Like, here's my theory of artmaking

I started to respond to Romanlily's comment on yesterday's entry about the Daily blog, and I discovered I had a subject for today. Which is, how much effort does this daily discipline of finding a photo to post actually entail? You know, not much at all. If I haven't done or been anyplace particularly interesting, I have the garden. It's the default subject. I can pop out there, any time of day (usually I'm ready for a break mid to late afternoon from whatever else I've been doing, usually at a computer), in any weather, and find something. For one week, all I did were the tulips. Lately, the Japanese maple out back has been particularly productive. It's a time when I can dive into the Zone, connect with where I'm standing, and find a photograph.

I like to pretend that I'm searching for something that I haven't seen before. It's totally not true, most of the time. I'm going to be sensitive to a particular arrangement of reality that has sparked the impulse in the past, and will probably continue to do so until I exhaust whatever vein I'm mining. You can look through the archive of Daily Photos and see that I have a regular way of solving the box-around-reality issue that I return to again and again. In a way, and especially for us guys who are making a livelihood from our eye, we have only so many pictures in us that we make again and again. We're whacking away at the same problem in the same way, because we know what works. And because we need to keep at it, for whatever reason. The picture's not done.

A measure of creative growth is how that picture we keep whacking away at changes over time. Part of the benefit of the daily discipline is that, hopefully, I'll have to change that picture sooner rather than later, because I'll get bored with it sooner. I'll want more complexity, or my internal life has changed to the point where I need a new image to make sense of it, or maybe it works the other way around and the need to find that new picture is going to make me respond to my life issues in a different way. There are photographs I used to do a lot that I don't need to make anymore. I'm not the same person I was five or ten years ago. It's pointless to parse out which drives what, because of course creativity and growth aren't limited to the output of an expressive pursuit. My life moves forward with greater awareness and depth because at the core of it is this commitment to a creative engagement with my surroundings.

Comments

[romanlily]

It is so good to hear you talk about this, Doug. Thank you. From where I'm standing, you have unique authority on this issue.

This entry of yours is going to get printed out and pasted into my journal for further reflection in the coming weeks and months.

I kept up with the photo-a-day thing throughout 2007. I looked through all of my 365 shots at the end of the year and actually got choked up looking at them. It was a proud moment for me. Some time in February 2008, I ran out of steam. I'm not a professional photographer and I work long hours in some very dreary office buildings. I felt like I was shooting the same thing over and over. I was tired of taking my camera everywhere, and I wanted a break.

Just this week, I started shooting and posting on a daily basis again. I have really missed taking a daily photo. The process of stepping away from the day's labors and actually looking at the world is tremendously therapeutic. Without it, I feel weirdly groundless.

The inner critic will probably always chide me for not taking amazingly inventive and groundbreaking photos every single day. The wiser, calmer part of me is starting to see that, as you say, it's OK to "whack away" at a certain photo for a while, and observe patiently as the quality of the work shifts.

Thanks for your reflections. I really appreciate them.

[romanlily]

You've probably seen this recent essay from Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker. I thought about this little exchange when I read it:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_gladwell