Fun, fun, fun…

Till your daddy takes your T-bird away.
That’s what the Beach Boys promised and you know the Beach Boys would never lie to you, they’re very honest boys.

I mean if you can’t trust five, clean-cut, blonde-haired, dazzling smile, Ivy-coated, surfer dudes before there was a surfer dude, who can you trust?

Excuse me while I pry my tongue from my cheek and continue, you really should listen to the fun part.

That’s right, I’m talking to all of you serious, dedicated artists out there, are you having fun yet?

If you aren’t maybe you should be doing something else. Let’s face it making a living from art in the big centers of art frenzy like L.A. and New York is tough, but out here in the wilds of Oregon, you could do better selling lemonade.

My favorite writing instructor, Lawrence Block, an exception to the old rule, “If you can’t do teach,” does, he does a lot, he does it well, he gets paid for doesing it and that kids is no easy trick. He says, “The odds of getting published are so remote you might as well write what you like. That way you will at least enjoy the process and if nothing else happens you won’t be left with shattered dreams, you enjoyed getting there.

Now that is sage advice for anyone working in the creative fileds, do what you like so that you enjoy the process of getting there.

I had forgotten that. I had, I’ve been so busy trying to get my life back on track after falling into the hands of the Croakers and losing six weeks to the hospital and missing all of the art shows of the Fall and Winter that I was frantic, trying to find new avenues and techniques to guarantee my place in the next big show.

I was crushed after spending a week or ten days working up a perfectly nifty design for the Ancient Americas show only to discover if I got a piece in I would have to ship it to the show and that would in the face of all of my indentures to the medical profession be prohibitive. There I sat with a perfectly good design and nowhere to use it. What a waste!

But it wasn’t. I learned something new, I dimpled my old brain and I came away with a little design which won’t do me any good right away but will someday and that’s the trick, I really enjoyed doing it and if it doesn’t pay off now, it will.

I had completely forgotten that at the time. I was so angry and disappointed and frustrated that I wanted to kick the cat. Fortunately all of my cats are too clever and too fast to be kicked by an old fart fresh from the Quacker and they ran circles around me until I was so dizzy that I had to sit down.

And while I was sitting two ancient 35 mm cameras fell into my lap. Okay, they didn’t fall, but they did come as a surprise and they did need attention.

They weren’t top of the line cameras, not at all collectible, not even something to make the audience gasp on Antiques Road show. They were just old film cameras in need of some love and understanding. I spent the better part of a week working on them. I had to search the Internet to find and download the manuals for them,

http://www.butkus.org/chinon/

And then I had to find the proper batteries to bring life into their old tired bodies, I even had to scrounge around Goodwill to find a lens for one of them.

And you know what happened next? I got both of them working again and sent them back to their owners with the manuals and batteries and a word of caution. And I was left with nothing but the web address for manuals I no longer had cameras to wonder about.

(Read the instructions The three most important words in the English language Valentine’s Day aside, love matters most to the young at heart but instructions last forever.)

And yet, I wasn’t left with nothing. I had a lot of fun. I had a ball bringing life back to those old guys. The owner took them to a photography studio which shall remain nameless and was told that they weren’t worth fixing. Boys and girls, Rule 2, people in the business of selling you new anythings make poor consultants when it comes to fixing old things which just might serve as well as the new things they are selling.

Now I won’t claim that there was any ill will, maybe they didn’t even check the camera’s battery compartment, even though they should have known that without the correct batteries both of these cameras are paper weights. They won’t work at all, even the films advance lever won’t turn. Maybe they just didn’t care enough, but when I did check the batteries in one of the cameras were inserted in the wrong orientation with the negative post where the positive post should have been and you know electricity is very picky about that sort of thing, it doesn’t like it at all.

If the battery had been fresh and hot there’s a very good chance that the electronics on this camera would have been toast. But the batteries were dead and there was no harm, no foul. Except my pal got some pretty bad advice.

I got something else, I got the look of delight when I returned the cameras and saw the joy it brought the owner to have the old guys back on the job. No, modern, digital cameras can run rings around both of the old timers and don’t need a trip to the processing plant before the results can be seen, but there’s something magical about film which can’t be explained to those raised on the CCD.

Okay, so enough about the cameras, you don’t care about cameras old or new, you are an artist, a rigorous, demanding, exacting artist. You don’t compromise, don’t minimize, you don’t commercialize your art. You are an aesthete.

But are you having any fun?

Sure suffering for your art is a long held belief, but should it be something you take to your heart of hearts? Can you enjoy yourself and still be a serious artist?

I sure hope so.

See the reality is you won’t sell enough to make warren Buffett shake in his boots, Donald Trump won’t forsake his empire and but on sack cloth and ashes and Time will not feature you on its cover. Sure you may become a famous artist and I sincerely hope that you do, but in the meantime, while you are waiting, wouldn’t it be a good idea to enjoy what you do?

I told pal, this was a coupla years back so I have matured since then, I told her that photographs should look like photographs and that a little judicious tweaking, shifting colors and making some adjustments was fine but beyond that anything else was just a photographer trying to be a painter without having the skills. I was completely wrong.

I still think photographs should look like photographs, but photographs are a very plastic medium, they can look like a lot of stuff. And I stopped taking myself so seriously and started having more fun. Wanna see a seagull?

I’ll bet you have. Now take a look at my seagull.

Not so common, but what if it was to get a complete make-over?

Now it’s like one of those dancing Mayan patterns on the Central American pyramids.

What about a bicycle?

I found this one lying in the snow. But I thought it had more to say so I adjusted it.

Now it looks like Norman Rockwell had a word in my ear.

Is it a painting? No of course not, but it sure was fun. And that is what I am trying to have a lot more of these days.

The next time the Quack gets her hands on me I might not come back with the same skills, so I want to use what I have right now, while I still have them. That means enjoying what I am doing while I do it, returning old cameras to service, installing a hard drive in a nearly scraped computer or taking an ordinary photograph and making it a bit more interesting. Now that guys is fun, fun, fun…