WIP.CRACKER

I have for as long as I have remembered, experienced the creative urge. I have spent most of my life ignoring, squashing, or running from the same. Yet I have also consistently dabbled in one form or creative expression or another: cartooning, writing, sculpting, painting, metalwork, interior design, urban planning. It's just that whenever my efforts in that form threatened to move from easy execution to difficult, I stopped.

Photography has stuck, or rather, I've devoted myself to it, drawn the line in the sand. So now, when it goes from easy to difficult, I don't stop, I just slow to a crawl.

My self-promotion machine is getting built, it's just really slowly. I assembled my portfolio images in May, and the physical book will likely be done in January. I initiated a logo redesign in March and it was finished in August. I did a magazine review to find targets about three months ago and have not revisited it. Yet.

Technically-speaking, the last year has seen a lot of improvement. A friend of mine told me I've spent the last year 'setting up still life problems and solving them'. I have really tightened up my techniques, and as well I have improved my gear.

Talking last night with my lovely and smart girlfriend, I was saying that it feels like I've moved further away from the conceptual side of things, which is what I truly love, in favor of the technical side, for which my love is a little fleeting. She said maybe what I really want to be is an art director, and it really touched something in me, stopped something.

But I don't want to change forms again. I lose too much each time I do. And after thinking about it, it seems that really good art directors are a little bit photographers, and really good photographers are a little bit art directors. Each needs to be able to communicate, anticipate, support, reach a common ground.

So I think I'll just keep on.