Something’s Been Bugging Me

I'm missing something. It's a small and insignificant thing. I've been looking for it for months now.

I think maybe it’s bugs. Or dust? A seed. A smallish little something.

I've got this collection of cyanotypes I did over the summer where I was trying to capture what summer feels like. The grass is a little long and going to seed. The big round circle of a sun cutting through the translucent green canopy overhead. The work is so close, and yet it's missing something. I can't quite put my finger on it. Like a sandwich that just needed a little mustard but didn't get any.

This is a cyanotype. The image is already made. I can't go back and expose some bugs onto it. It's like a Polaroid. One shot and its done. And yet. it needs some mustard.

So I've been making bugs. Ink bugs. Gold leaf bugs. Bleach bugs. Paint bugs. Bugs sewn with thread. Months of bugs. None of them are right.

I could do this if I was a real artist. I could do this if I'd gone to art school. I could do this if I had any innate talent. I could do this if I wasn't just playing. Pretending.

I think maybe it's not the bugs. I think there is something else missing. I don't think I will find it in the images.

Part of me want's to add something. Something to finish it. To mark it as Art, done. Indisputable.

Another part of me is remembering standing outside making these images. The wind shifting the grass. The vastness of the pale blue sky spreading out overhead. The space. I don't remember bugs. I remember standing outside, away from my kids, and my news feed, and my bills, and all the rushing I'm always doing, and just being in this big, bright, empty space.

In that moment I wasn't worried if I belonged there. I didn't ask if I was allowed to be making art or if I was doing it wrong. I was taking the light from the sun, the shadows of the grass and leaves that were growing around me, and using them to record this one moment in space and time.

If art making is an attempt to capture the truth of an experience then I've done what I came to do. Art, made.

It's me that isn't finished. The bugs, there but missing, are what these need. To remain unfinished.

Maybe the bugs are there, but under the leaves where you can't see them. Maybe if I stand here staring for long enough they'll come out.

Fall Cyanotypes and British Racing Green

New Work for September

August ends with school supplies and leather orders.

The first leather order of what will eventually be the work I have ready for the holidays has arrived. I've spent the last few weeks looking over what sold well last year and taking inventory on what I might be running low on.

Today I starting cutting down the leather. In this batch I'll be getting a full set of wallets (Belhoste, Ensign, and Pointsmen) in British Racing green. I'm dedicating the other half to making a new collection of cyanotypes on leather.

The cyano-leather is the part I'm most looking forward to. I have some new ideas I would like to try out.

In the past I've relied on straight forward botanical silhouettes. In the print work I've been doing this year I've been exploring the idea of depth and layers. I've been trying to make a foreground, middle, and background and it's resulted in what I've been thinking of as the canopy effect. Leaf shadows passing through each other.

I'm hoping to figure out how to translate this onto leather. I'm imagining layers of ghostly maple leaves overlapping each other.

Cyanotypes on leather are finicky though. It can be hard to keep subtle detail from washing out. If that happens I'll just end up with splotchy leather.

Some of my most recent work featuring some of my oldest work. Cyanotypes and toned cyanotypes.

In a box, in the rarely used closet, in the extra bedroom that has become the kid's den, there is a binder filled with negatives.

A few weeks ago I dug the binder out and started scanning its contents. All the photographs I'd taken going all the way back to the summer of 2001.

It is interesting the things which are significant to me in them now. The cars on the streets. The way people dressed. All this work I did, but never did anything with. I can remember how I felt taking them. It is a visceral feeling, looking off onto my old horizons. Forgotten and found in a box in the back of a closet.

I'm slowly scanning my way through the binder. Uploading them into the digital era. I don't know what I'm going to do with them yet. I love the idea of making something with these old negatives. It feels like picking up lost threads. Coming full circle to finish that which I wasn't able to finish back then.

As I sit here, scanner purring away, I'm thinking about how value changes over time. Maybe it is because I'm in my midlife crisis era, or because I've got a little distance from the gaping maw of Instagram, but I'm thinking about how temporary many of the artifacts we would leave behind are.

Having been promoting myself on Instagram for almost a decade a remarkable amount of my history is there. All it would take is a shift in ownership, or terms of service, and that would all be gone.

I've got backups, sure, but no one is going to find my old photo editing apps in the back of a closet.

Nostalgia can be dangerous, wishing for a return to a place that never was, but it can also be the roots that keep us from washing away in the stream of time.

As I load another strip of negatives into the carrier for scanning I'm thinking about the Spotify playlists that won't be thumbed through in the back of dusty record shops by future generations. The clothes we wear for a season and then discard not lining the rack of vintage shops. Our collective digital memories sitting in an abandoned server farms. All of these things we'd leave behind washed away in the current.

Part two

Sowing Seeds in the Dark

How do you know when an idea has run its course?

For me it just fizzles out one day. The last set of images I made for this collection worked that way. As I took them from between the blotter sheets I was drying them between I could see the spark had gone out. I think I knew it while I was making them.

An idea runs it's course. They grow from little seeds, blossom, ripen, and then die off, hopefully leaving a few new seeds behind.

For now I'm done thinking about developing these images. When I started this project I had an idea of mostly white images with ghostly hints of leaves. What I ended up with was different and I think more satisfying.

I made a few pieces that have that ghostly quality.

What I really fell in love with was what happens when I toned them. You can't tell when you look at the images but the way the light hits the paper as it comes through the window makes a subtle gradient.

If I soak the paper in washing soda the image fades. The lightest areas going first. The darkest areas come along much slower. Its possible to pull the images out in the middle of this split. The highlights running away from the shadows. Suddenly the gradient is there.

A second exposure of blue over the top of this gradient brings out the potential of the idea. Two images, both faint and barely there, but combined to make something new.

They look like pastel drawings. Not cyanotypes.

I've done my best to photograph them but I already know they are going to be difficult to capture. They are very quiet images. Reflections of the time in which I made them.

It snowed last night. I woke up to a wet pack of snow two inches deep. When it came down it brought most of the fall leaves with it.

It was a little sad. Bittersweet. I sat there looking out the window thinking about how soon I won't be able to hear the wind in the leaves anymore. Just the dry whistle of winter wind in the bare branches.

With the leaves buried under snow and the grey skies of Cleveland winter it will be time soon to put away to cyanotype materials. Any ambitions will have to rest until spring brings reliable sunshine back.

This could be a source of frustration, but I enjoy it. The second half of fall is like watching a friend pack their moving boxes. Every moment is savored, recorded, stored away.

For an anxious person like myself it's a chance to enjoy what is around me. I spend so much time living in the future in my head getting to stop and take a moment to smell the wet leaves is a respite to my running thoughts.

I think this is part of the reason why I make the work that I do. Good art is about saying the things we don't have words for yet. My cyanotypes are recordings of that fleeting moment when chance, and weather, and time, and personality come together and make something beautiful that will soon pass. Quiet magic gleaned from the edges of suburban lawns.