How Are You Living Your Life?
I have been very fortunate in that I have been able to make a living doing what I love for most of my adult life, despite the fact that what I loved doing at any given moment changed many times. Since college, I have lived on both coasts and a variety of places in between. I have been a prop master, a milliner, a welder, a set carpenter, an html coder, an art director, an artist and, along with photographer (and my fiancé) Nicole Rae, started an online magazine for photographers, called Faded & Blurred which, oddly enough, often depends entirely on those careers that came before it. Though I have followed a number of paths (in fact, one of my best friends in the world would often tease me about my “career du jour”), they all were centered on creating something.
I was lucky growing up to have been encouraged to “follow my passion” by my Mom. She even gave me a book one year for my birthday called Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow. ”Life’s too short to get stuck doing something you hate”, she would tell me. She was right.
A few years ago, I found myself teaching Photoshop at a photography school here in southern California. It’s not something that I ever seriously considered, but what I found was that I really enjoyed the process. I enjoyed creating the various projects and lessons and seeing the “aha” moment when a student connected with what I was teaching. At the same time, Nikki was finding her voice as a photographer and I had started painting again. Several of my paintings had appeared in group shows in local galleries and I was exploring a new direction for what I had hoped would be my first solo show. Then, shortly after the Worldwide Photowalk in July of 2009, the unthinkable happened. Just nine days after being diagnosed with cancer, early on the morning of August 19th, my Mom died. Nine days earlier, her oncologist explained that she had a large mass in her lungs and she also had four tumors in her brain. There was nothing they could do. When she died, I shut down. I didn’t leave the house much for weeks and my Dad called me every day for a month, “just to make sure you don’t do anything stupid”, he would tell me. I would be lying if I said I hadn’t considered it. Nikki checked on me every day and I’m convinced that she saved my life. My Mom and I were best friends since I was old enough to know what best friends were and now that she was gone, I felt lost. We had just started Faded & Blurred and though I managed to make it to our first photo walk in Venice, I honestly don’t really remember much of it. I stopped painting and stopped taking on any client-based design. For the next two years, I threw myself into Faded & Blurred, determined to grow it from a simple blog to a respected online magazine. I redesigned the site three times in less than two years, even completely changing platforms from Joomla to WordPress. F&B had become my White Whale. “What if I just changed this, or what if I just tweaked that?”, I would ask Nikki. “It’s great the way it is. Just leave it alone”, she would say (and still does). “Yeah, but this would be better…”
To make a long story at least a little shorter, what I have come to realize is this: I am happiest when my hands are in motion, when I am creating. I would love to come up with a way to make money while I sleep, and maybe I will someday, but I also know that it really won’t matter. Not really. Sure, it will make paying the mortgage or buying food easier, but it won’t make me any happier. What I realized is that for me, life is far too short to keep hiding, and that’s really what I’ve been doing if I’m being completely honest. I’ve been hiding behind fear, behind grief, behind the mistaken belief that what I do doesn’t matter “in the grand scheme of things”. I was wrong. It does matter. It all matters. To a seamstress, a hem matters. To a baker, a perfect loaf of sourdough matters. To a designer, things like color, layout, type and message matter. The image at the top of this article is called the Holstee Manifesto and I happened upon it a few months ago. It spoke to me, to who I was and to who I had let myself become. I bought a copy, which is now hanging in my studio behind my computer, so I never forget what I’m supposed to be doing and why I’m supposed to be doing it. I decided to finally let go and create new work, rather than just being a critic; I needed to put something back into the flow for others to love or hate. I even started painting again and though I was not able to pick up where I left off years before, the new work looks to be every bit as powerful. I decided to start this new blog for a couple of reasons. One, to talk about the things that move and affect me, but two, and more importantly, to act as a vehicle to document the evolution of my creative process and, in a way, hold me to task on moving forward. I really have no idea what moving forward looks like at the moment, but I am excited about it and hope that at least some of you will come along for the ride.
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