Customers who see my work at a show sometimes ask if they’re photographs and my answer is always no. A photograph is the final end product for a photographer, but it is only my raw material. Almost all of my pieces begin their “lives” as a photo (sometimes as more than one). I take that photo and import it into my computer. Photoshop is then used extensively to bring that photo or series of photos into line with the image I see in my head.

Some of the flowers that look the least “played with” have actually had more work done to them than some of the simpler portraits. That “perfect shot” I thought I was getting always turns out to be spoiled by poor lighting or greenery that suddenly jumps into the viewfinder, obscuring that brilliant play of petals. I may be many things, but I am not the world’s best photographer. What I see in my mind’s eye is almost never what I get after the shutter clicks.

Pounding the source material into a finished product might mean doing simple things like adjusting the color and light in a shot and then giving it what I call the “painting treatment” - which is done manually with Photoshop’s brushes. Preset filters just don’t give me enough control over the finished product.

More complicated pieces can require the wholesale removal and addition of elements, depending on how much I want to “fix” the original piece. Sometimes I want to add extra petals, remove or simplify an overly complex background, or add body elements not normally found on humans. My eraser takes things away, and I then can paint in what I want to see.

I manually paint in the most detail on my fantasy portraits. Tattoos, hair effects and highlights, outre skin tones, and anything else I think up gets painted on layer by layer in photoshop until I can look at it, squint my eyes and say to myself “nope, doesn’t need anything more.”

So do I make photographs? No - I make digital paintings.

So, what’s a joodle? It’s knotwork, tattoos, art nouveau, medieval illuminations, and many other sundry bits of inspiration all thrown into a pot and simmered for thirty-odd years. At the end of this process you will have an individual (named Julie) who doodles. Constantly.

Sometimes the a Joodle grows up and turns into a full blown illustration. Sometimes it gets an extra special treatment and becomes a tattoo or a painting. However, most joodles live a quiet life in one of several sketchbooks, waiting for the day when they too will get to “grow up” and take their turn in the great big world.

It’s been a while since I got good and tired of looking at this design every day…. so long in fact, that I seem to have lost all of my pointers to “really good looking sites that I want to use for inspiration”. Bah. Off to find ideas.

The rest of the time, I’m reduced to looking through the viewfinder and just *knowing* that I won’t be able to do justice to what I’m looking at.

This mope brought to you by the fact that I tromped though some beautiful early fall fields with my camera today, and none of the pictures do justice to the sheer magic of the season.

Must go work on that.

Had a co-worker yesterday as me what combination of filters I use to create my digital paintings. I had to explain that filters weren’t really part of the process. I guess it’s nifty that someone’s trying to do the same stuff I do. Of course, it’s also nifty that it’s not so easy to duplicate.

In spite of the fact that my WIP folder is getting far too big, I’ve been getting the urge to grab Bill’s digital camera and shoot some still lives. What’s the difference between twelve and twenty pieces waiting to be finished, eh? (Just the shreds of my sanity, I think)

On reflection, its a good thing I can’t find any batteries for the camera. Maybe I should just go bake some cookies. ::Shakes head:: Feeing creative and exausted at the same time can be confusing.

What happens when a clueless First Lady invites the wrong poet to the wrong event? You get Poets Against the War and A Culture of Resistance.

You also get some interesting parallels between the current attempts to marginalize antiwar artists and the attempts to do almost the same thing with the same arguments to the punk artists almost 20 years ago.

I’ve been tossing around the idea of diving into verse to try and order my thoughts on the mess that is current politics, but nothing worthwhile has come of it. However, what *did* get my dander up were varous comments in a few Op-Ed pieces and from the First Lady’s office that injecting some current political debate into a literary event was inappropriate. That politics and art should remain separate and involiate. To which I reply:

Art should not be political?
What would you have art be, then?
Useless, sitting in a corner or
worshipped from afar on ivory pedestals?

Words have power, and images too
that once were acknowledged with honor.
Would you squander such a resource
hiding with your nose in the air?

Foolish academic with your airs
come breathe less rarefied air
and use your art for something better
than proving your own stodgy worth

Prove to me that the blood of bards
runs strong and bold in modern day
and art is worth more than the posturing
of puffed up academia.

Else regulate yourself to forgotten
dusty corners with your fellows
while youth, vibrant and immature though it be
moves the passions of the world - without you.

More than one of my posts have been about some facet of being an artist, and tonight I found myself wondering, just what makes an artist?

No matter the medium one works in, there are limitations. A writer must adhere to the rules of grammar and sentence structure, a potter must respect the physics of drying clay and glaze composition, a programmer must write compile-able code, and so on. However, there comes a day when one realizes that, as creator, one is essentially playing god. An author can have *anything* they wish happen to their characters, a painter can transmute what they see with their eyes into something more inline with what they see in their head… with me so far?

That moment of realization, when one steps back and thinks, “wait, I can make *anything I want*” - that’s what I’m talking about.

BUT

And I can’t stress this enough - but, this doesn’t happen until one knows the fundamentals. Any full of them self art student can throw random blotches of paint at a canvas and call themselves the next Jackson Pollack (and a good many do). This might mean you’re a very good, even slavish imitator, but it does not mean you are anything approaching an artist.

So, there are two things that it’s very easy for those who might become artists to do. One, they can let their chosen medium hold them back, becoming a technically proficient craftsman, but never moving into the fully creative sphere. Or, two, they can ignore all restraints and rules and produce very enthusiastic but still amateurish work. Now you can make a living doing either of these things - I see it happen all the time. But to really be an artist, for me, is to walk the line in between. Always learning the technical side of your chosen craft while never letting the constraints of that craft hobble you. It’s not an easy balance.

Thanks to a growing tolerance for NyQuil, I am fighting a holding action with my head cold, yet am still unable to sleep. This has led to some middle of the night puttering around and then random surfing.

Random surfing, of course, leads to random thoughts.

What is up with everyone and their grandmother calling themselves an artist? Once upon a time, the term was barely even complementary, and artists as a whole were tolerated because of the contribution they were able to make to society and culture at large, but were considered, personally and individually, to be not the sort of folks one wanted to associate with.

Word associative stigmas have a habit of fading in this day and age, but do we have to use the word artist to refer to everyone who produces *any* sort of content? Writers, musicians, programmers, and who knows who else are suddenly being lumped under the banner of artist. Of course, some of them are.

Most, on the other hand, are tradesmen. Or crafters. People of skill who create things. Well and good. But artist used to mean something more. It meant that you put something of yourself into what you made. That it was something more than just a product or commodity or (god help me) intellectual property. It was, well, art. I don’t see a lot of art being produced these days. Certainly not by the people everyone keeps telling me are “artists”.

Second thought - content producers and artists alike have something in common. (Actually they have almost everything in common, but moving on from that…) What we make our livings from is far more jealously guarded than what we create for ourselves. What we produce to sell is hoarded, rarely put on the web; and when it is, it’s ringed with as many notices of ownership and copyright as one is able to muster. What we produce for ourselves (or, what no one is willing to pay us to produce/create but which we create anyway) is given like a gift; sometimes with no strings at all, sometimes with a token request. Feedback, linkbacks, a small monetary donation - you get the picture.

We (artists) need to have both kinds of artwork in order to survive. Too much work done “purely for love” and one will starve. Too much “I’m getting paid to do this” stuff and all the joy goes out of what you do. In spite of this, I do sometimes wish that everything I create could be of the “purely for love, give it like a gift” sort.

Specifically, Tolkien. Over the last year, there have been dozens of articles and op-ed pieces about the role of women in Tolkien’s work. Or rather, the lack of role. I don’t care. I love the books, I love the movies, I love the artwork (well, some of the artwork. The Hildebrant brothers don’t do much for me, but Alan Lee rocks) As for the female characters and how they aren’t there - so what? Is every author supposed to anticipate shifting social values fifty years post publication and cast his/her novels accordingly?

This meme is more annoying than the usual “well, the author really means this/that/some other thing” kind of lit crit that I grew to know and abhor in school. How the hell does some academic crawl into the head of a (possibly deceased) author and figure out that they were thinking at the exact moment they put pen to paper? Who cares? Can’t a great story just *be* a really great story?

Oh, wait. We’re dealing with Art and Literature and lots of other pretentiously capitalized concepts that will leads us to Higher Meaning and… yes! Even world peace!

Here’s what I think. Art is not philosophy. Nor is it religon. Even if it was either of them, it still wouldn’t be something you could peer into and discover the deep, musty scerets of the soul because people have been trying that with religon and philosophy and, by and large, they haven’t gotten too far with them either. At best, art, philosophy, and religon are starting points for finding truth and The Meaning Of Life inside oneself. None of the big answers will come from a book, no matter how good it is.

So back to Tolkien. Who, when you get down to it, was just a guy. Shaped by his time and his world (which was very different from the one we know today) and writing because he loved it. He wasn’t trying to create a world that would be gender-politically acceptable to future generations even if such a feat would have been possible. He was just doing what artists have always done. He created something. It was not an allegory, it was not a political tract, it was not a philosophical guide to enlightment. It was a story. A really good one.