Winter Camping at Pictured Rocks

I thought I’d share the story of my winter camping trip this winter to Pictured Rocks National Lake Shore. It was quite an adventure for me and it had a real personal impact on me. It’s a long story, so bear with me. This is just the beginning of it! If you like it, let me know, I’ll post more.

I’ll have to add pictures later. I’ve had some computer problems and it’s meant I don’t have access to all of my photos all of the time. They’re not lost, just inconvenient to access. Hope you enjoy the story.

Preparations

This winter, I decided I wanted to try winter camping. I wanted to be able to go anywhere at any time to take photographs. I wanted to be able to stay in remote locations and be there at dawn and dusk for the best photographic light. My goal was to snow shoe in to the Pictured Rocks National Lake Shore and camp there for a few nights while I shot the features along the lake.

I had been winter camping before, more than twenty years ago, and the experiences had been pure misery. I had suffered with cold each night, despite wearing every stitch of clothing I had, inside my sleeping bag. These experiences made me anxious about trying again, but I hoped that with better equipment and preparation, that it would be a more positive experience.

I bought some expedition weight long underwear, some nylon outer wear to shed the snow and keep me dry. I did a test in my back yard, sleeping out in below freezing temperatures and making breakfast in my tent without any problems. I’d actually been quite comfortable. I decided that with my extra clothing, I could handle colder conditions that I anticipated up at Pictured Rocks.

On my way

I looked for a weather window where there would be no heavy snow, and left for Pictured Rocks. I made the seven hour drive, got my permit, and headed for the trail head to Chapel Beach. When I got there, it was late afternoon, and I didn’t have much time to get down the trail and set up camp. I decided I would hike in just an hour or so, and set up camp just before dark. I didn’t want to go too far from the car on this first night. It was going to be much colder, about ten degrees, so I wanted to be sure that my equipment was sufficient before I went too far from the car.

I passed a group of women who were on their way out from a day hike in to Chapel Falls. They said that there was a good place for me to camp there, and that it was about an hour in. They’d packed a nice snow shoe trail, so the going was pretty easy, despite my fifty pounds of camping and photography equipment and the clumsy snow shoes.

I had to hurry, because the sun was setting fast, but I got to the falls just in time to set up camp and cook dinner before dark. I was feeling pretty good. The weather conditions were nice: it was partly sunny, and there was no wind. It was peaceful at the falls, with just the whisper of the falls to lull me to sleep.

I slept alright that first night. I woke up and had to adjust my sleeping bag and clothing a bit during the night to stay warm, but I was fundamentally comfortable enough. I woke up very early, prepared my breakfast and headed out to do a little photography around the falls. It was awkward dealing with the camera and tripod in the deep snow, with the snow shoes on, but everything was going okay. I wasn’t particularly interested in the kind of things I was shooting, but I wanted to practice a bit, and get some documentary shots at the very least.

First Morning

After a few minutes, I realized that I wasn’t feeling very well. I felt a little bit sweaty, slightly nauseous. I wondered if it might be the freeze dried dinner I’d had the night before, but it also occurred to me that I was feeling pretty anxious. There were little alarm bells going off in my gut somewhere. My mind told my gut to calm down, that everything was going just fine. There was no reason to be nervous. My gut wasn’t so sure.

I went back to camp, packed up my gear, and prepared to head down to the lake. It was about a two mile hike, but on snow shoes, I had no idea how long it would take. A light breeze had begun rustling in the trees, it was overcast now, but the weather seemed okay. I started down the trail to the lake. In about a hundred feet, the packed trail that the women had left, ended. There was nothing but two feet of fresh, light snow, untouched by any human track. As I continued down the trail, I quickly discovered how much harder it was to snow shoe in deep, fresh snow. I was working very hard. In fact, I had to stop to gasp for breath about every fifty feet or so. I would pick a target a short distance ahead, trudge up to that target, then double over and breathe heavily for fifteen or twenty seconds, waiting for my heart rate to drop to a reasonable level before continuing down the trail again.

The Hike In

I didn’t go far before those alarm bells began ringing again. This time they were considerably louder. Every part of my body was telling me not to continue down this trail. The woods looked absolutely forbidding. It was a sea of unbroken, uniform gray tree trunks stretching away to the horizon in every direction. There was no sign of any wildlife. No birds, nothing. No one had been down here this winter. It occurred to me that it was probably for a very good reason. It was crazy to exert myself this hard to get down to that beach. If and when I got there, I would be exhausted and very far from my car. I would have to survive the night there no matter what.

I didn’t really consider these thoughts too carefully, to be honest. All I knew was that I was scared out of my wits, but I had been talking about doing this for so long, had been preparing for so long, had made this long drive to get here, and I wasn’t going to turn back now. I had done fine last night, and I could see no reason why I wouldn’t do okay down at the lake tonight. I simply set aside the fear, literally telling myself that fear was only a state of mind, and that I might as well change my attitude, because I was going down to that beach no matter what.

I just kept setting my little fifty yard goals, and plowed ahead through the snow. I was careful to be sure I was following the right trail, conscious that I couldn’t afford to get lost in these woods. I could always retrace my tracks to get out, but I was exerting myself so hard that I couldn’t afford any detours.

An hour down the trail, I was getting pretty tired. I’d been doing the equivalent of a stair master workout with a fifty pound backpack for a solid hour. It was way more than I was accustomed to doing. I was sweating freely, though I was trying not to get too wet, for fear of hypothermia when I stopped. In the distance, I was surprised to see a set of snow shoe tracks. It was a single set of tracks. One person had come up the trail from the lake, then turned around and gone back down. I was glad to see evidence of other people in here, and even the single set of footprints made the walking much easier. I could now walk continuously, without stopping to catch my breath.

I kept slogging down the trail, looking for some evidence of the lake. I was looking to see an end to the trees, but there was none. After another half hour or more, I began to see some rock formations through the trees in the distance. I thought that must be the lake shore. The trail turned so that it seemed to parallel the shoreline, and kept going. Finally, about two hours from my first camp, I came to some steep drops and I could see the end of the woods ahead. I was pretty well exhausted by this time, getting clumsy with fatigue, flailing around on my snowshoes as I made my way down a couple of steep drops to the lake.

By now, the wind had picked up pretty sharply. When I reached the lake shore at the famous Chapel Rocks, the wind was ripping across the lake and into the trees. The snow was scoured into ridges where it was exposed to the wind. I shielded my face, and turned along the lake to look for the campground. I crossed a bridge over a frozen river, and came to the campground a hundred yards or so later. There were snow shoe tracks along the lake shore, but no one had gone into the camp ground. I plowed through deep snow, clambering over a large tree that had fallen across the trail as I went. I turned into the first camp site that I came to. It looked just fine to me. I’m sure that in summer it was a lovely site, backing up on the river on the far side It had a big pine tree that offered shelter from the cutting wind. I decided to look no further.

Quick Word on New Camera

Well, I’ve had the new camera for a few days now. I’m still forming my opinions. It’s definitely fun to play with. Definitely doesn’t feel like a “real” camera. I doubt I will use it’s output for anything I print or sell, but I am having fun with it, walking around shooting what I would otherwise pass by without a second thought. Too early to tell whether I feel like it will make a major contribution in any way.

I’d already taken to carrying my bigger camera more of the time and have benefited from that quite a bit. The smaller camera, I am less sure about.
More to come later.

Cracking Me Open

This Artist’s Way process is cracking me wide open. It’s only been a couple of weeks since I started dabbling with The Vein of Gold. Then I decided to form a group with my artist friends. We met less than a week ago for the first time. I’ve only read the introductory pages, and haven’t even done any exercises yet.

Still, just reading the material has shifted the way I’ve been behaving enough that I feel completely opened up to all manner of possibilities. I opened myself up to explore writing, which is something I’ve been hankering to do for months, probably years if I really think about it. Opening that door got me exploring some things in writing. It got me to a book store last weekend to pick up a book that I remembered liking a lot, years ago: Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down The Bones. I’ve been absolutely loving it. I feel like I can take almost any topic that comes to mind and write, largely exploring my own internal world, my personal history.

And just the little bit of writing I’ve allowed myself to do has opened me up to new ideas about photography. I put together a photography book, mentioned in my last post, in just a few days. I wrote lengthy captions and even a short story to go in the book. And I loved it.

I realized, while thinking about writing, that I could write on almost any subject, because I began with human experience, and that my photographs carefully excluded any evidence of humans. Why is that? Why don’t I photograph people or even manifestations of people? Might that not open an entire other world for me? I thought, for example, at one point about photographing the remnants of a dinner party, or tables in restaurants, after people have eaten. Strange idea, granted, but I suspect there’s a ton of evidence of the people who were there in those settings.

But what about photographing actual people? Very foreign for me, but intriguing. I’m thinking of candid photography or street photography where the people don’t know they’re being photographed; trying to capture the little human quirks and interactions that are revealed by our behaviors. I’ve thought about photographing people’s hands on tables, even their feet while at ease. I know, strange again, but I think possibly revealing.

All this opening up is due to the Artist’s Way’s simple encouragement to do the things that keep coming up for you. Do what you are drawn to do. I’ve gone no further than that and it’s made all this difference.

I’ve also been getting out, photographing casually around my home, and in a park nearby. I’ve just been enjoying myself, capturing and processing images in my mind and my subconscious. That process has been enough for me to start feeling that all the images I’ve been collecting in the past couple of months are adding up to something. I didn’t feel that any of the images were terribly strong by themselves, but I liked what they were suggesting as a group. I thought of collage or grids of images, but with the Artist’s Way stuff and the writing, I started to see the potential to use the images in a book rather than as monumental and expensive prints, which is what I have been doing.

I even started start that book last night, or at least the concept for it, and it works for me. I just mocked up a few pages, and would have more to do to resolve it, but I can see that the idea of a small format book with small, square images works very nicely. None of the images seemed to want to be big, so I thought, why not use them small? Let them add up to something in series, rather than be big statements individually. It removes so much pressure from each photo session and from each photograph. With this idea, I can just shoot what I see that engages me. Many of the photographs I’ve captured recently work wonderfully this way.

The images I’m working with are winter scenes; a lot of trees and branches and shadows in the snow. I should post some here, but I really haven’t developed them yet. I will do it soon. Anyway, I laid out this small 7 x 7” book and made the images only 3 x 3” square. I laid down a nice pale warm gray background, and most of the images have a lot of white and brown in them. They look wonderful like that.

Then, because I’ve been writing, or thinking about writing, so much, I thought about adding text pages. Small bodies of text, just like the pictures, probably on opposite pages, because I don’t want the text competing with the pictures. I didn’t really know what I would say about the pictures when I laid out the book concept last night. I didn’t have much of a story to go with the pictures. They’d mostly been gathered fairly casually. But today, I see that there are all kinds of things that I might write that could go with the pictures. They don’t have to do with taking the pictures. It could be about the seasons, which are a big deal here in Michigan. It could have to do with some of what I’ve been learning about myself during this period. The pictures would not be directly connected with the text, only peripherally, but they would lend something nonetheless.

I like this idea a lot. It opens the doors yet another notch for me. All of a sudden, I can put together the writing with the photography. This morning, I was worried that the writing would distract from the photography and prevent me making progress in any direction. Now I see that the one can support the other. All of this because I began looking at The Vein of Gold, during a period of staleness and discouragement brought on by too much marketing and too little photography.

It’s interesting to me that I am still learning huge lessons from the Artist’s Way, when I’ve been working with the book for years and years. I’ve done all the exercises, written thousands of pages of Morning Pages, done my Artist Dates, etc. And still, I circle around at another level, and benefit enormously from the book again.

I am cracking wide open, and it’s energizing everything I am doing. It’s wonderful.

New Book of My Photographs Released!

I’ve just published a new book of my photographs through Blurb.com.  I’m very excited about it! I think it turned out beautifully. You can see the pictures and read the text (first fifteen pages only) by clicking on the link below. Be sure to click the little full screen button at the lower right of the preview window, to get the full effect!

http://www.blurb.com/assets/embed.swf?book_id=2025153

The Eloquent Landscape by Curtis Hans Miller | Make Your Own Book

The book includes my Pictured Rocks and Blue Garden Photographs, taken last summer and fall, along with a few others for good measure. I’ve written extensive captions that comment on the photographs and tell about how they were captured and edited. I think you’ll find the captions interesting and informative, whether you’re a photographer or not.

I’ve even included a little story about my camping experience there, entitled Alone in the Woods.

As a special introductory offer, good through Sunday, March 13th only, the books can be ordered at my cost. No markup. Just order and enjoy. I really just want you to enjoy the pictures and text and let me know what you think.

I look forward to your feedback!

Final Word on a New Camera

I wanted to mention here that I finally went ahead and ordered the bloody camera. I bought a Panasonic Lumix DMC GF1. It’s just slightly out of date, but the spec is the same as their newer model, and I liked the body better.

I spent no end of more time thinking about this every possible way before finally making the purchase. I sold a lens that I wasn’t using so that I could afford it. I poured over endless reviews and thought about all of the shortcomings of the various cameras.

Dpreview.com is far and away the best source for reviews. The main thing about these cameras is that they are terrible compromises on every level. No one camera has it all. The resolution isn’t great, the lenses are not great, they’re too big to fit in a pocket, really. You need the big zoom to do most things, but they are handiest with the smaller pancake lenses. Their low light performance is frankly terrible. Noise, noise, noise!

On top of that, I expect that as soon as I buy this, someone will release a better camera right away. Bigger sensor, smaller form factor, better lenses and image quality. Of course as I say that, I realize that it will cost a small fortune, so maybe I’ve done the best I can. The Sony cameras in this class use a bigger and better sensor, but they’re clearly aimed at the compact camera user, not the enthusiast. The bodies are too tiny, and the lenses hang off the front of them like canons. Terrible proportions, and no “real camera” feel.

All of that, and I still bought one. I still believe that this camera will open up other photographic possibilities for me. I am going to swear to take it absolutely everywhere. I want to try some street photography and people photography with it. It will be smaller and less obtrusive than my primary camera. It will be quiet. No big shutter sound from the mirror slapping up and down. And I will use it to fool around, with no pressure on the results, something that I think will be good for my photography, which was getting too focused on big results and big prints. I’ve already begun a little Blurb book of images that will print only three inches square. This little camera will make images like that with ease.

I’ll let you know when I get it and what I think once it’s in my hand!

Practice and Composting

 

I have just returned from a morning’s walk and photography session. Yesterday’s rain turned into snow and the branches everywhere are covered in clinging snow. It was not a very appealing morning to go for a walk; cold and a little bit windy, which means the branches would be moving and might blur in any pictures. But I got myself out the door and down to the park and was immediately grabbed by the branches coated in snow. It was gorgeous.

I walked along the trail along the river, shooting the patterns of the branches. I shot bushes, and pine trees. I thought I might shoot the river, but it didn’t appeal to me. The water is us, and it’s over its banks, flooding into the woods. I made my way to an area where I know there is a grove of pine trees. It’s a favorite place of mine; hushed and a little darker. It was worth the trip.

I don’t know if the photographs will be worthwhile, but, as usual, I am glad I went out. When I got back, I was looking forward to reading a bit more of Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. I read a couple of short chapters and they sent my mind spinning right away. The first chapter was on Writing Practice, and the second, Composting. I realized almost immediately that I have been both practicing and composting my work of late, and I wanted to write about it immediately.

Natalie encourages you to practice your writing, every day, if possible. I see there as being an absolute parallel between writing and making visual art. I had fallen off the wagon of regular work with my camera, but I’ve been picking it up again recently, and beginning to build up a bunch of photographs. I’ve been practicing. I’ve been practicing without expectation of finding any wonderful photographs, for the most part; just getting out and engaging my visual mind and letting myself play a bit. It’s been very enjoyable. I’ve been a little uncomfortable, sometimes, that I’m not working on a body of work; something that I can package and sell right away, but I’ve kept at it.

This morning was a good example of that. I had no real expectations. I just wanted some visual engagement, and to get out of the house. I got those things, and some images that I think have some potential. I can sense that all of the images of the last weeks are adding up to something. There’s a commonality there, mostly because of the time of year and the places I’ve been shooting. None of the individual photographs are compelling to me, at least not at this point, but they’re adding up to something. I’ve begun thinking of putting them together into a book, because I think they’re saying something. This morning added a few more potential images to that book.

So I have been practicing of late, and it’s been good. But then I read the chapter called Composting, and things really clicked for me. She was writing that we can not usually deal with material effectively when it is new to us. It’s not deep enough yet. She mentioned writing about a place, and I immediately thought how I was unable to photograph Arkansas successfully. It just wasn’t in me. I didn’t own any of it yet. I couldn’t do it. I can’t even imagine how long, if ever, it might take for me to own enough of Arkansas to be able to photograph it.

She spoke of making repeated efforts with a subject. Her metaphor was turning a compost heap. Not very dainty, perhaps, but apt. You work the soil, turning it in order that it will compost more effectively, and then you return to it later. Only much later will the soil be fully composted and a rich source for art. Maybe that’s why I keep going back to putting my mom in the assisted living place. I’m getting farther away from it and I have composted it long enough.

But what really struck me, is that the entire artistic process feels like this to me. I’ve only recently learned to trust more that I can let there be periods that feel aimless or fallow to me. I’m in one of those right now. I can just sense that all this photo practice of late is taking me somewhere. I don’t know where yet, but I have a pretty good idea that I’m responding to something genuine for me, so I allow myself to keep photographing branches and trees.

This metaphor for the creative process is wonderful in that it removes all the striving and anxiety from the process. You don’t have to be working intensely toward a known outcome all the time. In fact, you may never be doing that. What you’re doing instead, is practicing, and composting as you do it. Can you see how much less anxiety producing this model is? It’s okay if you don’t know where you’re going. You’re practicing. As a photographer, I’m building up an image bank all the while. I don’t know if the images are of any real value, but I have the sense that I’m pursuing something, even if I am not clear what it is.

One day, I may hit on a way of handling these photographs that makes all the images work. Maybe I haven’t found the right value structure for them. I’m making them too contrasty, or too flat. Maybe they aren’t wonderful individually, but maybe they add up to a wonderful telling of the story of the season. Maybe they make a wonderful book. Maybe that book can mix writing with photographs. Maybe the photographs need to be made into a collage of some sort or worked with together in some way. Maybe they need to be layered, or composited in some way. I just haven’t figured that out yet, but in the meantime, I’m creating material, groping toward an understanding of what is attracting me to these images.

If I am not clearly working on a body of work that I can exhibit and sell, I am composting, turning the soil, allowing oxygen in to the decomposing waste so that the fertile soil can be created. I love the metaphor, and it fits with what I have been figuring out for myself as I mature as an artist.

Not Just Thinking About Writing

I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately. Not much of it appears here, perhaps unfortunately, but I’ve been writing a lot and it’s been becoming a more and more powerful force in my life. I’ve written long stories about my photography trips, which have been adventures for me. There’s been something going on for me with these trips. I’ve been exploring something in myself by going to remote locations alone and seeing what comes up for me when I do.

I’ve written a lot about what’s been happening to my parents; my mother has been suffering from Alzheimer’s for a several years now, and that’s put a lot of stress on me and my father, and has had a huge impact on me. I’ve had to see things happen to both of them that I would never have imagined, and I’ve had to do things that I would never have dreamed of doing; seering, heart-braking things that I have not fully absorbed.

I’ve also written a lot about my artistic journey, which has been intensified over the last year and has been yielding big changes in my self and in my life. All of these things feel big to me and I think I’ve been groping to get a handle on them for myself. I want desperately to capture what is happening to me. They seem like things that many other people are, or will, be dealing with. I feel like I am learning things that I want to report back to the others who will be going where I have gone.

I want to share what I’ve been learning, with the hope that others will not suffer the long and winding path that I’ve taken. I have the feeling, I guess, that I am at a point in my life where I am learning the answers to some things that I wish people had been able to tell me about twenty or thirty years ago.

Anyway, I’ve been doing all this writing, and I’ve largely been keeping it to myself. I’ve been very unsure whether the writing will be of value or of interest to other people. And I’ve wondered whether I should be spending time writing when I am trying to make a career as a photographer. I have no idea what I might do with this writing, other than knowing I have been desperately wanting to do it and, increasingly, wanting to share it.

But revisiting The Artist’s Way again has been making me look at the writing differently. One of the things that The Artist’s Way emphasizes is opening up your world in order to feed your creative life. I tend toward anhedonia, which means a lack of pleasure. I focus on what needs to be done, not what I want to be doing. I am very responsible, and hard-working, and productive, but I can run myself into the ground. That had been happening to me recently, and that’s why I picked up The Artist’s Way. Within a matter of weeks, it has opened me up enormously, and I’m feeling much better.

One of the things that I’ve decided to allow myself to do is to write. I’ve spent an enormous amount of time thinking about whether I should write or not; testing the idea in my mind to see where it might lead, asking myself whether it could contribute to my making a living. I tend to test everything that way. I’m a self-employed, creative person, have been all my life; and that means I think a lot about how I’m going to make a living. But the Artist’s Way has been making me think that I need to allow more room in my life to just try things. If I want to write, then write for crying out loud. Stop thinking about it; just do it.

I’ve always thought of myself as a visual artist. It’s what my parents did in one form or another. It’s what I wound up doing when I went to college, even though it had never occurred to me that I might do it before I got there. I’ve made my living in one creative pursuit or another, though never by painting or photography; usually something visual, often including craftsmanship of some kind.

But I had never even considered writing. And it’s a little strange that I had not. A couple of weeks ago I was helping my father move to a condo from his home of 11 years. He was packing up all of his worldy possessions and those of my mother, who has been in an assisted living facility now for about six months. I had gone over to help him finish packing and make the move. I was putting things in boxes and I came across a box with no label on it. I opened it to find my the manuscript of a book that my mother had written.

It had been typed on a typewriter, which suggests how long ago it had been done. I knew my mother had written at least one novel; maybe two, I wasn’t sure. To my shame, I had never read it. Anyway, here it was in a box, bringing back to me the mother who has been disappearing over the last couple of years. It made an impression on me. I could sense my mother’s presence in the crude impressions of the typewriter keys on the paper.

It reminded me that writing ran in my family just as did the visual arts. And then I thought of my brother. He’s a lawyer, now a law professor, and I know he’s published an enormous number of articles, five or six books, and is always working on the next one. So, the writing was passed on to my brother as well. He writes in a different arena; he would never consider writing any kind of personal memoir, but he’s putting his thoughts down on paper; laying out how he sees the world in a legal and ethical framework. So maybe writing is as natural a part of me as the visual arts.

All of this is a very long way of my saying that I’m going to allow myself to write more, and I’m going to share more of my writing as well. Just allowing myself that thought has really energized me. I’ve written a lot lately, and I’ve been pretty excited about all my creative activities since then. It’s released a lot of energy that I guess I was keeping bottled up by judging and evaluating mywriting rather than just doing it.

I was putting togethr a Blurb book of my photographs this week, to be used for marketing purposes primarily, and I took some time to write captions for the photographs. I had a ball doing it. Just a few sentences of description of my thinking, the genesis of the photographs, some of what I saw in them. I was having so much fun that I decided to insert a couple of text pages and tell a little story from my photo expedition.

It ran maybe a page and a half and it, too, was a pure pleasure to write. I’m not entirely sure whether it fits in the book of photographs, but it was fun to do and it opened the doors to thinking about what else I might write in the book.

Later, I added another couple of pages to the book and wrote the story of how I had come to put my mother in the assisted living facility she’s living in now. It was something that happened just a couple of weeks before my photo trip, and it was very much on my mind when I was there. I think it shows in the photographs I made on that trip and that’s why I thought I might include the story in the book.

After writing it, I see that it doesn’t really belong there with the photographs, but I know it belongs somewhere. It was the most difficult thing I have ever had to do. It was very difficult to think and write about. I didn’t like bringing it back to my mind so clearly, but that’s what the story is all about. I think the story and all the other stories that are part of that long and difficult experience belong somewhere.

There are probably millions of people in this country dealing with this horrific disease. Some of them would like to know what they are likely to face as they go through it. It’s a very difficult thing; very difficult, but I’ve realized as I think and write about it, that it’s not been entirely awful. Many good things have happened along with the bad. It has opened the door for a very loving relationship with my mother. I’ve had experiences with her that I doubt I would ever have had if this had not happened to her. I’ve been able to express my love for her in a way that I probably would not have, had she not gotten sick. I hold my mother’s hand when we walk outside. I help her order food when we go to a restaurant. I cut up her food for her when she needs help. I help put on her shoes and socks when we go outside. It’s very much like caring for a young child. It is as heart-warming and generous an experience as it is sometimes heart-breaking.

Those are things that people coming into this may not anticipate. It’s something that I think people might want to know. All of the books on the subject focus on the problems you and your loved ones are going to have; and you’re certainly going to have troubles. You will have to grieve the losses, as will the patient, but wonderful opportunities will arise as well, and that you might not guess.

I remember simply arranging to get my mother out of the assisted living facility for a few hours and taking her to the beach. It was something she probably had not done in years. It was a veritable expedition for her, but it was such a joy for her too. She spends almost all her time lying in her little bed there, sleeping or staring at the ceiling. Her world is circumscribed to the locked hallway on which she lives. Simply having the thought to get her out on a nice sunny day and take her to the beach was a huge event for her. I got sandwiches to eat and brought lounge chairs so she could sit on the sand with my father. I felt absolutely wonderful for it, and so did she. What a day!

Afterwards, I took her back to the assisted living home and tucked her into bed, pulling the covers up over her and kissing her on the forehead. I told her that I loved her and that she should have sweet dreams. She smiled up at me like a child; such a look of thankfulness, I can’t tell you. She fell asleep almost immediately. It’s exhausting for her to be out for more than an hour or two. I left the room quietly, with my heart overflowing with both thankfulness and grief.

Ah well, that’s enough of this for one night. I hope to be sharing more of this sort of thing with you. It may be a little bit random sometimes, because so many different things seem to be going on for me right now, but I hope you enjoy and profit from what you read here.

The Artist’s Way

I’ve begun forming an Artist’s Way group in the last week and I’m kind of excited about it. For those who aren’t familiar with the Artist’s Way, it’s a process of creative recovery and enrichment that’s founded on the book by that title by Julia Cameron. If you’re an artist and you’re not familiar with this book, you should run out and buy it and do every exercise in the book. It’s a lot of work, but it will reward you many times over.

I’ve actually worked with the Artist’s Way many times over for several years now. I first read it maybe five or more years ago and it was a very affirming and encouraging book for me. I actually did what I suspect very few people do, which is to do all the work that the book suggests you do. It was a lot of work, but I think it was well worth it. It was a beginning of a process of growing into being an artist. It’s a process that has not stopped, and if anything has gained momentum in the last year or two.

There are a couple of basic tools that are a foundation of the Artist’s Way. One is the daily Morning Pages. I won’t outline the entire book here, but the Morning Pages are simply writing first thing in the morning three pages of hand written stream of consciousness writing. Whatever’s on your mind, that’s what you write. Simple as that.

The second fundamental tool is the Artist’s Date. This is a once a week affair where you take your inner artist out for a couple of hours, just you and him/her and do something that is fun and creatively enriching. This can be whatever you find to be fun, or whatever you think your inner artist would find to be fun. Cameron describes the inner artist as a child and I often literally thought of myself at age three or four when I went on these “dates.” A date could be anything from going for an interesting walk, picking up rocks on a beach, going to a toy store or art supply store, going for a drive on a new road, whatever you think that kid would find fun. That’s what you do.

I think the Artist’s Date was particularly hard for me and it was particularly rewarding as well. I tend toward what is called “anhedonia.” A lack of pleasure. I work hard. I’m very disciplined. I do what I’m supposed to be doing. I don’t just go out and have a lot of fun. Oh, sometimes I do, but not nearly as much as a little kid might like. So the artist’s date makes me do more of that.

I’ve done this process before and I’ve gone back to the book many times to remind myself of what to do when I am feeling discouraged or frightened or whatever. But this time I’m going to be doing it because I thought it would be good for some of my artist friends. I had been looking at another Cameron book, The Vein of Gold, and had found that it was helping me dig out of a period of discouragement or burnout. I thought it might be nice to share this with my friends.

Years ago I actually took a week long workshop with Mark Bryan, the co-developer of the Artist’s Way process. It was an expensive workshop, and I took it because of the way the Artist’s Way made me feel about taking chances like it. I would never have done something like that before, but the Artist’s Way suggested to me that if something appealed to me and the opportunity arose, I should go for it. So I did. It was a very nice workshop. Very moving and affirming. We did lots of very interesting exercises and went through some of what it would be like to run an Artist’s Way workshop. I had in mind then that I might run some workshops, but never followed through with it at the time.

I think the idea of doing one now may have occurred to me because my artistic life has taken on so much more power over the last year. I feel like I finally know what it is like to be a fully functioning artist, and I want to share that feeling with my friends who are trying to make something more of their artistic lives. I’m actually pretty excited about it. I love the idea that I could contribute something toward my friends experiencing some of what I’ve experienced this last year, which has been a big affirmation of my ability as an artist and my hopes for making something of a career as an artist.

These friends are mostly members of a little critique group that we’ve been having together for a number of years now. The critique group is a monthly gathering, held at a different house each month. We socialize a bit, eat some snacks, and then settle down to sharing the work we’ve been doing in the last month. We’ve gotten to know one another well in that time. I wanted to take that group to another level and integrate the Artist’s Way process to see where it takes us.

In a lot of ways, the critique group has functioned as a form of an Artist’s Way group. We’ve not so much critiqued one another as supported one another. Now we’re going to try to arrange a time to meet weekly and do the full Artist’s Way process. We’ll see how it goes, but I’m pretty excited about it and I think they are too.

One of the things that the Artist’s Way promotes is focusing on things that you might like to do and, instead of dismissing them as impractical, consider that they may be things that you both can and perhaps should be doing. One of the things that I’ve been doing and wanting to do a lot is writing. I’ve been writing about my photography trips. I’ve been writing about my family as my Mother suffers with Alzheimer’s disease, and I’ve been writing about my own struggle to become an artist with an actual money making career.

I don’t find it very hard to be an artist any more. When I started with the Artist’s Way, I wasn’t even comfortable using the word to describe myself. Now, no problem. I’ve spent a lot of time and energy working on the things that blocked me from being an artist for much of my adult life. I’ve struggled to overcome my fears and my self doubts. I’ve spent some time in therapy dealing with the issue too. I’ve had days when it was all I could do to face going out to the studio and I’ve had times when I simply could not face some of the things I wanted to do. But I’ve stuck with it, and years later, I’m past all of that. At least I think I am.

I no longer doubt my ability. I’m not afraid of much any more when it comes to working as an artist. Sure, it’s not always easy. Maybe it’s almost never easy being an artist. You do struggle constantly to figure out what will be the next thing you do and how you’re going to do it. You can begin to doubt that there ever will be a next thing that matches the last thing, but I’ve gotten much more at peace with that struggle over the years too. I’ve found the next thing time and time again now, so I’m learning to relax and believe that it will happen again.

The Artist’s Way is about creative unblocking and creative recovery. I’m not sure I need a lot of that any more, but I do need to keep taking care of my little inner artist, and for that reason the book remains useful and I’m willing to undertake the process again. I’ll be in a different place this time, but I will still profit from the effort.

If I have a struggle right now, it’s the struggle of figuring out how to reach where I think I need to be in the market place. Not only figuring out how, but also trying to keep the faith that it can and will happen. It’s easy to be worn down by the constant process of marketing. I’ve spent a fair amount of time at it this past year and I’ve got to say that I’ve been pretty successful all along the way. But a part of me still half way expect there to be a glass ceiling somewhere that I’m going to bump into and will be able to go no farther.

Rationally, I don’t believe that to be true any more. I really do believe that it’s just a matter of knocking on the right doors in the right way enough times that the doors finally begin to open. That, and continuing to do really strong work that makes those doors open more freely. Oh, and keeping up the process of exhibiting and publishing and all the other things that go into building a strong resume as well.

It really is a daunting process, but I am hoping that the Artist’s Way will help me keep the process from looking insurmountable. Thus far, I’ve simply put my best foot forward in as many places as I can. I’ve gotten more and more confident in that process, and it’s gotten easier to do, but it’s no small job to get past the gate keepers at a prestigious national calibre gallery. That’s what I need to figure out how to do next, and I’m hoping that the Artist’s Way will help me get on with that process.

For my friends, I hope it helps them strengthen their sense of capability, their sense of belief in themselves, lowers the resistance to doing the things that make their work as strong as possible and take them in the direction that they want to go. These people are experienced artists. They are quite capable on practically every level. Some need to make just one more step to be where I think they’d like to be. Others need the support to begin to believe in themselves enough to make their art a priority in their lives.

It will be interesting to see how this goes. I remember that going through the book for the first time was a bit tumultuous. It introduced all kinds of ideas that I was unfamiliar with. It suggested that I needed to make some changes in the way I related to friends and family. It was, perhaps like all growing processes, a bit messy. But in the end, the result was a stronger sense of mission for myself. A stronger belief in myself. A greater ability to withstand the challenges of the studio on a daily basis. It was a powerful tool for me. I hope it will be for them as well.