The Weaver

A friend of mine recently quite her salaried job for a part time position and to pursue her creative passion. She’s a weaver.

She’s going through the usual adjustments. The biggest of which is getting used to the idea that most of her waking hours are not devoted to making money.

It takes a while to get used to the notion that you can spend much less time making money and still keep yourself sheltered, clothed and fed. It is very difficult for most people when they decide their creative life is more important than money to adjust to the idea that the time they devote to their art is every bit as important if not more important than the time they devote to making money. And the completely debilitating idea that your creative work must earn money in order to be justified can completely kill your art.

The world needs creative people to be creative. Art and creativity nourishes the human soul and keeps cultures alive. Artists and creative work are vital to the survival of any society, the preservation of every culture and the existence of human kind.

It is a good thing to be a weaver, a painter, a poet, a musician, a story teller. One can always find a way to make a “living.” But a “living” at the expense of your art is not living at all.

Photo: ©2013 David W. Sumner

A Question of Expression

Since I started using the iPhone to take daily color snaps while I'm out & about I've been looking closely at how I compose in color and process the final image.

The in-camera image is always the raw material, placing colors in appropriate physical relation to each other. Knowing I will process the image in one or more of the apps on the phone I often leave space around the edges of the image to allow vignetting and exposure tools to shape the image. I also consider color saturation and usually prefer higher contrast and a muted palette.

I've found that I want to express a mood through the color image which is more pronounced and obvious than I have tried to achieve in my black & white film work, at least up until now.

It's possible the use of the iPhone in making these color images is effecting how I process my black & white film imagery. I'm liking more contrast and texture in my monochrome work these days. Certainly I'm influenced by recent studies of Japanese and Czech photographers.

But I still have issues with color and limit my use of it. I still believe, that for me. color often gets in the way of the image. Like Antonin Kratochvil has said, "The pain is in the eyes," not in the color of blood.

I disagree that color is more "raw" than black & white, as suggested by Gabriel Bauret in his book Color Photography. I strip away color to get at the essence of a thing, the essential expression. I'm looking for the tear drop on the cheek of the clown. That tear drop is often lost in the cacophony of the clown's colorful costume.

Photo: ©2013 David W. Sumner