[Fresh Beginnings]

Plans For 2023

I’ve never been one for new year’s resolutions, party because speaking about plans can be like allowing them to be jinxed. Yeah I know that’s superstitious. I never had to quit smoking or begin a weight loss campaign. I’ve also never wanted to start something that’s historically been doomed for failure according to popular thought because all you ever hear about new year’s resolutions is that they never last. That’s always not true, of course. Sometimes the new start on January 1 is the beginning of a fresh outlook and a corrected path for some people and it’s a direction they continue on indefinitely. But that’s the zeitgeist, and people have fun laughing at the struggles of others because it makes them feel good about their own shortcomings and failures.

No, what often happens with me is more like an end-of-holiday-season game of catch up. After a couple of weeks of backing off of promoting and not feeling like rounding up new work I’m released from the Christmas season protocol of letting customers tend to their personal lives and families and I begin aggressively working the salt mines again. This year is different though, for many reasons. I won’t wade into specifics right now but I will say this: I need some adventure and excitement. It’s been a strangely productive 5 years, the last 2 of which even more, so albeit in a rigidly structured and detouring kind of way. But in 2023 I hope to make things change. I’ll resolve to try to make them change. Because I need adventure again.

Society fits you into its system and things fall into a pattern, and that’s fine. We need systems and patterns. My goal this year is to use that system to the best end of bringing back the fun and adventure that got left behind. I’ve always been a fan of the people who were outliers, the people on the fringes who made their own rules, who perhaps fit into the system well but used the rules to forge their own unique path. That’s what I hope to do in 2023. I’ll write more about that later but for now this is my announcement. I hope you and yours find total fulfillment this coming year too.

Here’s a couple renderings of an image from a roll of photos I shot of Kelly in her room at her house when she lived with her mother on Goldfinch Avenue in Mission Hill, San Diego, 1989. It’s originally analog 35mm film, Kodak T-Max 400 I believe. Since I began playing with the colorization process in Photoshop it’s reminded me that 25 years ago I was thinking I should get an easel and paint some of the images I shoot because when I set up a portrait session like this one that’s what I had in mind. The goal was in to do it in the style of a classic painter of the pre-impressionist era.

So, okay, that’s another one of the resolutions I made this week, to think about buying some art supplies and rendering select photos of mine on canvas. For now I’m happy just thinking about it, but that’s not all it’s for. A resolution’s meant to be fulfilled. Time to go to work.