Overhaul
I'm reading Jack Kerouac again, Big Sur. I’m just a few chapters in but the onslaught of images and free flowing thoughts is already quenching my parched soul. This one is wrapped in mist and ocean winds and vertiginous cliffs, the Pacific looming, its sleepy roar trapped in undercurrents, biding its time. It’s a deep well he digs Ti-Jean, but always luminous, even as nightmares take hold.
We spent the past week in yet another frenzy of re-organization: with a new downstairs bathroom all but finished (details remain but it’s functional), we took a long hard look at our reality and decided to switch rooms around. So after fifteen years of working from a studio in our basement, I’m now typing these words in what used to be our tv room. I no longer need lights on during the day but most importantly, I’m looking out of a window, a frame filled with nothing but green, green, green. Oxygen.
Greens…
The move forced me to rethink the entire space, an opportunity to streamline and optimize for the way I work today—as opposed to shifting around accumulated remnants of the past. In the old studio I’d built a seamless floor to ceiling background (over two windows), so I tore it down and we spent a few days fixing and painting the wall behind it, before transferring things over.
A lot of rewiring and cleaning and drilling...but a week later there’s a better family room and a better studio/office. It’s not as slick perhaps, it’ll require paint eventually, but I can now easily switch from shooting to writing to composing, and each activity feels natural. After a year of sharing a work environment with boxes, construction materials and renovation overflow storage...I realize now how much that visual noise had weighed on me. Chaos can be inspiring but it needs to be the right sort of chaos. Or at least deliberate.
...
The last post was my awkward attempt at expressing...something, regarding current events. 2020 is quite a year so far, every week adding a layer we must labour to comprehend and deal with. Today is George Floyd’s final farewell. Let’s hope a new era beckons.
P.S All images shot with the X-Pro3 and XF 35mm f/2 R WR.
