How do you know if you are turning into a video artist or just having a mid life crisis?

I'm not going to lie, I like the idea of adding 'video artist' to my titles. It sounds sexy. Like I should be French and incomprehensible.

Is video artist even a thing anymore? Or has all that been subsumed by 'content creator'. Content sounds very digestible. I want to sit in gullets for a while. So that might not be for me.

How did I get here? I don't know anything about film making.

Art imitates life. Instagram imitates both life and art and it was Instagram that got me here.

When short form video became a requirement I felt adrift. I've spent my whole life thinking in terms of still pictures and capturing light. Not trending and pointing at things that aren't there. I'm a photographer dammit.

So I decided to try to cheat. I came up with this idea of Moving Pictures. I'd set up my camera exactly the same way as I would to photograph. Except I'd flip the switch and film it. The result is a a picture where something moves, but not much. There is no plot or narrative. It's a still picture, stretched over time. It's hard to explain. Here's what I'm talking about.

It has the appeal and quality of a photograph, but it moves. A moving picture.

I made a few of these before I started to figure out what I liked about them. In the rest of my work empty space plays a very important role for me. My cyanotypes tend to be little detailed points of interest floating in big empty spaces. Same for my leather work. There is a lot going on in that empty space that is important to me.

Silence. Breathing room. Texture. Slowing down.

In making these videos in which nothing much happens I started to realize I'd found the same thing. Instead of emptiness in space it's emptiness in action. I think its a contrast to how loud/fast/noisy everything has become. I feel like I'm standing in the middle of that and pushing my arms out to the side, making space.

Another fundamental aspect to my art practice is leaning into my limitations. I think butting up against the things we can't do is the best way to figure out things only we can do. I started hand dyeing leather because I couldn't afford to buy more than one color of leather at a time. Now hand dyeing is fundamental to the work I create.

A limitation on these new videos was the sound. I'm shooting most of these on a digital, point and shoot camera I bought in 2009. I like the quality of the picture but the video sounds like it was recorded through a drive through while someone turned on every fan they could find. And besides that, the real world is messy. Cars. Leaf blowers. There is a battery of air conditioning condensers humming away outside my window.

So I needed sound.

On Instagram this is easy. I can just plug some music over top. But that feels a little gross. I'm an artist. I expect to be paid for my work if someone else is benefiting from it.

So that means I need to get sound that I made or paid for. Paying for it is out of the question. I don't know where to start with that and I don't want to have to figure out how to collaborate with a musician for these off the cuff videos I'm making.

Making it is harder. I'm not a musician. So I was stumped.

Then it occurred to me that sound is around me all the time. And it's free. I don't need to keep the sound from the video. I can just use sound from somewhere else. I can even record it on my phone which is better than the point and shoot camera's.

At first this felt like cheating. Like I was trying to cover for my lack of... I don't know credentialed sound experience? Then I shot this video of the rain outside my studio window, I played the sound of it raining I'd recorded on my phone a few days later, and it all came together.

I like the idea of constructing this reality. It feels like what A.I. is being nefarious about doing but I'm doing it in a very human way. Sampling from things to create a reality that never existed.

I call this part of the project Found Sounds. I love it. It has added so much to the way I experience life. How often do you stop and taste the flavor of what a place sounds like? Everyday places.

It's like taking a photograph. With a photo I'm capturing the light in a specific moment in time. Here I'm doing the exact same thing but with sound. A sound snap shot. Each is about a minute long. I like to listen to them with my eyes closed. I'm excited to see how I feel listening to them in ten years. Will I remember what it felt like to be me, standing in the rain, soaking in the world around me? I think I will.

Since I am new here I'm planning on being unabashedly awkward about it in the beginning. There is something to be said about doing your work on stage with everyone watching. Hopefully by the time I've published this I will have figured out a platform to post my work in progress to.

If I have, please follow along. Don't expect to see polished finished work. I am hoping to capture stuff as a I go along. I would like for people to be able to see how things evolve as I figure all of this out.

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.