Doppelgangers

If you are an actively creative person, I will bet 1 million dollars that you know something of this experience firsthand:

You develop an idea for your work that seems to evolve naturally out of dreams/sketching/trial-and-error/memories/experimentation/the-unnameable-pool-of-inspiration, you are intrigued by the idea and follow it, and then later you discover that someone else has already had the same idea, too, and has already been taking it to some of the same places you’ve been trying to go. And maybe, just to really dig things in, they’ve been doing it for years to critical acclaim, and you’ve managed to just not know about it–until that fateful day when it all finally comes to your attention.

And then you’re like, shit. SHIT! What do I do now? Do you continue on your own path, knowing that this other person is already out there? And now you feel like an irrelevant second-rate hack, but do you comfort yourself with the knowledge that your own work is still uniquely yours, so you can go forward with it and follow it to the places it takes you, knowing that a few unintentional similarities along the way are par for the course, because there are only so many musical notes/words/colors in the world and we’re all recycling so much of the same shared sources of inspiration anyways?

I think you may be predicting where I’m going with this. Heck, maybe some of you have been thinking this for months and just haven’t told me about it! But I give you: the work of Clare Rojas. Apparently she was born in Ohio just a couple hours from where I was born, a few months before I was born, and she also makes folkie music, and, oh yeah, she also makes artwork heavily influenced by hex signs, often featuring simplified human figures, and the hex signs have at least once been used as the head of the figure. And she’s been doing this for years.

I first heard of Clare Rojas a few weeks ago when Matt brought home the latest Vitamin P book and she was featured in it. It was obvious that she was also influenced by PA Dutch designs and I just thought, cool. Her work is really beautiful and I love the way she uses color and shape! I had been working with my Hex Dancer series since mid-2010 and in recent months that work had replaced my little landscape paintings as “my main art thing,” so when I saw Rojas’s work in Vitamin P, I just thought, “nice, these are great and it’s great to see other people making work based on hex signs and patterns–and I’m surprised that more artists don’t, because they are clearly awesome–but thank god she does not do people with hex sign faces.” Then today Matt and I were talking about our various artistic influences, which lead to Googling things like hex signs (and Philip Glass’s geometry of circles piece for Sesame Street) and artistic uses of hex signs, which lead to the moment of Oh my gawd, Clare Rojas has made at least one work with a hex face and oh gawd what if people think I’m just copying her and oh gawd I didn’t know and do I keep going with this it was just getting so interesting and what what what!

Left: my most recent hex dancer drawing, made before I saw the Rojas work on the right.

This is pretty funny to me for the additional reason that a couple months ago I became aware of another artist on Etsy who in the past year or so has started making little landscape paintings on the very same wooden plaques I’ve been using (since 2006-2007), and sanding them off to make them weathered, and she uses some of the same language I do to describe them. When I came across her work, I was like, OK, but at least she is not doing round paintings. Because I kind of felt like the little round landscape paintings–especially little round landscape paintings that have been sanded to look weathered–was kind of like, my thing. But recently she has started listing round paintings. My gut reaction was NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Even though it’s quite clear to me that 1) thousands of people make landscape art, 2) I’m surprised that more people don’t use those plaques, because they’re inexpensive and pretty nice, 3) lots of painters sand their work down to rework it and lots of people must have noticed that it looks nice when sanded, 4) lots of artists sell work on Etsy. In fact there must be MORE people out there doing the same thing, I’m sure. I just don’t know about it.

I don’t know. What do you think? When this happens, do you stop or keep going? Is it even possible to keep going? Is it possible to ever make that kind of work again without thinking of your art-doppelganger’s work that’s already out there? Or are you able to just shrug it off and keep going forward? Because the work IS different, and is being made for different reasons, and will end up going in different directions at some point. That is one of the things I love most about making art: experiencing those points at which an idea shifts and you feel like you’ve been blazing a trail through a forest and suddenly a whole new path is opening up in front of you. And you follow it until it leads somewhere new. And I guess maybe sometimes your path temporarily seems similar to someone else’s path. But it’s still your path and you should follow it. Right? Maybe that’s a bad metaphor, though. Maybe when you’re able to recognize that you’re on a path, you need to start trailblazing through the wilderness?

Eh, maybe I’ll just try to do both!

BBear Awards 2011

Edit: I feel that I should give a better explanation about what this is…? Is that dumb? Ok, in my last post I discussed the year-long By Mountain and Sea photo project and mentioned that I wanted to share photos that were not part of it (but felt like they related to significant moments of the year in various big or little ways). And instead of just posting a slew of photos, I thought it would be more fun to pretend that they represented awards, since this is the season of year-end lists. Hence…

Best ecosystem variety experience within one 27-hour period:
Olympic Peninsula, WA: sunny, 84 degrees in a temperate rainforest -> foggy ocean beach with sea stacks -> waterfall and giant trees by a bright blue lake -> thick fog that made me worried I would drive off a cliff -> snowy mountaintop. All experienced at a leisurely pace between noon Tuesday-3pm Wednesday.

Best Kitty Cancer Recovery:
Prado! Continued remission of intestinal lymphoma since November/December 2009.

Best single-day mate-then-die frenzy:
These ants outside my apartment, 8/17/2011.

Best Sandwich:
Seitan Sandwich from Quickie Too, Tacoma, WA (eaten while waiting at SeaTac).

Best Retreat Cabin:
The Woodshop cabin at Woolman Hill. I’ve stayed at the 3 main retreat cabins and now by a slim margin I prefer this one. It is the most friendly to wimps like me who get freaked out easily by monsters and boogeymen, because the other cabins are slightly off into the woods (aka: nobody to hear you scream), but the Woodshop is pretty much in the center of things at Woolman Hill. Yet, the whole place is so peaceful and quiet, I don’t think it matters much to your sense of peaceful seclusion. It is less quirky and attractive than the other 2 cabins (Sunrise wins for Best Architecture and Saltbox wins for Best Kitchen), but overall I think it gives me the best retreat experience. It also wins the coveted Best Outhouse prize, but that’s not such a great competition, so… Anyways, sorry about the weird photo.

Most Amazing Conveyance of a Small Child Across a Creek:
My sister with her daughter, Amethyst Brook, Amherst, MA.

Smokey Memorial Award to the Tree That Looks The Most Like A Bear To Me:
Found while hiking around Chapelbrook Falls, Ashfield, MA

Neighborhood Cat I Get Most Excited About Seeing Ever Since Orange Kitty Moved Away:
Booklet! I never see Booklet anymore, though. Maybe Booklet has moved recently, too. Or is being kept safe indoors.

Best “Ohhhh…I Remember That From My Childhood” Smell:
Wet horses.

Best Photography Cliche That I Never Ever Get Tired Of:
Taking pictures of piles of crap. I LOVE finding and photographing piles of crap.

From the Year

In late 2010, Ashley Anna Brown invited me to participate in an online photography project along with pals Rhea Mack, Jessica Hanscom, and Anna Slezak, artists all, who live across Massachusetts:  throughout the year we would choose a photo each week to share a bit of our lives with each other, and our images would be posted together on bymountainandsea.blogspot.com every Tuesday. There were no restrictions on the photos except that they couldn’t be vertically-oriented (horizontal works better for blog formatting), but other than that, it was wide open. I clearly remember the feeling of being about to begin the project, a whole year ago, wondering, “what am I going to take pictures of?”

I can’t believe that the year is now closing up, and we only have a couple more photos to go. Wait–just ONE more? So strange. Looking and thinking with a camera every week has been a really illuminating experience. I’ve often enjoyed taking photographs but I certainly don’t think of myself as a photographer in the same way that I am a painter or draw-er. Now that I have been camera-ing much more for a whole year, I still don’t think I could ever call  myself a photographer, but I have a much more acute appreciation for how photography is all about a triangular relationship between your body (and your camera), your subject, and the Sun (or artificial light if you’re shooting indoors). Outdoors, there’s such a sense of connection to the Sun hanging out there in space. I often feel that there are thin threads binding me, the subject and the Sun into a silvery triangle like a spiderweb. That sounds really stupid now that I’m typing it, but yeah, lesson #1 of the photo blog project: before this project, I didn’t think of photography as a means of building a relationship with the Sun, but now I do.

In typical fashion, before the project even started I got very caught up in thinking about how I wanted it to all turn out. At the forefront of my mind was that I wanted my photos to be somehow very honest. With any public diary project, I sometimes question how honest the entries are–it’s only natural that many people want to portray themselves in a very flattering way. I had seen other photoblogs, and I can be nagged by a feeling of the diarists manipulating their readers’ perceptions of their lives by trying to take idyllic photographs. I know that I am being totally unfair to those photobloggers who really DO have gorgeous homes and lives of constant idyll, but I’m just being honest here. I like pretty things, but I also like to see some shadowy sides.

So for me this project started out as a very strained exercise in taking a photo that 1) I liked, 2) felt honest in some way, and not “manipulative” as if to make me “look better,” 3) really represented a significant moment of the week or encapsulated, for me, what the week was “about” in some way. But as it went on, I loosened up and just focused on trying to take photos that I liked and that would remind me of something significant about that week, and quit worrying so much about the whole manipulation thing. Because you can’t control that anyway, you know? There are some photos from the year that obviously have a very personal association for me that no-one else can understand; to me they are full of a certain emotion or energy, but how could anyone tell that, really? I still think of a photograph as a “neutral documentation,” but of course like any art form, so much gets transformed between the creator and the viewer. And so throughout the year I staged photographs, because that felt like the only way to make a good personal record of that particular week (these were often the wacky self-portrait photos).

Well, that’s just a little intro to the project. Next up, I will post some photos that never made it onto By Mountain And Sea or my outtakes on Flickr.