Something between Spanish, and Algebra

It is a morning on the cusp of spring in late April. I'm standing in a park before the sun is over the horizon.

It is that time of day when most of the colors haven't woken up yet. Only somber blue shakes itself from the shadows under hillsides and reaches its slumbered fingers up towards the edges of the sky.

The only company I have this morning is ebbing around me. It sits lightly on my hair and makes the air smell like a conversation just barely heard in the distance. I have come to talk with the fog.

Speaking through a photograph has always come naturally for me. It's something I can feel with my eyes. I'll walk until I see something that looks right. This is usually something that is changing or different with what's around it. Everything hums a little. I try to find the thing that speaks.

The sun will peek through branches and light up the fog bank down the trail, but not reach the dark where I stand.

The march grass ahead, burnt sienna, huddles against indistinct mothers, fog shrouded tree shapes closing them in.

I take pictures because I don't always have words for what I feel. There are no words for what I feel.

The fog parts a little ahead and through the trees I see a puddle turned pond and it looks lonely-serene-sad-waiting-but only temporarily-and about to be becoming. I feel that.

I hold my camera up to my eye and it speaks to me. And I can feel what it's saying. We are each alone. Together. And too soon we will be gone.

Hours later the fog is gone. I'm here, in my studio. The magic of the morning boiled away with the morning sun.

The pictures I took sit on my laptop on the corner of my desk. In front of me is my sketchbook. Drawings of shapes. Notes about color and what they might mean. A list of themes in my life and what symbols might represent them.

My relationship with my leather work is very different. Here I have a lot to say. I know I do. I can feel it burning through me every time I work. There is a moment where I'm dyeing leather or making a shape and it just feels right. I know it's time to stop because I've said what I needed to say. But I can't understand what I'm saying.

It feels like trying to translate love poetry from Spanish to algebra. So I sit here looking at the As and Bs and remainders and quotients and I try to make sense of it all. It's saying something. I'm sure of it.

It hurts. I've given up so much to get here. The stability of a traditional career. The nights awash in self doubt. The continuous pivoting.

I think it's because I started out making photographs to find out what the world looked like through a camera. I started making leather goods because I wanted a way to make money that wasn't waiting tables.

The problem is that somewhere within all those handcrafted leather wallets I realized I was trying to say something. Now that I've given it my full attention, it's shy. Maybe I don't have the right words for it yet. Maybe its sculpture or it wants to be hung on a wall.

But it's there. And it has something to say. And it's my job to bring that out where people can see it.

It is a lot to hold onto. So I'm making bowls to hold what I can't

I've been making bowls for a while. I'm fiercely proud of my bowls. But it's bittersweet.

I get asked “What's it for?”. I understand. I'm the wallet guy. I don't know how to explain to people that its art.

It's for looking at.

Look at it until you feel something you couldn't otherwise put words to. And then when you want to feel that again, look at it again.

Once in a moment of pique I told a lady “It's a bowl to hold your hopes and dreams.”

I said it as a joke. I say most things I feel deeply as a joke.

So now I'm making bowls to hold what they were always meant to hold. I don't yet know if this is what the art in the leather is trying to say. But it needs to say it so I am trying to say it this way. Something between Spanish, and algebra, and being alone in the fog, and the click of the camera shutter.