I'm a marine ecologist who loves photography, sketching, and comics. I've been having a really good time posting doodles and photographs on DeviantArt - www.deviantart.com - go there you artists and craftspeople and get your art some exposure in a low-risk kind of way! The journaling tool, however, I find a bit limited, so I decided to start this little blog and see how far it goes. I'll upload images of my own art and write about my own process, groping towards improving at things I'm far from being a technical brain in. I think reflection is an important part of the creative process for professionals and amateurs alike, and also, it's just fun to talk about expression and perception. I'm also hoping to get some friends and family involved here.
The idea is, most of us create art in one way or another, or in many ways, and we all have a story about how we are learning or why we are learning to create it. Hopefully folks will be willing to share with me and with each other...but if they aren't, maybe it will just result in some one-shot driveling about my stuff. I'm perfectly happy to foist my opinions on the internet.
So, some images of mine to start things off:
These are images from a couple of years ago, when I was doing fieldwork in San Francisco and Tomales Bays in California. I worked up to my knees in marine mudflats, futzing around with invertebrates and stinking. Everything I owned seemed to be somewhere on the spectrum of spotted to coated with grey, clay-based mud that dried but never completely came off - despite multiple washes to kill any lingering hitchhikers that would threaten the next field site. My own coating of dry clay dust became so routine that I came to rely on it as sunscreen. I was tired, sweaty, dirty, and smelly most of the time...and I loved it. It was like being part of the habitats I was coming to understand. That probably makes me weird, but I dig weird.
I took these images to capture a little bit of that feeling in a broad sense. Beneath the shallow waters and grey mud, under grey, looming skies that might seem oppressive, the mystery of hidden life was bubbling up under my boots each day. Cloudy days were the best. Life squirmed and skittered and slopped more actively without the tyranny of the boiling sun. Temperatures at the mud surface during low tide on a sunny day can skyrocket above ambient as the tide recedes, and the sun became as much my enemy as the bane of the little creatures I studied. These photos were a few feeble attempts at making the scenery of mud as beautiful to others as it was to me: a moonscape of hidden treasures. The closeups I took of that slime-coated beauty will follow soon.
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