32nd ANNUAL SPRING PHOTOGRAPHY CONTEST

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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…

Finish it

I have been working on one of my books and I don’t remember working this hard when I wrote it.

Now you may say that’s because I’m a hack and I will admit that, I never had any ambition to write the Great American Novel, my heroes have always been pulpers, Dashiell Hammett, Rex Stout and Edgar Rice Burroughs, with a special nod to Walter B Gibson who as Maxwell Grant wrote two hundred and thirty-two Shadows novels. What devotion!

Jus give me a hero and a threat and maybe a mean, dastardly villain and leave me alone to write and I am content. Unfortunately that’s not all that has to be done.

The writing part is the easy part, just the word processor and a blank screen and word after lovely word and in time you have a novel.

And if that were all it takes, I would have five published novels and an income like J.K. Rowling and be living my life in the tabloids.

Fortunately I have avoided all that by being unpublishible.

That’s right, what I write will never be published. See publishing is a business. They want a guy or girl who can crank out a one hundred and fifty thousand word novel twice a year for the next twenty years and bring in half a million sales with each title. Do you have any idea what that takes?

That’s right; you have to find a way to hook the public. James Patterson has it, that’s about all he has. His books have become so formulaic that they aren’t worth reading, but that doesn’t stop hundreds of thousands from buying each new title. His “Girl’s” Murder Club, he thinks its Women, but none of the women in his stories are mature enough to be anything but girls, has nine titles in the series. There are even more Alex Cross titles and probably will continue so long as he wants to keep writing. I stopped reading Alex Cross when Patterson named his villain The Mastermind. Oh Good Grief! The Mastermind?

But his publisher is happy. And that is really the most important thing, cause a happy publisher is a driven publisher. You sell half a million copies and they’ll send you more than a month old box of Valentine’s candy, you can bet.

To even get a publisher you have to jump through enough hoops to make art look like a smart way to earn a living. You have to write the thing. No one is going to take your word for it, if you don’t have the finished copy you got diddly.

Then you have to start looking for an agent. Sure you can send it in without an agent…do you like the DMV? Let me tell you sending in a book “over the transom” is like going to get your license renewed on a Monday, it will be Thursday before your number gets called and by then you may be too weak to stagger to the counter. “Over the transom” submission don’t even go to the bottom of the pile, they get read, in their spare time, by under-paid, over-worked assistant editors and if they like it after all of the thousands of books they read, they might just pass it on to their boss. Why not just buy a Lotto ticket? You’re odds are better.

If you get an agent to look at your book, you have to convince them that they can make money flaking it cause they don’t get paid if they don’t sell your book and they won’t do a thing with something they can’t sell.

You can self-publish, don’t make a face, Mark Twain did it with Huck Finn and that seems to have worked out. Amazon even makes it pretty easy, so long as you submit your social security number and banking information. Try just leaving your car unlocked the next time you go shopping, the results will be the same and walking is such good exercise.

Jack the Giant Killer had it easy compared to the writer trying to get a book out of his computer and into the bookstores.

But…the biggest obstacle in front of any artist, writer or not is the oldest one, finishing what you start. You can’t do anything if it isn’t finished.

Did you frame it? Did you mat it/ did you go back and create a glossary if you used words which are made-up or not standard English?

I didn’t. Yeah, I know bitch and prod, whine and complain and then be guilty of what you are moaning about.

So that’s what I’ve been doing all day, creating that glossary and it looks like its going to take several days, maybe even a week or two. But there’s nothing to do but do it, cause you have to finish it. You have to finish what you start.

Silliness for Artists

FAMILY TREE OF VINCENT VAN GOGH



His dizzy aunt ---------------- Verti Gogh

The brother who ate prunes---- Gotta Gogh

The brother who worked at a convenience store ------ Stop N Gogh

The grandfather from Yugoslavia - U Gogh

His magician uncle ----------- Where-diddy Gogh

His Mexican cousin ----------- A Mee Gogh

The Mexican cousin's American half-brother --------- Gring Gogh

The nephew who drove a stage coach --------------- Wells-far Gogh

The constipated uncle -------- Can't Gogh

The ballroom dancing aunt ---- Tang Gogh

The bird lover uncle -------- Flamin Gogh

An aunt who taught positive thinking ------------- Way-to-Gogh

The little bouncy nephew ---- Poe Gogh

A sister who loved disco ---- Go Gogh

And his niece who travels the country in an RV --- Winnie Bay Gogh

Enchanted Hours

For the last several days I have been crawling around in the innards of two old thirty-five millimeter cameras.

Now why would anyone do that you ask? I mean everyone knows film is a dead medium. Digital is the ONLY way to go.

And yes, everything you’ve said, you didn’t really say it cause this is a blog, but you would have said it if you’d had one of those nifty, neat and cool, Dick Tracy writs radios, wouldn’t you? Course you would cause you know a thing or two and you have every right to express your opinions and when you see someone driving off a cliff it is your duty to tell them, “Hey you’re getting ready to drive off a cliff.”

So I’ve been told and it didn’t do one bit of good, cause I am a resurrectionist. No, not like Burke and Hare the Scots grave robbers of the nineteenth century, I love to try and bring back life into old stuff. I’m sitting next to a stereo system which cost thirty-seven dollars. It has a receiver, five disc changer and a turntable for LP’s. (If you aren’t old enough to remember LP’s get someone to explain them. They’re like Frisbees with a greater purpose and you could use them to listen to music before there was a tinny Ipod to carry around. Besides the old vinyl records sound better than those MP3 thingies and you can’t get Jackie Cooper’s band playing the theme to Hennesy on MP3. Yeah, I know, you don’t know what Hennesy was. Take it form me there was funny long before Seinfield.)

See I scrounged around at Goodwill and the Salvation Army looking for parts for my Frankenstein and over the years I’ve managed to put together two respectable stereos that way. No, they aren’t as cute as a Bose and they don’t have an Ipod dock, cause I don’t have an Ipod.

Back to my story, I got them because one of my pals have them lying around catching dust and didn’t know what to do with them and besides film is dead so they might as well go to the junkyard.

This wasn’t helped any by a double-breasted, hounds toothed, oil slicked photo expert who said, “Film is dead. These things aren’t worth anything to anyone and you should toss them before you trip over them and do yourself an injury.” Okay, maybe the injury part was made up, but that was the jest of it and it was just plain wrong.

It is true that film cameras are not in demand these days. Digital is just so easy, you point, shoot, download and print and it’s all done and over.

Back in the old days, you never really knew what was lurking inside the magic box, might be the next Ansel Adams or just a blurry piece of silver-coated plastic. What you thought I was going to say POS? No way, I’ve never seen a POS come from a camera. True I didn’t always get what I was aiming at but I always found a use for what I did get.

So my pal, brought the two cameras to me and said, in effect, “They’re junk, play with’em.”

The first part was wrong and the second part was right and that’s a fifty-fifty average which is not at all bad.

Okay so the first step was to check them out. Fortunately cameras aren’t all that complicated, one end has a hole in it and the other has a flat carrier to hold the treated plastic. You let light in through the end with the hole and move the plastic along so that you only take one image per measured section, unless you are in the advanced class and want to do a double exposure. Yes, tell them that’s what you had in mind even if you did just do it by accident, it’s always better to claim you did it on purpose.

Took a while to clean things up, nothing nasty or foul here just too much time sitting on a self not working and that is as bad for a camera as it is for a human. Once they were clean I could get into the insides and see what was working and what wasn’t.

Okay, now for the part where I fess up and admit that I do not know everything there is to know about every brand of camera. I used Miranda cameras when I was doing film and I had four or five of them and they never let me down. I also found that when you are working away from your home-20 it helps to have a machine which can use multiple lenses designed for something else and something cheap enough so that you don’t want to jump off a cliff if you drop it in the river. So if these had been Mirandas I would have been ready for teddy. But they weren’t.

Fortunately the Internet makes this sort of thing easy and it only took a coupla hours to find the correct user manuals. Good thing too. I never used a completely automated camera and didn’t know that one of my new toys has to have battery power or it is a paper weight. The other news flash was half of the problem with that camera was the batteries were inserted upside down. I wouldn’t have known without the manual and batteries for this sort of camera only run down every six months or so so I am pretty sure my pal either forgot which way they went of lost the manual and couldn’t refer to it to find out. Batteries in and presto, chango it works! Not only does it work, but it has more double-secret stuff than a house full of Deltas.

I was enchanted.

The other old timer wasn’t so far wrong either, it just needed a bit of cleaning and some touch up and it sprang to life too.

So now I can go back to my pal and say, “Tak’em they’re yours and they work.”

Of course to be really sure, I’ll have to run a roll of film through each one and wait on the developing, but in the mean time I can send the guys back home. It will be a hoot to take the pictures by later in the week and see the expression of the face of someone who thought I was administering Last Rites when al I was doing was applying a Band-aide.

And what do I get out of it? Seven, maybe eight days of unadulterated joy playing with the senior staff members, not to mention learning all about two brands of cameras I never had a chance to use in my film career.

They say that learning new things, not just taking on the daily crossword in the paper helps fight off Alzheimer’s. I don’t know and I do the crosswords too, but they don’t give me the jump-start trying to bring back old technology does.

And yes, when the film comes out of the soup I’ll give you a look. But why don’t you see if there’s some obsolete technology you can try. Just changing the tools and techniques you use might fire off your creative juices. You never know, there might be a cave painting in your future!

Pushing the Envelope

Submission Deadline: February 28, 2012

"Artworks NW 2012" (formerly "Hundred Valleys")

Umpqua Valley Arts Association, 1624 W. Harvard, Roseburg, OR 97471

http://www.uvarts.com
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Submission Deadline: February 28, 2012

"Photoworks NW 2012" (formerly titled "Best Photo")

Umpqua Valley Arts Association, 1624 W. Harvard, Roseburg, OR 97471

http://www.uvarts.com

Random Acts Of Time

Call for Art: Random Acts of Time      OCCCA Call for Art: Random Acts of Time Curator and Juror: William Moreno Online Entries only, click here to enter!  Deadline for entries, March 31st, 2012  Exhibition Dates: May 5th - June 23rd, 2012       Juror Statement  This exhibition investigates our relationship to the concept of time, the choices we make and the random, uncontrollable events that shape our lives. From the moment we begin our journey into the cacophony of the world - a series of decisions, choices and twists of fate guide us - often lurching or blissful and occasionally tragic. What have we chosen for ourselves? When has our hand been forced? Where have random or serendipitous events changed our course? When have we triumphed? What have we lost? What have we remembered and forgotten? Time is a recurring thematic in artists' works - witness the public response and fascination with Christian Marclay's 24-hour montage The Clock. Exploring that inexorable passage via divergent points-of-view, media and imagery demands introspection and perspective. This exhibition will investigate what binds or propels us, notions of conscious or unconscious experiences and the narratives we collect as we negotiate our lives.      About the Curator and Juror   William Moreno is a curator, writer and director of William Moreno Contemporary which mounts periodic exhibitions. He was most recently the Associate Director of ArtPadSF, a hotel- based art fair. William was the founding Executive Director of the Claremont Museum of Art and the director of The Mexican Museum, San Francisco. He has organized and overseen numerous exhibits including: Karl Benjamin: Conversations in Color; Ephemeral: Explorations in Light: an international, multi-media exhibition featuring contemporary light-based installations and sculptures; Multiverse, delving into the hypothesis that physical reality exists within a set of multiple, parallel universes and Vexing: Female Voices from East LA Punk, which explored a singular music scene.  He has been a featured panelist addressing topics ranging from the contemporary role of museums and the international art landscape at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club, the American Institute of Architecture, Latino Art Now Conference, William Turner Gallery, ArtPadSF, Flagstop and others. He has appeared on KCET's series California's Gold as well as other media. William serves as board President of LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) and on the Advisory Board for the California Associations of Museums.   Orange County Center for Contemporary Art 117 North Sycamore Santa Ana, CA USA, 92701    www.occca.org  Opening events sponsored by Reed's Orange County Center For Contemporary Art 117 N Sycamore. Santa Ana, CA 92701  www.occca.org 714 667 1517 · Hours: Th & Sun 12-5pm, Fri & Sat 12-9 1st Saturday Receptions: 6-10pm OCCCA is located at the corner of 2nd and Sycamore in the Santa Ana Artists Village. There is no entrance fee.  Please see the web site for more information, www.occca.org , or call the gallery during regular operating hours. # # #

Orange County Center for Contemporary Art Is an artist run California nonprofit corporation.  OCCCA affiliate artists are committed to presenting contemporary art exhibitions in an atmosphere conducive to discussion without censorship. OCCCA is a 501(c)3 non-profit corporation and all donations are tax deductible to the fullest extent provided by law