The one aspect of a maintaining an artistic website is that it’s relatively ‘static’, which really means that it just lurks out there in never-space just waiting for someone to find it. Not something I find myself constantly tweaking or adding content. Versus social media, like this blog, that is consider ‘active’, where I am constantly adding new content and when it’s posted, a bunch of folks are immediately notified, for better or worse.
I am perhaps like many of you, updating a website is a bit of a chore but does require some occasional housekeeping. Like today. I have had a few exhibitions with my gallery, Fabrik Projects, and local photographic organization that I am on staff with, Los Angeles Center of Photography (LACP) over the last couple of months that I needed to add to the Bio/CV. Okay, that’s done, so now I must look like I am an even more impressive artist.
Okay, back to reality. For this update I have included one of my photographs from my Gardening For Ordnance project, as I am not sure that I have ever posted this photograph before on the blog. Background; its a gardening spade I found buried in my back yard flower bed last year. Not sure how long it was buried there, and maybe even one of mine that I accidentally left from years before. Nevertheless, evident it has been buried for awhile.
My initial impulse was to clean it up while probably muttering under my breath as to how in the heck did this get there. But then my creative muse whispered in my ear that this could be a nice metaphoric subject for my Gardening For Ordnance project. For sure! After tweaking the composition for a while, I came across the idea of the juxtaposition of the cruddy spade with one of my wife’s gardening gloves, especially as the coloring of the glove seemed to complement the spade’s handle. Yes, buried space could metaphorically equal buried military ordnance and much better to find the old spade than a old buried bomb. Just saying.
So now to tie-up my photo and this article together in a nice little bow; the buried spade/ordnance is similar to a web site; folks don’t know about it until they find it since it is usually out of sight. So my job, besides the occasional website maintenance, is to help promote it from time to time so that folks can find out more about me and my artistic projects. Done.
Oh, the real reason to post this photograph now is that I had recently submitted this photograph to one of those many galleries which have a call-to-entry (a potential win-win as my cousin lives near the gallery and it would have a chance to see her if I was juried in) and regretfully a curator did not think that this image was worthy of acceptance. Okay, we can agree that they got that wrong as I think that this is a cool photograph. It probably does not look like I had used some expired 120 film to create it, but I did, as there is only the smallest of color shifts. Enjoy!
Cheers & stay safe,
Doug
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My other exhibitions and workshops:
The Photographers Eye’s gallery exhibition, Living and Photographing in the Time of COVID-19, group virtual exhibition that includes two of my diptychs from the series A Developing Crisis. This online exhibition is from May 8th through August 1st, 2020.
Medium Photo 2020 Workshop: Developing a Creative Book workshop that I will be leading, is now rescheduled for September 24 – 27th, 2020, a four-day extended weekend workshop in San Diego.
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Featured artwork; Adjacent Ordnance Burial Site, Mid-Morning, copyright 2019, Douglas Stockdale
Singular Images 
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