It’s official, it’s the first day of winter in Montana, and I woke up this morning to see the trees above my bed, through the skylights covered in a blanket of white snow. To me this signifies the turn of the season as this also signifies the turning point of another phase of my life and existence as an artist. The chosen sampling of galleries for the website were finished last night and many of the bugs worked out through out the day so it will be officially up and running tomorrow morning. I am cleaning up link adding articles, and getting the blog transferred over today. Wow what a trip this has been!!!!! A peaceful calm is settling into my body this morning as I ride the edge of nervous energy of anticipation. I remember this feeling well from my days of working in the theater. It’s the dress rehearsal right before the show opens, when you know everything is in place and you are ready for the audience to see the production and you are just tweaking and refining the details. In a sense my entire life has been a production of some sort. As a kid I was always producing something. I think back to my brothers and cousins and all those shows I made them create in the barnyard on summer eves when we were little kids, they some how always believed in my crazy ideas and followed my strange endeavors. Will I always be this creative? Probably so, organizing the senior citizens in what ever center I end up in our scooter carts creating some sort of show.
I finally got a good night’s sleep last night and sleep in this morning. The truth is I feel like I could sleep for a week.
It’s game day in Missoula and I am still not feeling too well from the nasal thing that I have been fighting all week and so I have opted to stay home and watch the game on television, bummer. Though today’s image isn’t naked, I have to be with the Montana Grizzles in spirit so I am posting some images I took a few weeks back so I can feel like I can be there in spirit. Now that I think about it I feel like the Griz players about to emerge into the arena through the cloud of smoke to a stadium of avid and adorning fans. GO GRIZ!!!!!
The good news is I am catching up with myself and getting all the stuff done around the house that I have been neglecting for the past week.
It seems far easier to be creative then it is to actually market or sell your creativity. This is becoming the lesson of this week. This is the greatest leap in my creative endeavor so far since this project began. I think back to the beginning of when I was first getting into photography and the greatest hurdle was just getting my self to the creative table. The beginning of a creative existence is filled with self-doubt and anxieties surrounding whether we are good enough or even talented enough to create. It happens in baby steps. For me doing “The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity” a 12-week program by Julia Cameron which created that leap in my head that said it was OK to be an artist and the acceptance of myself as a creative being. With each success your confidence grows. The consistence of creating good stuff begins to outweigh the mistakes and, believe me there are lots of mistakes, you reach a tipping point where you become a master of your craft and nearly everything you work on is at least interesting. But it is a long voyage of forcing yourself to the creative process that continually nudged your way to that point of this clarity. The next hurdle seems to be exposing what you create and putting yourself out there for judgment and criticism. Of course this has been my greatest obstacle because of what it is I want to do and the acceptability of it in the culture I live. The first Friday evening of every month all the galleries in Missoula have a gallery walk where everyone is open late and you can wander from shop to shop and see all the new work that is up for the month. It has been a huge success in Missoula because they typically entice you in with wine, beer or some sort of edible treat. But these shows mostly only contain images of western themes or landscapes, the usual sort of paint pealing off the old barn sort of work. If I where to display my sort of imagery I am afraid I would create a scandal sort of thing and my studio would possibly be fire bombed. So this has become a huge leap in my own creative acceptance. The next phase that I feel I am on the verge of overcoming is creating a presence. This is the culmination of the process of this year and the process of search for a place. This phase has been far more creative and certainly more work then the process of creating art where the process of art began. Along each step there is a huge growth and a better understanding of myself and the things that seemed insurmountable in the beginning are now trivial in the end. Why does it take most of us our entire lives to become what it is we desire or aspire to become? Is it that we just don’t know the pathway? Does it become a battle with our own self-doubt? I began this year asking the question from many of my artist friends “Are we born to be artists or is it something we learn?” I now see what a tremendous amount of time and perseverance it takes to create anything. But so many of us put that amount of time and effect into things we are apathetic toward as a means to an end, just to make a living. When the real question becomes what is it that really satisfies and makes us happy. I know most of my life has been lived in uncertainty. But I have had this impulse all of my remembered existence and somehow at this stage it all seems worthwhile.
I have been battling a sinus infection all week and slept in this morning. I think we all have been pushing a bit too hard on the web project to get it up by tomorrow and are running into issues as we have been testing it that need to be resolved. At this moment I am utterly exhausted and need to take a break. We all need a break. I have to take some time off today to recover myself physically, mentally and emotionally. Sorry to announce that we will have to push the launch date back to next weekend. I am a bit disappointed to have to do this because I am generally a person who follows through with something when he says he will do it and bust my butt to make it happen when it needs to happen. But right now with my head I can no longer even think clearly and need the break. It is another wondrous fall day here in Montana and I am getting outside to enjoy the fresh air and clear my head.
On website overload today trying to get everything ready for the Friday launch of the new site. So far it is all going well, though it is taking a lot of time to get everything functional. Lots of details as it feels we are working around the clock to make it happen. Thor and Danny have been staying here at the studio the last couple of nights as we all work from three computers on separate areas of the project. I can’t seem to sleep and worked until 3 in the morning, cleaning things up. The internal structure is becoming far more complicated then I originally anticipated, but the surface will seem simple and easy. Working in this new medium that has not been completely developed yet makes us have to adapt to make it interchangeable and adds to the complications. I keep wondering what on earth have I gotten myself in for. Thor seems like he is on the edge of burn out and I worry about him a lot as he works through the galleries. Glenn just takes on logistical things and seems to solve those sorts of issues I don’t have the patience to work. I am trying to work on linkage and overall look of the site. We are so close and it may be a bit rough the first couple of days. The weather has turned nice again and I keep looking outside thinking I wish I were out there enjoying these last days of fall.
The coldness is beginning to set in, which indicates that I am coming full circle on the project. It began in the dead of winter and now, as I begin to feel winter come upon me, I realize this project has followed me through a complete cycle of my life. Yesterday I hit three hundred posts through the process of a year. I am beginning to look back through all I have written and created over those three hundred days, for some of the most interesting points to start to somehow work them into the new website. Although I was not sure where I was going in the beginning with this project, I knew I really wanted to go there. Now the goal seems clear and vividly laid out before me. I have never had such clarity in my life. The year began with so much doubt and a real fear of becoming lost or fading into oblivion – the fear of a man dying without ever having accomplished his greatest dream. This project has become the journal of that dream. The daily struggle and exploration in finding myself and the discovery of light, beauty, desire and art. What seemed a daunting task in the beginning now seems to have become a way of existence. I honestly didn’t think I would make it this far. I kind of expected I would end the year in disappointment, having realized what a failure my life had become, and would somehow have to jump off the Madison Street bridge into the cold icy waters in the middle of a cold winter night. But the opposite has now happened. Through the course of this year I have mended all the old wounds and have examined my life in such detail – some of it interesting, some not. I have come to the conclusion that what I have lived and experienced is relatable to so many others I have encountered along the way. I have confronted and made sense of all the nonsense of life amongst the shadows. The new website is really a gift to others who have helped me along this journey. It becomes not just a look at myself, but an examination for others who also live creative lives of desperation. To live in our time and our culture and become a creative soul seems daunting if not near impossible. It seems the world is stacked against us. I am an older man and do not seek fame or glory at this stage in my life, but look for relevance and meaning that has allowed me to live such a daunting existence. Today I feel I’ve crossed into a new arena of my life – one that is filled with possibility and hope and yes, desire. I guess it could be “It’s A Wonderful Life” syndrome – being able to see beyond oneself and find what is truly remarkable about one’s seemingly meager existence. Does everyone look back and say this is the sum of what I have become? I know the struggle is the same for all of us. I guess this is why I am so drawn to art, literature, movies and photography. I see that my seemingly rough life of living on the outside has been extraordinary and filled with a rich wonder. Today I feel lucky.
