Painting Studio at UT College of Fine Arts.
Working on that second degree.
circa 1980.
If you want to have a steady flow of self-made art that you really like you have to constantly remind yourself to keep shooting. We become, I think, more perfunctory about life, and recording the wonderful daily magic of our lives, as we get older and we become a bit jaded about taking time to click the shutter. It's largely a function of having seen so many variations of life before. Why both to record one more?
It's good to remind myself that every moment is, in some way shape or form, different from all the other moments we live through, and that we'll live through in the future.
The image above is a copy shot from a print. I have no idea where the negative is right now. It could be in one of those boxes full of negatives from the 1970's and 1980's that I have shoved into a closet with the realization that I'll never have time (make time?) to sort through tens of thousands of old negatives (and slides) in order to make any rational, accessible archive of my oldest photographs.
I'm too selective now in what I make with my camera for my personal use and I need to remind myself to be more promiscuous with my photography. Shoot more and push aside the agonizing realization that most of the work will never see the light of day or a rapt audience.
But for me images of Belinda painting on canvas so long ago are like wonderful small treasures that surface sometimes by surprise and fill me with a quiet kind of delight.
That, and the realization that, maybe blinded by love, she appears more and more beautiful to me with every passing year.
3 comments:
What a delightful love note to your beautiful wife, Kirk. And a well considered sentiment, I have found myself in the same place, in a way, with photographing my children. As they have gotten older, I find them in front of my camera less often, and that is regrettable (and, to a degree, fixable).
Love this post.
Ahhhh. If only she was one of my blog readers...... But, thank you!
She is my muse. And the brains of the outfit...
A lovely portrait, indeed, of a lovely lady.
As for your boxes of negatives, they may be a bit disorganized, but unless some major flood, fungus, or fire befalls them, they should be accessible to your offspring and their descendants decades from now. They are tangible; a little piece of time caught on silver gelatin. Hold one up to the light and it is a time machine. As for your digital files, do you think your descendants will be able to access them and interpret the files 50 years from now with whatever computers exist then? 20 years from now?
Post a Comment