But even more importantly, I will tell you what I'm not gonna do, and that is I AM NOT GONNA COUNT UP. Tempting as it is. There are so many ways to keep track of a life. Parents will you that knowing if an event occurred pre-child or post child is a big indicator. Once the children start arriving keeping track of events by knowing your child's age at the time is huge. Josh was 6 months old on 9/11. Not that I am trying to be a Debbie Downer here, but holding his sweet chubby little life filled body while standing in front of my family room television watching the horror unfold will be forever etched into my memory. I'll probably be chatting about that say and the baby in my arms until I am in the nursing home and forget which planet I am on. (Please let it be earth, space exploration is NOT my thing)
The only pre- and post graduate school counting I plan on doing is racking up my success as a fine art photographer, which will all start happening now, as someone who lived to tell about it! But I won't tell you how many days past graduation I am, that seems like a really weird thing do, as opposed to how great it felt to count down to graduation. My next big effort is going to be two fold. 1. I am going to review all of my work from this past year and print up some work prints of the stronger work and 2. I am going to see if the NY editor can spend some time with me, helping me see if I do indeed have more than book completed or what I need to do to to polish off what I have already started. (Even though there is a part of my brain wondering if I will ever be "finished") I am currently thinking of the rest of my life as one super long nature project with some not nature stuff thrown in.
I didn't get to be alone in my house until yesterday afternoon and now I am just wiped out. One of the boys from school came and spent the night with his mom and girlfriend. Only knowing him from critiques, it was interesting to see him in another light. I have to admit he was so sweet and charming to me, being helpful with cooking and clean up and also nice to his mom (scoring big points!) and girlfriend (score again!) that I feel like I know an entirely different person. When we are in school we are so self absorbed because we are being forced to dig around in the depths of our own emotional septic tanks that it is easy to forget that there is a lot to us that has nothing to do with being an artist. I should have invited everyone over with their families before school started just to understand them all better.
One young man's mother suggested I watch a Jennifer Lawrence movie because it would inform my work. I think the movie she was thinking about was Winter's Bone. I watched it today. Wish I could tell the mom I took her advice. She said it would inform my work. Other than the pallette of the entire movie I have no idea what she was talking about. I suspect it was more than that. This is why sometimes I did feel like the most superficial student in the group. My advisor must have picked up on this since he used the word superficial 6 times when commenting on my thesis. except, the committee seemed to have love fest with me, so I will focus on that rather than some tough guy finding my tender spot and hammering on it.
In the end I will just keep plugging away and making more good work and hopefully find an audience for that work. One of the visiting photographers in my age group said we all get dismissed around now and then become interesting again once we reach 70. Good thing I never use use sunscreen and will not be dying the gray out of my hair! I'm going to start saying things like "back in my day....." and when I was young in the dark ages ...."
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