May (4) Photo a Day

May 4: Fun!

Many, many thanks to Sean Kramer (my Pookie Bear!) for this shot.  I know, I know… I’m supposed to be shooting the photos.  But we collaborated!  That counts for something, right?!  Yeah, go with that.

See the list of daily photo prompts HERE.

Challenge Accepted

My buddy Roxy over at grrfeisty.com Instagrammed about a May Photo a Day Challenge, and I’m thinkin’ I’m gonna give it the ‘ol college try.  It’s a photo a day for a month.  I can do this!  I mean, I know I have the attention span of a goldfish and all (one lap around the bowl!), but it’s ONE PHOTO A DAY.  How lazy can a person be, amiright?

The Challenge

And away we go!

May 1: Peace

I wanted to majorly go overboard in an obnoxiously obvious way with this one.  Vintage film style, doodled peace symbol, throwing the peace sign… If only I had a headband…

Therapy

I’ve had A LOT going on with my back pain: Finally getting to a diagnosis and undergoing a procedure to (hopefully) fix my Piriformis Syndrome.  I’ll get into all that later.  But since my procedure, I’ve been laid up at home in a lot of pain going through the recovery process.  It’s getting better and better each day but my activity levels are majorly limited.  It’s making me stir-crazy and damn near bat-shit-insane.  My body is anxious for activity and I’m not allowed to… activate.

Whatever, you know what I mean.

So when I got home from work today I pulled out my sketchbook and hit “play” on the new Alex Clare album, “The Lateness of the Hour.”  This is where it drove me:

I have some great ideas about where to take this sketch and I can’t wait to throw them all down on canvas… Which will be a while since I can’t bend, stoop, blah, blah, OhMyGodThisSucks, blah.  But thank the baby Jesus for art.  I couldn’t stay sane without it.

The Process

Of an artist interpreting lines, layers, texture, geometry, nature, form, light, shadows, mood, feeling, emotions, intention, and chance into a sketch.  Which may or may not be further translated into a cohesive art piece.  When I look at the world, my brain is a continuously circulating reel of images that I’m constantly piecing together.  Eventually a story emerges much like a train of thought and what sticks with me the most are the transitions between the images, not the images themselves.  I become obsessed with how these images (captured or remembered) relate to one another beyond their natural timeline of happenstance.  And it makes me wonder how that string of events could visually translate.  If it would even make sense.  Or rather, how to make it make sense.  Like taking snapshots from your brain, laying them out on the floor in a pile, picking out the ones that “fit” and sewing them back together with one hand while the other hand creates new images to be sewn into the gaps.