You know what I love?
Blurry photos taken from a moving vehicle.
I’m serious. I love being a passenger with a camera.
I love taking pictures of whatever is outside the window when we are stopped at a light. And while we are in motion. I love the underside of bridges, all covered in graffiti that you can see from train windows. And I even love the flares, sparks and trails of light you catch if it’s dark out, on the highway and you trying to take pictures anyway.
I figure there have to be more people out there who also love blurry (and non-blurry) passenger photos. I searched around on flickr and found some beautiful photos, but no groups that specifically noted photos were taken as a passenger in a car, train, boat or aircraft.
So I started my own tumblr.
the Passenger Project
If you want to participate, please send photos or links to photos, your name and the location, date and any other details you want in the caption to:
thepassengerproject@gmail.com
or if you are on tumblr, go ahead and submit something! and I will post or link it up.
OK, so I’m exaggerating a bit. It didn’t save my life. However, I was in a serious rut. I finally moved to a new house with plenty of room for my projects and I was doing nothing. I think it’s like when you keep a small animal in a cage for a long time and they have ideas and instincts for getting out, but then you open the door and they sit in the cage and stare at you – yeah… my creativity apparently is like a hamster. This is what I’m saying.
So I have felt stuck. I poured all my creativity into renovating and decorating the house. (And that was fun!) And then I kept thinking “Now What?” and nothing was happening. I missed the days when I would get entranced in painting for days, using ALL my free time to complete a project and then have to stop and write down all my ideas for new projects that would just come to me.
Thing is, any creative process is a practice. It’s something you commit to opening yourself up for by doing. It’s like meditation, you can only “get it” by doing it and the more you do it, the more it makes sense. So I started drawing again, hoping something would happen and I felt a little better. Finally, I did what I should have done a long time ago – I stopped thinking about the “hows” of it all and started thinking of some “whys”. I realized I needed a project with a purpose other than for me to get back to where I once was. So I went on the internet and went to the website of some of the people who inspire me and are doing great work. And I played the blog-follow game – where you keep bouncing from blog to blog from links of people/references you may not know – until I got to something that sparked.
It didn’t take long. I had found another artist that was participating in a project with the Art House Co-op in Atlanta Georgia. The Art House does these massive projects involving artists from all over the country – and you can just sign up! I looked at their upcoming projects and saw The Great Arthouse Print Exchange. Remembering how much I used to love printing (and I’m talking about 8 years ago, so “rusty” is too kind a word), I signed up right away. I ordered the supplies I would need (lino block printing is very affordable, thankfully) and got to work about a week later. And Darcy was super-supportive (and always is). She started printing with me. (She’s crazy good at it, too!) Darcy wants me to be spending my time working on my goals and I finally feel like I’m able to be really pursuing those goals, so her sacrifices in our life together are getting paid back in a way. She doesn’t ask me to work more hours at a higher-paying day job, because she knows I want to be doing this and that’s awesome.
Now of course, it didn’t magically get all better. My first prints were not exactly what I wanted, but I was pleased overall. And it’s not like I went from no creative activity to a gallery show in a few weeks. That was never the point.
The point was awakening something and I did, I got it back. This project led to more projects – so many that I don’t actually have time to work on them all – and that is a very good thing. I wake up in the morning and can’t wait to work on one of my projects. Sitting at the beach or at the coffeehouse, I have my journal, my notebook, my sketchbook, the laptop and I am working on one of my projects. At dayjob, I daydream about one of my projects. This is my life in its best possible day-to-day pattern. This is the life I want to be living.
These are the prints that got me here:
I took these pictures during the printing process – in my kitchen. I can’t wait to have a studio set-up. I love printing in my kitchen, but I’m still finding little inky pawprints on our butcher block table (and chairs, and the floor… and in other rooms). Because cats are always most interested in whatever you are doing that you don’t wish to involve them in. (And you can’t even get mad, because cats with little inky paws are so damn cute!)
Lately I feel like I have very little time. I’m starting to figure out that part of the reason why is that…
I have an ENORMOUS list of blogs and websites that I want to be reading ALL the time.
I have a stack of magazines from this month and last month that I haven’t seemed to ever feel like sitting down and reading through (and now that I’m without subway rides, I can’t do that while commuting).
I have three library books that are calling my name every evening.
I only watch about 3 television shows regularly and even those feel like a time commitment that pulls on me (when I just want to be entertained).
And I want to be writing, drawing, doing yoga, gardening, organizing my life, unpacking the rest of our boxes, decorating our house, having cooking adventures, taking more walks, going to the beach, painting, renovating my studio, seeing good films, knitting and beginning to meditate again…
Oh and blogging with actual substance, on here, more often. Tonight I spent a long time multitasking by trying to put up my entire blogroll while Top Chef was on. I didn’t really finish, but the number of links I got up and the list of links I still wanted to brought on this ranty to-do list. Because I haven’t read half of them in nearly long enough. Even though I enjoy and recommend ALL of them. bah!
And I work too.
Ok. I’ll stop whining now. This is the good kind of busy. My life is filled with mostly “the good” stuff. I make choices, like everyone. I just need to find a way to prioritize better and get -really- organized and settled.
It probably won’t happen. It will be a process. But I’ll keep working on it.
