I'll see you in the ICU!

Resolutions

I've always hated New Year's resolutions. Even if I was a stick figure, it would always be to lose a few pounds, to take better care of my appearance--dress better, make sure I did my hair and makeup always...always those self-esteem type resolutions.

I lost about 20 pounds of that stuff that creeps up on you a pound per year after returning to the bay area. It wasn't hard at all, really--just cut out all refined foods, white flour, white rice, etc and exercised a little bit a couple times per week. I've put about two pounds back on since I started working, you know how bad nurses eat--candy, cookies, cake, fried foods, so yeah, I guess I'm resolving to lose those two pounds, but honestly, I could drop those before the end of the year without much effort or sacrifice; I'm not worried about two pounds.

I would like to get a haircut before the new year, only because I have a party to go to and don't want to be a shaggy mess.

So in this sense, I guess I do still have some appearance-related resolutions, if you can call them that.

My resolutions have gone by the way side. I think I resolved one year to not have any resolutions. Like the time I gave up Catholicism for lent. The nuns didn't like THAT

Anyway, I've been hankering to do something creative again. I think I'm going to resolve on either getting some of my crap paintings finished and shown, or better yet, print up and frame some of my slides from Europe to have a small show/salon. I once went to a small show put on by a friend of a friend, of all these really bad amateur photos of her trip to Italy. She sold the show out and I was left with my chin hanging on the drive home. No eye for composition, zero processing...plain old enlargements! Crazy.

I think I'm going to start working on something like this in the wee small hours. I'd love to make some extra cash, but I'm aware that I'll probably (at best) break even.

Anyway, these are the crazy ideas I have when I'm baking and cooking from 11 pm to 6 am. Tonight I made a huge batch of pasta sauce, my week's supply of steel cut oats, scones, cracked wheat bread, and rice with steamed veggies for the quick "leftover re-heat" before going off to work.

maybe it's the creativity in the kitchen that's pointing me in this direction; the drive to do something creatively meaningful.

The only problem is that I shot 35 mm slide film in Europe, which was at the time, the best resolution you could get outside of a large format camera (impractical for travel) and though I have a light box, I don't have a slide scanner any more, in order to crop and fix my images before printing. This would leave me with a lot of printing instructions for the photo lab (and a lot of room for them to make mistakes, if you ask me) so this would kinda suck. I'm wondering how to get this remedied.

Anyway, I would love to even make the invitations for this--I'd probably make up about 500 4x6 cards and send them to everyone I know. I'll also, of course, have to come up with an artist's resume (gonna be pretty short) of the type they hang at galleries so you know about the artist. I don't want a webpage because this, I've decided, is for people who are trying to attract business, and make a name for themselves and get hired. I may, at most, set up an email list for notifying people of upcoming shows (if I ever have a second one, that is!)

So there you have it, the wheels in my pea brain are turning. I'd love to actually do this and it's not that far-fetched, really. People always buy photographic art and I could do all the framing myself with stuff I have around here (from the framing days) I think photography sells better than large format canvases I was doing a few years ago, so I won't focus on those for now.

I have enough slides for now (around a thousand) to have a massive show, but since I need to have these printed up professionally, it would be expensive to do them all.

So besides a slide scanner, a place to actually hang, a professional, good-quality printer that won't charge me an arm and a leg, this could happen! :)

posted by sketchmonkey @ 3:53 AM