Ed Schlotzhauer

An artists journey

Category: Fear

  • Have You Already Done Your Best Work?

    Have You Already Done Your Best Work?

    Have you already done your best work? Have you taken your best image or painted your best picture, or sculpted your best piece? In other words, have you peaked and it’s all down hill from here? What a frightening idea.

    Yet I believe this is a great fear of many artists. Me, too. You love what you have already created. How can you ever top it?

    You have to believe in yourself and in your process.

    Your body of work

    Does your portfolio define you? Many of us believe it does. I think it would better to look at it as saying your portfolio represents the best of what you have done up to now. You will change and move on and do different things with time. Your portfolio doesn’t define you, it reflects you. Who you were up to today.

    If you destroyed your whole library you should be able to go on from here and build a new, better one. Of course, none of us would want to do that. We have done a lot of great work in the past. We have many impossible to recreate scenes. Our library or portfolio represents a huge investment of both time and creative energy. We should embrace that and celebrate it.

    But the creator is much more important than the creation. If I go to the Louvre or Orsay (back in the good old days) or another great museum I see people lined up admiring some of the important and enduring works of history. But the focus is on the art. This is only appropriate at these museums because the artist is dead. It is much more interesting to study and appreciate the people who created these pieces. They are the genius. The art is just a reflection of their vision. These famous works came out of their minds and through their skills. What was it about them that allowed them to create and overcome?

    In the same way, you are the one who makes images. If you have made great images in the past you almost definitely will in the future unless something changed to take away your skill. This can happen, through life-altering events like a wreck or a stroke. But barring something like that, it should be true that your creativity grows and persists. Very few of us can use this excuse.

    An idea

    A great image is just an idea you had at a particular time. You will have more. It is your ideas and your vision that creates. Ansel Adams famously said “The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it!“. In other words, images are made in your head, not in a camera.

    The “muse” or our creativity has ups and downs. Sometimes it seems like you are empty. You fear you will never do great work again. Be patient. Keep working at whatever you find while you wait for the spark to return. It will. Always.

    Fear

    Don’t be limited by fear of trying something new. Even if you are famous for one look or style, at some point it limits and boxes you in and you start to become stale. Then it is time to re-invent yourself. Don’t be afraid to make a sharp 90 degree turn and do something completely different. If that is what your creativity is calling you to do, follow. Better to follow it into uncharted territory than to have it leave you behind.

    And sometimes we look at the work we have done and think “Wow, I can never do better than that”. This creates fear of failure. We become afraid of creating anything because it might not be as good as what we have already done.

    This is because we are trying to do something like a work we did in the past. Don’t worry about trying to recreate an old look. Go with where you are now. It probably won’t be the same as what you did before, but it is you. It represents where you are now in your life. If you are growing as a person and an artist, it will be better.

    Push

    Always be pushing yourself. You are the only standard of measure that matters to you. Learn, grow, experiment, be open to new thoughts and ideas.

    When you don’t feel creative, work anyway. Just doing the work is refreshing and therapeutic. It is like “putting in the reps” that is required to learn and master almost anything. Keep pushing and when the creativity floods back, you have improved and can do even better work. You will be better equipped to keep up with the inspiration.

    Keep moving. Don’t ever just sit and feel sorry for yourself. Get out and do something. Don’t try to recreate your best works, do new things that are better.

  • Play by the Rules

    Play by the Rules

    OK, I admit it, I don’t do well with rules. I’m a “ask forgiveness, not permission” guy. I don’t cheat and I never take advantage of people, I just don’t necessarily play by the rules. And for context, this discussion is mainly about the world of art, so don’t extrapolate my malady too far.

    Even if you don’t read the rest of this post please study this cartoon. A classic Calvin & Hobbs from the great Bill Watterson. This has been on my wall for at least 20 years. It perfectly captures my feelings about rules. 🙂

    Whose rules?

    Ah, this is a root of the problem. Who has the authority to make up rules I have to follow? Where did they get this power? What governing board set the standards?

    Now, I’m not an anarchist in my everyday life. Not entirely. But in my artistic domain I do not give anyone authority to dictate rules about my work.

    It seems to be human nature to want to control other people. Perhaps it is a power trip. Perhaps it is financially motivated to protest self interests. Maybe it is insecurity. I am a big believer in the old saying “Those who can, do. Those who can’t become critics”. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I have seldom seen successful and respected artists put themselves forward as a critic. They do not see any need to, they are too busy creating. And if someone else wants to go off a different direction, fine.

    What rules?

    The art world has no shortage of rules to live by. Each little group wants to exclude you if you don’t play by their rules. So my work may be criticized because it it too realistic, too abstract, too colorful, too little color, lacking in social message, too much social message, too sharp, too blurry, too painterly, no people, only people, etc.

    Even on a more safe level of visual theory, there is the “rule of thirds”, rules of balance, of leading lines, of framing; there has to be a definite foreground, middle ground, and background; don’t put the subject in the center, expose to the right, the subject has to be sharp, water should be smoothed with long exposure, never shoot in the middle of the day, always shoot on a tripod, …

    Being Conventional

    None of these so called rules make a work of art. If you are new to the craft these guidelines help you quickly learn to make images that are accepted as “conventional” and inoffensive.

    Let me give an anecdote from my own experience. It goes way back, so I’m sure the statute of limitations has expired. I was an early adopter of Photoshop. The excellent camera club I was a member of had monthly competitions. I was the first to enter a “Photoshopped” image. It, of course, won the blue ribbon, because the post processing improved the basic image a lot. When I “confessed” how it had been processed and modified there was a lot of hand wringing and discussion. Some people even wondered if such images should be allowed in their competition. What I did was outside the norm and the expectation, therefore maybe a violation of the rules. At the least it was suspect as not being fair or in the proper spirit of photography. Yet, they chose it as Best of Show.

    I have not been associated with that group for a long time, but from what I have seen, it would be almost impossible to win a contest there now without significant Photoshop processing. A new normal. Since it is conventional it is acceptable.

    Why have rules?

    I think I was on the right track earlier when I said rules create works that are accepted as conventional. Rules are normative, to use the proper term. Accepting a set of rules defines a baseline, a norm, it regularizes things.

    There are times to follow the rules exactly. My accountant needs to follow accepted practices. I fully expect my doctor to follow best practices as he has learned them and as his profession requires. If I go to a restaurant I want them to follow all the health and safety and food preparation regulations.

    But for artists? Well, yes. This may seem like I’m spinning 180 and shooting down my own arguments, but I believe the widely known rules are valuable for artists. Knowing and following them would protect the world from some of the useless stuff thrown around by people who do not know the history of their medium, its limits, or the social conventions people like to abide by.

    I believe all new artists should learn the rules and spend quite a bit of time creating boring and conventional work. It is good practice and it instills some discipline. I’m not saying artists should go to art school. That works for some but not everyone. I don’t believe there are any valid credentials that qualify someone to be an artist.

    After the rules are well understood, then comes the time to start exploring the edges. To start experimenting with breaking the rules that are limiting you if that is consistent with your style. Most experiments will be failures and the learning is that the rules are there because they point out something of general truth. But sometimes… Sometimes some new truth is discovered. Sometimes creatively breaking a rule leads to good art.

    If I break the rules?

    What happens if (when) I break one or more of the rules? Do the art police come and confiscate my computer? Do I go on a secret list shared by galleries and collectors to blacklist my works?

    Actually, nothing happens. If I break a rule it is an experiment. The experiment will have one of 3 outcomes:

    • I love it, do more like that;
    • I hate it, don’t do it again;
    • or that’s interesting, it has promise, I need to modify it and try again.

    And the people who view and potentially purchase my work will look at it and either say:

    • wow, I love it
    • yech, I hate it
    • or eh, don’t care.

    The combination of these 2 sets of votes determines if breaking the rule was a success. And my opinion about what I like is the overriding vote. Note in my value system customers have a vote but people who are just critics do not.

    Creating somebody else’s art

    Playing by the rules guides us to create art that is acceptable to the largest audience. Like the paint by number cartoon above, we, in effect, create somebody else’s art. Our art follows the pattern that many other people follow. “Wow, it looks like Ansel Adams.” “Wow, it looks like John Shaw.” “Wow, it looks like John Paul Caponigro.”

    These are good people to look like, until you develop your own style, your own vision of what you want to say. Then the rules are holding you back. At some point you have to make your own rules. To be you, you have to make something different.

    Nothing new is ever created without a painful break from the past. Impressionism would never have been established if Monet, Renoir and the others had listened to conventional wisdom. John Rewald, in History of Impressionism, said The only thing to be learned from the critics was how to suffer the sting of their attacks and carry on just the same, accomplishing a task which more then any other required serenity.

    If you play by the rules you will just get better and better at what everybody else does. That is not a waste. But to create something new and creative, rules, like eggs for an omelet, have to be broken.

  • It’s Been Done

    It’s Been Done

    It’s been done. A dreaded phrase we hear all the time that is meant to dismiss and disparage our creative work. Don’t fall for it. Just because someone says it has been done does not mean you don’t have just as much right to do your own take on it.

    Over and over

    Artists have always done the same subjects over and over. There are only a limited number of subjects and not that many truly different ways to approach them.

    Are you not going to do ponds because Monet had “done” them? Are you not going to do a night sky because Van Gogh was the only one to be able to do that? Are you not going to do landscapes because there are no more to do after Ansel Adams finished? Are you going to forever avoid flowers because O’Keeffe did everything that could be done?

    Of course not.

    Are you going to avoid shooting any subject that has ever been photographed?

    Let’s see, landscapes have been done; portraits have been done; street photography has been done; abstracts have been done; food has been done; travel has been done… It is getting pretty hard to find something that has never been shot. Near impossible.

    So “never been done” must not be the important test.

    Every artist repeats subjects other artists have done before. The real question is, do I have something new to say? Can I make this fresh and unique? Can I offer something that will make my viewers think new thoughts?

    Writers, for instance, all write the same stories but try to make them fresh. It is said that there are only, depending who is giving the data, 3 to 36 fiction plots. All books are a variation of the basic patterns. A. Hyatt Mayor has an interesting take on it when he says: The really original artist does not try to find a substitute for boy meets girl, but creates the illusion that no boy has ever met a girl before.

    Likewise, can we create the illusion that our work is original?

    Do it different

    Just because a famous artist did the subject before does not mean they created the definitive work that can never be topped or even equaled. An artist should have an unshakable belief in his vision. We should not be timid and shy away from controversy. No critic owns the right to disallow your work.

    Creative thinking may simply mean the realization that there is no particular virtue is doing things the way they have always been done. Rudolph Flesch

    If we are going to do things the way they have always been done, then why bother? If we are just copying other work,that is not adding anything interesting to our art. Re-envision what has been done. Do it different.

    Creativity is not usually something radically new. Usually it is an incremental build on the past. It is the little twist we came up with that makes it uniquely our own. It is our own spin on the conventional way it has been done.

    I think artists of necessity are a little crazy. Obsessed. Focused. This drives us to separate ourselves from the crowd. To share our vision and show that we see things differently. I seem to be putting in a lot of quotes this time, so here are 2 more:

    Follow your enthusiasm … The only quality common to all great artists and creative people is that they are obsessed with their work. Richard Avedon

    If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much. Bill Swanson

    Apply your style and vision

    Our vision usually applies to the unique way we see the same thing other people see. We will not often see something that no one else in history has ever seen before. The secret is what we bring to the common. Can we make something new out of things everyone else sees? Can be see different? Be different?

    That is what we are called on to do as artists. Everything has been seen or thought of before. But how can we bring a new interpretation, a fresh point of view, an unencumbered view?

    Finishing with a final quote:

    I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it. Garrison Keillor

    Most people are burdened with reality. A thing is what it is and can’t be anything else. What a limiting view! A thing can be almost anything we can envision it to be. That is creativity.

    Don’t waste time being an imitation of anybody. Spend your life being yourself.

  • Vulnerable

    Vulnerable

    Being an artist is creative and rewarding. It is also a position that is vulnerable and lonely. I made my career in an objective, logical engineering world. In contrast, the artist’s world I live in now is based on opinion and perception. I have never felt so vulnerable and out of control.

    Lone-wolf

    A popular view is that the artist is a lone wolf. Fiercely independent, self-sufficient, going his own way regardless of what anyone thinks. To a certain extent, this is true. I think an artist has to have the fortitude to maintain his independence in the face of adversity and pressure to conform.

    Unfortunately, there is a cost to being this lone wolf. A lone wolf is, well, alone. He is isolated, vulnerable, having to go it alone. It’s a position where you don’t have a support infrastructure. You don’t really have people to build you up when you are knocked down. You don’t have people to take care of things and offload work from you – you have to do everything yourself. This can get debilitating at times.

    Some artists maintain a network of mentors, confidants, and collaborators. I envy them.

    Courage

    For me, one of the hardest things is to have the courage and determination to keep pressing on. I am not a natural marketer. It is hard to “put myself out there”. Making noise for myself is a very uncomfortable thing. Especially when I am continually getting knocked down emotionally and passed over.

    An artist has to believe in himself. To believe he has a vision and a message that people should pay attention to. This has to carry him through rough patches when things seem to be going against him. When you seem to be a lone voice in the world, this can be hard to maintain.

    Coming in in the morning with a fresh resolve can be trying. Sometimes it is difficult to say “I am an artist; I believe in myself and know I have something to bring the world”. And act on it.

    Rejection

    Rejection is a part of life, especially for an artist. We have to expect it, even seek it. If you are not being rejected, you’re not trying.

    But it takes a toll. I think even the strongest pay an emotional cost when we are rejected. It’s like being back in school and not being picked for the team or not receiving the scholarship or just not being asked to sit at the table with the “cool” kids. You know it is going to happen sometimes, but it still leaves a bruise.

    With rejection the world seems to be telling me I’m not good enough. That I don’t stack up to the competition. That I probably should just give up.

    But the world is a bitter and heartless place. I have to shrug it off and believe my own inner voice rather than a message some stranger is giving me. I have to believe in myself, even when others don’t.

    Indifference

    Possibly even worse than rejection is indifference. When my art seems to not matter at all to anybody. When everything seems to be futile.

    This is another tool the world uses to try to crush the aspirations of most artists. and it works a lot of the time.

    I sometimes think I would rather have someone write me and tell me they hate my work. At least they took a moment to acknowledge it. (No, it’s an exaggeration. I’m not really asking you to tell me how much you hate what I do.)

    Will power

    This has been much more negative than I usually am. Vulnerability can do that. Rejection and isolation can be cumulative.

    But I think the real point I am trying to make is that these things will come. They happen to everybody. The question is, what am I going to do about it?

    I said an artist has to believe in himself. That is kind of trite, but nevertheless true. Being vulnerable or discouraged or feeling isolated are part of what we have to accept if we call ourselves an artist. If we are feeling down are we going to pick ourselves up, metaphorically, and find the will to go on? Or are we going to pack it in and stop doing our art? It is our call. Nobody else can decide.

    I know of artists who claim to seek rejection and collect rejection letters. Good for them, if they are telling the truth. But good for them regardless, because the attitude is right.

    If I apply for something and get rejected, I have to understand that just means I was not right for that exhibit or the juror was looking for a different style or the gallery has a different culture. The rejection was not a legal certificate from a higher authority saying “you’re not an artist and you should give this up immediately.”

    I am an artist. I believe in what I do. That has to come from inside. If I listen to what other people say I will doubt myself. If I doubt myself, it will inhibit my creativity and my ability to express my vision and my will to apply for that next opportunity. I’m a lone wolf.

    Vulnerable

    Back full circle to the idea of vulnerability. Yes, I am vulnerable in the sense that I am out there, on the edge, exposed to the world, all alone. I have to take the hits and survive. I have to have a strong enough belief in my ability that it can carry me through the rejections and indifference.

    This can be one of the hardest parts of the art world. Many artists are introverts and somewhat shy and self doubting. We have to get over ourselves and put our work out there for the world to deal with. Rejection will come, but we have to go on if we believe we have something worthwhile.

    I will close with a favorite quote from Theodore Roosevelt, popularized recently by Brene Brown:

    It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

    To me, this is what it is about. I have to be in the arena to become what I want to be.

  • Indoor Time

    Indoor Time

    Most of us are having to adjust to rather extreme temporary measures in our daily lives. Our focus has become on indoor time.I won’t say it is a “new normal” because I hate that phrase and it is tossed around too easily.

    This has caused most of us to spend way more time indoors than we are used to and are comfortable with. As photographers, we are accustomed to being out shooting a lot. So what are you doing with your new indoor time? I’ll give you a brief rundown of some of what I am doing.

    Filing

    I hate to admit it, but I was thousands of images behind in sorting and tagging and grading. I have spent MANY hours in Lightroom recently trying to get caught up. I’m not there yet, but I have dealt with thousands of images. That is tiring.

    But it also can be rewarding. I have run across a lot of images I had mostly forgotten about. It makes me feel good to find these pockets of images I really like. It encourages me that maybe I have a history of making decent images. Plus, they remind me of good times and great experiences I have had.

    Do I really need to do all this detailed filing? Probably not. But it is critically important (to me) to go through the sorting and filtering process to narrow them down to the set of images I am proud to show to anyone. For me, this takes several rounds of serious evaluation and making hard choices. It is very difficult for me to “let go” of images I really like that don’t make the cut.

    Post-processing

    Along with filing comes post-processing. This seems like a never-ending struggle. Trying to catch up on thousands of images that have not been processed yet brings with it the opportunity to edit many of them.

    I am constantly learning new techniques for processing in Lightroom and Photoshop. So this is a great opportunity for me not only to catch up, but to practice some new methods and get more efficient. And my values and vision seems to evolve all the time.

    I make it harder on myself because I am often not content to process an image and have done with it for all time. No, every time I take a new look at many of my images I have a different inspiration about what to do with a few of them.

    So between trying to catch up on a backlog of lots of images and re-processing many that I see differently now, I have a lot of work. Luckily I enjoy the post-processing in the computer. I view it as one of the creative parts of photography. But it is very time consuming.

    Backup

    Yes, I am a computer nerd. Well, I used to be. Now the computer is just a tool. I no longer have an intimate relationship with them. But as I have written in the past, I am fanatical about backup. This has been an opportunity to review my system and make some changes.

    I have levels and levels of backup. One of the last levels is rotating storage offsite (where they’re then backed up again. ☺ ). My offsite disks have been too small for a while to hold all of my main catalog. I had to restrict them to the “most important” images. That has been uncomfortable. It was a chink in the armor. So I took this opportunity to replace the offsite storage with larger disks. Now I can backup everything in my main catalog to each of them.

    WD makes some great little portable disk drives. This MyPassport drive seems very reliable and pretty fast. And the physical size is amazing for 5 Terabytes of storage. I do not receive any benefit from referring this. I included an Amazon link, but, honestly, I would recommend finding another vendor.

    Warning, when you attach a 5 T disk to your system don’t think you are going to just copy your files to it and be done in a few minutes. If your computer can transfer data to the backup at a rate of 100MBytes/sec, it will take a few days to do the initial copy. Subsequent updates only take minutes, because they typically only affect a few GBytes. There is 3 orders of magnitude between a GByte and a TByte.

    Study and read

    For an introvert like me, free time means reading or study time.

    One of the benefits of the popularity of photography is that there is limitless information available, online and in books. You remember those things printed on paper, don’t you?

    Ah, but that glut of information brings other problems. Who do you trust? How to separate the useful from the useless? There is a lot of bad or useless information out there. You can learn good information from a bad example, but I don’t recommend it unless that is the only alternative.

    I admit to being rather jaded. I am technical and creative and very experienced. It is hard for me to find someone I trust to give me good information. I don’t want to come across as arrogant. This is something that happens with lots of experience in a field.

    Two instructors I can recommend who consistently do great training are Dave Cross and Ben Willmore. They are fantastically deep in their knowledge of the tools and are good communicators. Plus, they mostly teach how to use and understand the tools, not “cookbook” methods for copying the results of someone else.

    So, in the spirit of good disclosure, I have been spending a lot of time on CreativeLive, KelbyIOne, The Nature Photography Network, John Paul Camponigro’s web site, and B&H’s archive of videos.

    I have also been reading books for inspiration, such as Creative Black & White, by Harold Davis, and More Than A Rock, by Guy Tal.

    Study your equipment

    I believe intimate knowledge of your equipment pays off. If you can’t use your tools rapidly and with little thought they will get in your way rather than help you be creative. This is an opportunity to spend time practicing with your camera.

    I moved to a mirrorless body about a year ago. I confess that I have struggled with it some. It is not as convenient and user friendly as a larger and more mature DSLR. I am comfortable using it for normal day to day shooting situations, but I could not pass the blindfold test like I could with previous bodies. That is, I could not reliably set the camera up for a particular shooting situation blindfolded (or in the dark).

    I love the quality of the images from the mirrorless camera, but I am having to spend extra time making it natural and intuitive to use. I am working on that as part of my down time.

    Get out and shoot

    I may make some people mad for saying this, but I am out shooting almost every day. Our officials here kindly allow us to be out walking, biking, etc. I take advantage of it to wander with my camera. I try to get out walking 2-4 miles a day. It is very good for me health-wise and for my sanity. Plus I like to practice shooting every day. Sometimes I even get a decent image.

    I also occasionally jump in the car and drive out of town for some photos. For instance, we had an unusually large snow last week (as I am writing this). I was out all afternoon shooting. It was great and very refreshing! For the sticklers, I was never within 20 feet of another person. But then, I do not worry about Covid and I am not concerned about catching it when I am out and about. I refuse to be paralyzed by fear.

    Time well spent

    These are some of the things I am doing in my “confinement”. I hope I will look back on it as time well spent. A chance to regroup, catch up on some things, refresh and recharge. I hope you are able to make productive use of your time indoors, too.

    Let me know how you are doing. I would love to hear from you. Sign up to receive notifications. Please visit my gallery site and let me know what you think.

    I hope you are well and I’m glad you’re reading! Even if it is because you are bored. 🙂