Art for its own sake. It’s a cavalier expression that has ascended the mantle to cliché. I understand that it follows, perhaps correctly, that this is the motto of the unserious artist or hobbyist. The expression is employed almost as a throw-away, to explain away unimaginative works. It can even seem dismissive, like the art student who mutters these famous last words after the critique: “You just don’t get what I do, man.”

I’ve met many artists who cloak themselves in intellectualism & self-aggrandizement, and gravitate towards the hot-button political issue of their day. If you dislike their work, then you must not be intelligent enough to appreciate its brilliance. Go to any university art department, throw a rock, and you’re bound to hit one. Their passion and intensity disappear pretty quickly once they leave the classroom. That great big world out there, and the time spent trying to cobble together a living, extinguishes the ambitions of a lot of young artists. This is a sad fact of life. But consider the possibility that it also separates the wheat from the chaff. Some people go to art school because it’s the cool thing to do before graduating and going to work for the family business. My studio art classes were filled to the brim with people who had no interest in pursuing a career in the arts, and my education suffered because of them.

That being said, I believe in art for art’s sake. It’s a declaration that has lost its meaning through repetition, possibly the result of our current social or political climate. Our leadership often disregards the arts as being impractical, unproductive, and unimportant. The National Endowment for the Arts has a long history of falling under attack. Attempts are made, routinely, to defund arts programs; in public education, it’s generally understood that when budgets are cut, the arts are the first to hit the chopping block. The arts aren’t mentioned on capital hill much, either. When discussing education infrastructure, our leaders have been focusing heavily of STEM education (science, technology, engineering, and math). What we fail to realize, time and again, is that creativity and creative problem solving are integral to each one of those disciplines.

Trying to make something where there was nothing before requires a kind of risk. Risk of failure and embarrassment. But risk is critically important in order to develop skill. The act of creating – be it a haiku or a bar napkin doodle, a piano melody or The Mona Lisa – is an instinctual behavior. It’s part of what makes us human. When we talk about culture, we typically aren’t talking about politics or GDP – usually we’re talking about music and dance, architecture, literature, religious artifacts and great big paintings and sculptures. We are all artists, but our creative instincts are all-too-often beaten out of us by our education, by a political and social climate that devalues or disregards it.

Today’s picture is a photograph intentionally taken out-of-focus. I layered another photograph on top to add texture. It is a photograph in the most basic sense, in that it’s a two-dimensional image of color and light. Like all abstract artwork, it is in no way functional, and serves no other purpose than to be looked at. The hope is that my audience finds it interesting to look at. The hope is that it sparks a memory or stirs an emotion. The beauty part is that this image can mean a million things to a million people, and I can appreciate that kind of ambiguity from time to time.

Until tomorrow, I hope you have a creative day.

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“Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.”
~Henry David Thoreau

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The light is different in the winter here in Kansas. The earth grows cold and colorless. Leaves fall and die. The grass turns grey and lays down. We wrap our bodies in cloth and strap on boots; we remove ourselves from the world, burrow in, shutting the elements out. Having lived in the Southwest for the past ten years or so, I really had forgotten what it’s like to watch the world transform around you. The tempo shifts in Arizona, too. The light is different there, too. But the colored orange landscape remains largely unchanged.

I don’t care much for the kind of intense cold that comes with a Midwestern winter, but at dusk there is a kind of magic that’s unique to this place. The ground is cold ice and  the sky, ablaze. Looking at the fire and ice reflecting off each other in the growing darkness makes you feel small. Not in a bad sense, mind you, but in the kind of way that genuinely inspires adoration and awe. It’s no wonder our ancestors worshiped the sun; the nuclear color and the distant promise of warmth while stumbling, shivering through the cold, would be enough to bewilder any sentient being. Winter makes you feel alone. It awakens a dormant primal emotion. Heat becomes everything; a feeling of safety from the crushing force of nature. Like an evolutionary twitch, surviving the night feels oddly like a task, rather than a given.

I walked along the shores of the Kansas River today and watched the sky slowly turn from blue, to red, into purple. On the edge of Shawnee, a couple of miles from the Interstate, few people walk the pavement. At rush hour, the highway is a maelstrom of anxiety and noise. Just a short distance down the road, and you can sit on a rock and watch the starlings dancing from tree to tree, looking for a place to rest for the night. It feels like another country altogether when you can get away from the huge thoroughfares. I watched the five-thirty train roll along the line, carrying it’s freight westward. I watched my breath drift up into the darkening veil.

You know what? It’s true what they say about the value of a good walk.

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“Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.”

~Paul Theroux

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True bitter cold has arrived in Kansas. It was bound to happen eventually, and mother nature appears to be making up for lost time. It is a surreal scene, to look out the window and see green lawns in the neighborhood and sunlight punching through the clouds; it almost looks pleasant. It is far from forgiving outdoors. It is downright freezing. It’s days like this thst remind me why I moved so far away, all those years ago. I would trade a desert for the Midwestern Winters without a second thought, and without regrets.

The cold weather front that delivered this icy change was a little further West a few days ago. The storm brought some of the only snow Southern Arizona has seen in almost three years. My news-feed has been flooded with beautiful photographs of the snow-covered Mule Mountains. My heart aches, to think that I’m not there to take-in those panoramas with my own two eyes. I am, at the very least, thankful that I live in an age where I can see everybody else’s happiness, even if from a distance. And, knowing that there’s little utility in dwelling on it, I decided to look back to some photographs I made those three years ago, when I actually was there.

Bisbee is a beautiful and well-kept secret along the Mexican border. It’s a wholly unique town that arose from a copper mining camp that fueled the local economy until the mining operation shut down. Low rents attracted artists and vagabonds – and other…unpredictable types – and the character of the town transformed from saloons and whorehouses and mining to just saloons and whore houses – and one hell of an arts and music scene.

After the weight of the snow, the slippery steps and fallen tree limbs, I hope that the handful of people I know and love out there are enjoying the view just a little bit extra, for me.

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“History never looks like history when you are living through it.”

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Na-Nex-Se Blackhoof, widow of Chief Blackhoof, was the signer of an 1854 treaty. Over one and a half million acres of the Kansas Shawnee Indian reservation was ceded to the United States government. In 1865, shortly before the widow’s death, the Kansas and Neosho Valley Railroad was organized; a railroad depot was erected and a civil engineer platted a town. In 1869 the name “Lenexa,” a derivation of Na-Nex-Se, was adopted. The old Santa Fe Trail ran directly through this little corner of the cosmos.

I only write these words because I didn’t know about this until today. I was raised a few miles away from the railroad depot. The city of Lenexa was my home until I turned eighteen and left for Arizona’s warmer climates. It dawns on me that there’s an awful lot that I don’t know that I probably ought to.

The historic downtown area is small. If you’re driving through and you blink your eyes, you might just miss it. Today it’s pretty much only comprised of this old rail house, a saloon, and a barber shop. I never spent any time here. For one reason or another, the idea struck me yesterday that it might be a good idea to drive over and make a few pictures. It may well have proved to be a waste of time. The weather was disagreeable, and I’m not so sure I’m pleased with any of the photographs I got out of the deal. But at least I learned about my hometown’s namesake.

There are lots of little details that slip through the cracks. It can be argued every which way that the details of our history are important. The details also rarely seem to be very glamorous. In fact, most of the time the details of our history seem decidedly mundane. Nevertheless, the importance of our history is argued regularly. It has been my experience, however, that rarely are our words ever put into proper practice. The business of life overwhelms us. At the end of the day, the television seems to be a greater comfort than a history book.

I’m wholly confident that this is not a good thing.

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“The photographer is a manipulator of light.”

~Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

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A photograph of somebody else’s artwork. Is it really even appropriate for a photographer to take such an image and claim it for themselves? It’s an interesting dilemma because the photographer is still engaged in making decisions about the light, the framing, the angle of the shot. All of these variables – and many, many others – influence the emotional impact of the photograph. I tend to tread lightly with topics like this, but I make efforts to exploit my own skills to capture the subject as dramatically or uniquely as possible.

The fountains and statuary of The Country Club Plaza – known by most folks simply as The Plaza – have been photographed by countless thousands of people throughout the years. It’s just on the Missouri side in the Kansas City Metro area, near downtown. It boasts upscale shopping and fine dining, beautiful lights around Christmas, and horse-drawn carriage rides. A couple of city blocks away, though, and you’ll see some of the most impoverished neighborhoods in the city. This is the case all over the country, though, isn’t it? The Plaza is the kind of place where the local police will pick up the panhandlers, drive them over a few blocks, and drop them back off where, presumably, they belong. I’ve see it happen with my own eyes. And I get it. I just don’t like it, is all.

I remember my first high school photography class, using this old metal hunk of a manual Canon film camera my father bought me. A friend of mine from school – you know, who actually had a driver’s license – drove us out to The Plaza. I remember thinking I’d get some great shots. I hadn’t even considered how truly unoriginal the idea was, but hell, it was all new to me. I have to remind myself of the same thing today. “Sure,” I’ll tell myself. “The Grand Canyon’s been photographed a thousand times before. But not by me.”

We have to have our own experiences, now, don’t we?

I still have the negatives from that trip to The Plaza – most of them under-exposed – sitting in an old three-ring binder with many other of my early failed attempts at the whole ‘photography’ thing. I read about a New York photographer who set their camera up on a tripod in their apartment and pointed it straight out the window to the street scene below. He took one photograph every day for a year. Not the most ambitious project, but it’s something. I think we’ve all seen videos of people who do this with self-portraits, to document how much they have (or haven’t) changed in one years’ time. But this photographer did it in 1918, and nobody had every done anything like it before. The modern photographic method hadn’t even reached the century mark; there were lots of things that hadn’t been done with the camera yet. So this photographer’s year-long project made the history books, and the photographs are preserved in some archive or another, probably at the Eastman House in New York.

I’m sure there are plenty of things that have yet to be done with photography, too. It just always seems like it’s all been done before, but that’s just the lie we tell ourselves so we can talk ourselves out of trying. It’s really just a matter of figuring it out. So I guess I’d better get back to it.

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