I’m hard at work on another web project, collecting materials for a stunning interview with one of Pixiport’s premier artists, and also trying to finish a screenplay at the moment, but lest I should lose my reader, (singular) here is another slightly revised reprint of an article I wrote a couple years ago for Pixiport’s E-Magazine:

I wrote a bouncing check today. It was at the Bank of Chaos. You know the one, that place we all go to pull creative kernels from the ether - that cauldron where ideas are stirred in a pot-luck soup of half-forgotten memories and unfinished dreams - where sound investments and practice pay inspiration, novelty, and wonder.

As these things go, I suppose mine would be considered a high volume account. At least my family eats partially dependent upon my creative trade.

So, I’ve been getting a little careless, taking on jobs like I lived on a planet with a fifty hour daily rotation instead of this damned skinny twenty-four hour stint which saddles us all. Recently, a friend and fellow photographer finally went all digital, consigning his old photo chemicals to the illegal drug manufacturers, where they’ll get  some use. His trade has always been “spaghetti-portraiture” - school yearbook type stuff, youth sports, etc… Now digital, he started doing weddings - actually taking on way too much work than he currently has resources to deliver in a timely fashion. Wedding shots are very special but usually unappreciated if they’re delivered after the couple has long since divorced.

He called me, desperate to catch up on some color-correcting, leveling, and cropping that needed to be done on a wedding he’d shot last May. I’m snowed under with other contract work at the moment, but he convinced me that his reputation was at stake. He said the mother of the bride was “mole”-esting him with angry calls, saying he was slow as “mole”-asses. So I told him to go ahead and drop off the DVDRom-disc full of raw images and this seemed to “mole”-ify his fears.

I apologize for my “mole”-evolent attitude, but I guess I have “moles” on the brain because, you see,  the bride in those shots had a doozy smack in the middle of her forehead. I had to be careful not to cover it while having to use Photoshop’s heal brush to dampen the river of shine which lay an inch thick atop her caked orange powdered make-up. She was, simply put, not very pretty.

Now I realize I’m being unkind and hardly fair. I inherited a genetic predisposition to age rather gracefully, though with an additional nod to Mike Meyers’ Austin Powers character, a lifetime addiction to the caffeine in cola has left me with the teeth of a proper Englishman.   (Mouse-over image of Mystery Artist to reveal self-portrait!)

But nevertheless, the raw images were indeed, RAW, and very uninspiring. There were nearly four hundred individual shots. I went through them all, looking for that ONE which caught her in just the right light, the right angle to avoid a viewer’s tendency not to caption it with “Mrs. Quasimodo”… I went through them again… Time began to crawl and my creative cup went dry.

They say all brides are beautiful… I soon found myself staring blankly, zombie-like at my screen, and not for the first time, wondering who the hell “they” were.

My mind drifted and I thought about the concept of “creativity” - how poor some of us are, how fabulously brilliant and wealthy are some others. I remembered how easily drawing and music had come to meas a child, how quickly I had learned to mimic other’s song stylings and copy realistic detail, even in my early twenties… But I smiled to myself, remembering how creatively wealthy I thought I had been, and how WRONG I was.

I painted hundreds of pictures throughout my twenties, actually made a living of sorts, but they had no real worth. I took no chances. I merely copied preexisting scenes. My work had no context, no flavor, no emotional nor experiential ‘investment’ of time spent within the true cauldron of creative chaos.

Heed the warning. Beware of too much technical proficiency. It can lull you into a false sense of creative wealth, and make you write bad checks.

Context is a curious, ever present issue with what we artists do. With my apologies to those more brilliant younger prodigies, for me there has been no substitute for age and experience in learning the mature application of appropriate context within my work. And I hardly think I’m alone.

Remembering this, my pulse quickened a bit. The overdraft protection on my creative bank account kicked in. I noticed something wonderful then in each and every wedding picture I opened. It was the absolutely blind, adoring LOVE seen in the gazes of this young girl’s parents, friends, and in the sparkling, worshiping eyes of the groom. I suddenly began to see her with their vision - in the proper context  and just as suddenly I really SAW her, so full of giddy dreams, romantic ideals, and hopes at the embarkation of her new life and family. I found her beautiful beyond measure. And my creative cup refilled.  (Mouse-over my daughter’s image to see Proper CONTEXT…)

Sometimes idly, I wonder who among us was the richest? Who in mankind’s long aesthetic history had the wealthiest creative mind. My money’s on Leonardo Da Vinci. You understand that would be “cash” money, of course. (End of 2005 “Jester” article)

 ~~With apologies, I must add an addendum to my last statement, which I wrote two years ago. I’m no longer “idle” about my speculation of who was the greatest creative genius of all time. I no longer wonder. I  now KNOW, and while DaVinci certainly ranks up there, along with Mozart, and “Dirk Fusbubbard“, (See next few blogs!), none of them can hold a candle to the creative illumination anonymously bequeathed to the world from the gargantuan mind of “Sir Francis Bacon“!… Ah hah! See the plot thicken…

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