Yesterday I finished reading “Art and Fear“, a classic small book on making art by David Bayles and Ted Orland. It’s a beautiful little book that fits my conception of art as personal process. With the internet, it is now so much easier to communicate with one’s work. I’m actually quite happy that having been working consistently for about 2 years and have actually arrived somewhere. I have two interesting streams going- color digital images examining the effects of light in the suburban landscape and monochrome film images examining motion in urban settings. There are lots of images that don’t fit, many that are unsuccessful, but the body of work has, over time, actually moved somewhere.
Digital imaging has made it much easier to create and manipulate images. And has made distribution much easier as well. I fear that the volume of work produced can be discouraging to image makers. As “Art and Fear” makes clear, one’s own art is likely to go unappreciated by the world. And even successful artists have the problem that their current output is always competing with their earlier, better known work.
There are always those who want to dismiss most of our work because they don’t see the value:
A Photo Editor – An Endless Stream Of Photography: “Anyway my point here is that there%u2019s so much going on in this business that%u2019s not worth paying attention to. I%u2019m not even talking about the amateur stuff that%u2019s gone from the shoe box to flickr or on the personal website either . . .”
Personally, I’ve found over and over, that what at first seems like a unitary “Internet” or “Flickr” is actually a complex web of communities and neighborhoods. One generally finds oneself enmeshed in a community where the stream is actually small enough to deal with on a human level. While there’s a romantic notion that artists can labor in obscurity, my observation is that art grows best among a group of like minds. It may remain obscure, but it will be appreciated by its maker and at least a small audience.
