Digital Ink & Dusty Pages: The Reboot of a Blog

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
- Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

01/17/18 - Is this how I get back in the habit of writing every day?
11/29/19 – This feels as good a place as any to start a new blog. 
09/15/22 – Title: Out of the Dark and Into the Light Again?
04/17/23 - Today is not the day. Maybe tomorrow?

It’s 8:54 a.m. on Tuesday May 9th, 2023, and the sun has finally made a sleepy-eyed debut in the Pacific Northwest. Instead of enjoying the silence after my kids have gone to school, or doling out friendly “good morning”s, I’m pacing my yard and fervently ranting into a message to my friends about the existential dilemmas of being an artist navigating modern technology. 

9:03 a.m.
“But what does it all MEAN Bekka,” Kate texts back. 

Good morning! And good question. 

A week ago Kate Woodman and I agreed to hold each other accountable to blogging and finally each go write something. How hard could it be, right? I only blogged nearly every day for 10 years! Nevermind that I also only told myself "today will be the day I start again!" for the next ten. Kate's first post was poignant and raw, an intimate introduction into the eccentricities and vision that make her an impressive photographer to watch and the right kind of nerd to befriend. My first thought was "Do I really need to write this same blog in different words? Can't I just enjoy knowing there are others out there with similar feelings and interesting perspectives?" But if that's the case why do I still feel compelled to heap plates of esoteric musings for anyone who will listen before they've even finished their morning caffeine?

While not often haunted by whispers of insecurity in my visual art career, those ghosts have instead found their way through the veil in the sporadic pages of my journals and the dozen abandoned posts in my drafts folder. Why does this need to be public? Are my thoughts still as profound as I thought they were in my youth now that I'm a lot older and maybe a little more humble? What if no one sees me? Or worse–what if they do?

What would they even see? 

Some piece of me feels frozen in 2016 when my piggy bank finally stored enough pennies for me to quit my “real” job and risk making art full-time. I was unstoppable. Fierce. A growing force. Until that growing force revealed itself as my growing 3rd baby, and all creative efforts were funneled into morning sickness, dizziness, and a distaste for getting out of bed. I spent the better part of the year at the bottom of a slump in a pile of photographs that I couldn't edit, music I couldn’t listen to, and movies I couldn’t watch. Even the brightness of a phone screen triggered the splattering of a Pollock worthy masterpiece into the toilet bowl, every pigment saturated with "get this fucking baby out of me". Abstract expressionism at its finest! The next act involved a carefully choreographed game of Tetris, maneuvering 3 small children, 15 years of hoarding, a treasure trove of now neglected camera equipment, and a couple motorcycles into a U-Haul while waving goodbye to our lives in California in search of greener (and more affordable) pastures in Washington. The comforts & freedom that nurtured the youthful artist were gone. The curtain closed.  

Life has that tendency of getting in its own way, doesn't it? One day it's the excitement of learning, of creating, of the absurdity of being a sentient piece of meat with decades of time stretching out before you to explore–but a couple marriages, mortgages, children, businesses, and a pandemic later you find yourself buried under the weight of responsibilities and commitments and the ever building pressure to perform for now both human and machine expectations, even when you're still living The Dream™. Is this topical? Is it on trend? Did I include a call to action? Does this writing provide value? Will future clients find this professional or off-putting? Does this content have viral potential? 

But…I don’t want to be fluent in content. 

I want to be fluent in the language of art, conversational in curiosity, able to translate those isolated colors and phrases and moments of disconnected nonsense in our lives to a crescendo that starts to take on a human voice. A voice that maybe someone can hear and harmonize with. 

Before tying my hands with excuses of busyness, writing was that instrument to fine tune the noise of my life, work through new ideas, piece the discordant notes together, and connect with other actual humans! Yet here in 2023, instead of a paragraph from a longtime reader, my first Instagram comment is from a bot wanting to know if I'd like more followers (what a novelty it once was to interact with a bot!). Here in 2023, instead of stumbly blindly through the hallways of an adolescent internet into surprising new communities, we're presented with endless curated recommendations of information, instant gratification, and constant stimulation just a click away on our pocket sized supercomputers; the old magics of the blogosphere feel like dusty relics (on the shelf right next to my burned CDs, MySpace, flip phone, and AIM archives). But here in 2023–if the fashionistas on TikTok are to be believed–Y2K is en vogue again, so what better time to perform some digital necromancy? 

Amongst that jury of judgmental ghosts whispering over my shoulder as I type this, I’m looking for those spectral echoes of my younger self. That familiar face at 17 armed with a camera and a half-formed frontal cortex, confidently shouting her brilliance, creativity, and curiosity on the public stage. That snapshot of am ambitious 26 year old photographer caught short by pregnancy. The bleary-eyed 30 year old tickling a toddler with one hand and learning 3D modeling with the other. All characters responsible for every risky & audacious decision that somehow—against so many odds—brought me here, and might still have some part to play if I lay the right bait on the page.

So, what DOES it all mean? Until I accept homogenization completely and upload whatever future ChatGPT 8.1 directly into my brain to off-load all decision making, I'm still grappling with an overactive imagination, the meaning of existence, and the compulsion to make art while standing at this uncharted intersection of creative human nature & late stage capitalism. A caged animal cursed with consciousness and a muse. I don't have all the answers, but I want to work through the questions and conversations about being an artist and a person, especially in an increasingly sci-fi landscape. 

I hope that this outlet will be a place to examine conceptions about creativity, technology, humanity, and to explore the works of other artists, scientists, philosophers, as well as sharing my own experiences, practical techniques, and perspectives on being a working artist. Maybe we’ll even stumble upon what some of it means along the way.

"Artists love other artists.  Shadow artists are gravitating to their rightful tribe but cannot yet claim their birthright.  Very often audacity, not talent, makes one person an artist and another a shadow artist–hiding in the shadows, afraid to step out and expose the dream to the light, fearful that it will disintegrate to the touch." 
– Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way