new work & creating creative cycles

This is one of my new photographs. I haven't been posting many of them here, sorry! I have plans of sharing more...

Lately I have been achieving this perfect balance of making new work and being inspired to make more new work. I don't always magically feel this way, and in fact, when I don't, I often beat myself up about it. After so many years of studying art making, you would think that staying in a cycle of creating things all the time would be easy...right? Maybe it is for some people, but I think for most of us it takes a little conscious effort to keep it up.

What do you do to keep up your momentum and find inspiration? Here's what I have been doing lately:

- I write down EVERY single idea I have that could potentially relate to my art. The ideas I later find unworthy still usually manage to evolve into something else that I can use. I have a composition book and a sketchbook and I try to keep at least one of them with me at all times. Ideas often come to me suddenly, and I dare say many of them would leave just as suddenly if I didn't write them down!

- I look at other art, but not too much. I look at just enough, until I feel this impulse to create, but not so much that I feel an impulse to imitate. Leave room for your own ideas to develop! But don't try to create in a vacuum where you never ever look at the work of others. I also try to look at a mix of emerging and established artists. It can be daunting to only look at well-known people in your creative field.

- I make something every day (it can be something really small, like a half hour drawing, or documentary photographs of my garden) and I make something towards my serious body of work every week*--even if I don't know where it's going, or I have a million excuses, or I think it's going to turn out badly. It can be tempting to keep on planning, or make just one more trip to the store to get supplies, or do more research, but the bottom line is that you just need to get in there and create something! Making small things every day even on days when I am not shooting my serious work helps me keep up the motion of creating. It is also a good exercise that helps me remember how fun making art is. I would recommend that no one limit themselves only to serious work. You also never know what will become of your side projects.

*I'm always envious of my artist friends who have processes that allow them to be in their studios every day creating work piece by piece! As a photographer, I feel my process is a little different. I do assemble my photographs piece by piece but personally I don't feel I have "created" anything until I press the shutter release button! Others may feel differently, but with this sentence what I meant was actually getting to that final point of shooting a photograph.

How do you keep your cycle of creativity going? Does it come naturally for you or do you find it to be a bit of work?

Next time I will share what things I find distract me from my work and how I am aiming to limit those!

new work: give and take

This is from a new narrative-type piece I have been working on, Give and Take. I have actually been making a lot of new work lately and am really thrilled about all of it. I had a good critique tonight which is always nice. I've been reading The Artist's Way (cheating...it's a 12-week book but I am taking it at my own, much slower pace) at the suggestion of Erika who writes the blog A Tiny Rocket. Reading this book and doing some of the activities in it have been helping with my "artist's block" which I definitely felt all summer. I don't want to jinx it by saying too much, but right now I have more ideas than I have time to make! Definitely a good thing. More updates on the new work soon...this is just one of many.

new work: my mother's apron

I'm not ready to reveal all of the pieces of this yet, but here is one photograph I took last week and the rough draft of the story that goes with it...more to come...

My mother has an apron. Its fabric is a rosy shade of pink, printed with tiny, red flowers, and trimmed in a matching red bias tape. The tiny stitches are impeccable, made with a sewing machine but without question, guided by a steady, skilled hand. My mother wears this apron while she cooks.

When it’s not being worn, the apron is folded neatly and laid to rest in the kitchen drawer which is home also to potholders and trivets, birthday candles and batteries--kitchen drawers tend contain the oddest of collections.

She made the apron herself, my mother did. She made it in her high school home economics class. Forty-six years old my mother is and the only apron she owns and uses is the one she made thirty years ago which, aside from a few minor stains, is still in perfect condition, and could not display better craftsmanship even after all of these years of sewing experience.

When I was fifteen, my mother and grandmother taught me to sew. I see it as a rite of passage in my family. I want to be as skilled of a seamstress as they are, but even after ten years of experience and a few formal sewing classes, I fear I can never be their equal with a needle and thread. I haven’t an apron of my own perfect craftsmanship. I haven’t an apron of my own craftsmanship at all.

Today I will bring out my sewing machine. Today I will sew my first apron.

And some informal thoughts about the objects in this series:

Why do the people in my photographs wear flower masks? Why do I use floral print?

I think faux flowers and printed images of flowers are the perfect representation of decoration. If you take them away, everything still functions, but still, something is lost. We don’t need floral wallpaper or floral sheets in our homes, we can have the plainest walls and the plainest sheets and the plainest things, and their function remains the same. The flowers are just decorations. I think that’s the way some people feel about many of the skills people use in the home. Specifically, I’m referring to women, because as a woman those are the skills that were passed down to me and what I know best. Surely there’s a different but similar set of skills that have been nearly lost among men. Maybe I’ll get into that in the future. But for now this is about me, and I’m a woman. We no longer really need to sew our own clothes. It takes ages to sew clothing and doesn’t really save money most of the time. We don’t need to mend things, because buying a brand new replacement doesn’t cost us much. We don’t need to cook. We could go out to eat, or buy prepared meals at the supermarket. We don’t need to knit or grow a garden or so many other things. Yet many people today are learning these skills and putting them to use, including myself. I find this fascinating, why we would want so badly to be able to create all of these things by hand when we could so easily buy them. We could spend all of the time we save not making things and put it to good use doing something exciting. I guess I just don’t see most people around me doing many exciting things with all of that free time. For me making these things is about preserving something which I feel is vital. I feel that if people stopped making things by hand altogether, as a culture we would lose something great and important. So that’s what I mean by decoration. It’s not out of necessity that I like to sew or cook or all of those other things I mentioned. Some would say it’s just a hobby. For fun. Playing house. It’s decoration. Not important. Dispensable. Those are their opinions. But I would tend to disagree. The masks talk about women’s work in the home being undervalued, as if it’s just decoration. But I think there’s something to this work that we don’t give enough attention.