling more honest in almost every facet. But that is another post as well. Anyways, thanks for reading the ramble, enjoy the photos, and look forward to more!
Changin' Shit Up!
Hi.
Been a sec, I had to cocoon for a bit to figure some things out. And I still am of course!, but I am starting to un-cocoon if you will. So naturally, my art has been changing too. I dove into clothes, textile/fiber art, and fashion a bit and may share that at some point. Not sure when. I have also been doing a bit more film and want to incorporate it into photo-based projects, such as stills from an unmade film (<—click to check out), and form a more mixed-media style, but those are just some thoughts right now. We’ll see where my life takes my art…
So that’s a quick art update, and here’s a quick website update. I have changed it around drastically because I wanted to and it fits a vibe better… Anyways, I like the word, deliquescent’ because:
del·i·ques·cent - adjective
/ˌdeləˈkwes(ə)nt/
“becoming liquid, or having a tendency to become liquid.”
So yeah that’s a rad word. To become liquid. so sick. So I changed the whole thing in celebration of the word deliquescent. And also it’s also designed around my newest project (and coolest), stills from an unmade film; lots of dark to immerse in the cinema-like images, and offsetting and slightly out-of-place lavender text to add to the bold look, but reduces the extreme contrast of white on black. Enjoy, it took a long time to make…
And lastly, a quick life update ~screams!~ This past summer, I started to figure out who I was for real, and my art probably is reflective, as was my art in BZN two years ago. Then I stopped arting as much because I started a job ski patrolling, I didn’t know who I was, and life got hard. But over all that time, I rediscovered that I am queer (not straight; look it up.) and trans nonbinary (neither of the ‘two’ genders; look it up.). And this is great because I am way more me, creative, and just amazing now. :) My art will be greatly influenced by this too. I strive to be a representation of nonbinary and queer people in art, in the outdoors, and in aviation. But one at a time… I am starting with art and fashion. So this is the real me and my art! Thanks for listening!
Watching Wind (+ some more blurry photos)
This post is from Late August, but I never posted it fully. Warning, there may be typos! And lastly, I’m making more things…
These are hard to keep up with on the side…. But I want to put out two little threads of technique that I have been working with and enjoying thoroughly. Art has, for a while, been a tool of expression for me. An outlet unlike anything else for the most part. My photography is one of the only forms of art I regularly ‘share; with the world. Working within that medium, sometimes I struggle to fully, or even partially, capture or convey the emotion or feeling I am trying to get express. The photos from the ongoing two series I have been collecting have been working better than some of my previous styles in this aspect. Both incorporate blur and motion. Okay, probably easier to show than tell…
Here is the first series in progress, Watching Wind, or something like that. As you can see the photos are still untitled. Make sure to click on the photos to view them full screen and get all the details. Anyways, I started with this idea by accident, like all good art, back in 2020 in the ‘intro to photography class. I was doing one-minute exposures of trees in the wind and one shot, in particular, was a standout because of the balance between motion and blur, and detail so the viewer was still somewhat oriented. Then, just a few days ago laying watching the leaves, I wanted to capture the motion of the wind, I thought back to the photo I made two years ago, then had an idea. Photo stacking is a technique you can use with digital images to create the effect of a long exposure even in well-lit situations.
These are 30-50 images each, all hand-held, that were stacked and aligned in photoshop, then lightly edited. The software does a remarkable job of aligning the image so the parts that didn’t move over the duration of the series are relatively crisp, while the blowing leaves are blurred and in motion. It has been very fun to experiment with and see the results, especially since all of these were done with my phone camera out on walks or in the yard.
So that’s the technical ramble, but it helps explain my process, which is something I want to do here so I can keep a record of my evolution over time as an artist. The next series is far more simplistic in the way of the process. It requires darkness, some lights, ~1-2 second shutter speed, and just the right amount of unsteadiness. All the images are purposely blurred with movement, except one, with is blurred with a defocused look instead, but I’m lumping it in here because it has a similar feel.
Here is the first image. It, like all of its peers, is untitled for now. This image also stands out as the only shot done in portrait orientation. Throughout the series, I have also pushed the editing boundaries a bit too. I have accentuated the colors of the images to strengthen the feel of liminality and slight otherworldly-ness, along with the blurred, off-kilter view. Most of the other ones, like this photo, is not so blurry that you can’t tell what the image is off, but enough to not be able to pick out fine details. Like in a dream, or while running from something, or when you are very tired, etc. I love how, for me, these deliver a sense of discomfort, maybe some urgency, disorientation, or general unease.
While that is a list of primarily negative things, since when did art need to be pretty? Isn’t the best work of art ones that break out of the reaffirmation of your biases and beliefs? Art that makes the viewer uncomfortable, and can push them to look at the world differently, is the most important art in my opinion. I don’t think that these images necessarily do that entirely, but for me, they are expressing a set of feelings through artistic and technical practices in a way that I am very happy with.