Sometimes I just sits and thinks and sometimes I just sits

“A Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man” – Self-portrait in Infrared

It has been quite a while since I wrote in this blog. Life and the things we have to do often gets in the way of things we would like to do. So please, consider this the first of an irregular series of musings of an artist.

There is an old Pennsylvania Dutch saying that goes “Sometimes I just sits and thinks and sometimes I just sits.” I know I do both but when I do the first, when I “thinks”, I often find myself wondering why it took so long for me to allow my creative side to come through. It’s not that I haven’t been surrounded by creative people. My daughter is an artist. I spent more than 20 years working in ad agencies surrounded by creative visual artists and writers. But I was (and still am in my professional life) the straight-laced  marketing strategist/researcher.

But all that time, I had a yearning… a yearning to express in pictures and in words the vision I had within me. But alas, I never felt I had the creative talent. I had agency colleagues tell me to leave the creative end to the creatives. And I wasn’t one of them.

Then I discovered photography and it quickly became the channel for expressing my creative vision – the way I see the world. And it is MY vision! Some may look at my images and question how closely they represent reality. Purists may suggest that I use processing tools to alter reality to which I say YES! YES, I alter reality, whatever that is, to suit my vision of it. For example, when I look at colors I see strongly saturated, vivid hues be they in a sunrise or in the color of an old barn. And I represent that in my images. It’s what I see in my mind’s eye. So when someone asks “Was the sunrise really that red?”, I have to answer “Yes, for me it was really that red!”

The artist in me keeps whispering in my ear… “Please yourself first then worry about others.” (Yes, I know there is a business side to this as well.) But after all those years, I have this well of creative juice pent up in me and who knows how many years left to expend that creative energy. So I hope all my friends, known and unknown, who follow my website, my blog and my postings on Facebook will hang on tight and continue to accompany me on the ride here here on my blog and website; on Facebook; with presentations I do (I am available to do presentations for your local club) and in one-day and multiple-day workshops that I offer (2012 schedule will be coming soon).

I thank you, my friends. Yes I look to please myself first with my work. But you all are close behind and I am always grateful for your continued support.

And if you would like to be on my e-mailing list for information on upcoming workshops and such, please drop me a line at ed@evatza.com.