My oh my. When discussing my end of year for 2020 and doing a little looking ahead, I had no idea that politically in America that democracy would almost come off the rails. Wow. Just shows that you can never underestimate a sociopath in our White House and the many neo-Trumpians who believe his Big Lie. Extremely un-settling to watch this play out live on TV and realize afterwards that the sociopath is still lurking in the White House until January 20th. Then who can really tell what this neurotic might do next. Sigh.
I suspect that it is best to still be wary while working on doing the right thing. For the country as well as myself. It seems that my creative energy is a bit off, not entirely missing, but very diminished. As I understand from others, this is also one of the intents of a dictator, to get you off your game and play with your head. This really helps with my empathy for those who have to live under a dictatorship in other countries; their ability to get up in the morning and one hour at a time to do the right thing. My motto as well for right now with the craziness in America which appears to be a temporary aberration; but regretfully the neo-Trumpians are still out there, and fortunately some will soon be in prison. Okay, I had never planned to make this a political opinion blog, but it’s hard not to discuss these current events. I recall the criticism of Ansel Adams in the late 1930’s when Europe was going politically nuts in Spain, Italy and Germany, that Adams was choosing instead to photograph rocks.
Back to art. So at the beginning of this week as a start of the New Year, I was preparing to promote the sale of the last few copies of my artist book Bluewater Shore. That lasted a whole day until everything went sideways on Wednesday. I was going to promote the final availability on my social media; Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. I will try this again starting on Monday. (I still need to get my head into the game). I did ship out six copies of the Edition nevertheless, still a few more remaining.
I have the exhibition of the Memory Pods series opening at the end of February (details below), so my goal was to start some self-promo on social media about this exhibition at the start of February. I am still concerned about the pandemic in Southern California impacting an opening reception, so we are working on plans for an artist Zoom talk for the end of February. More about that soon. So this is still on track.
During the week I did get a ping on a potential book submission for my project Gardening For Ordnance. Nice! The publisher has been really impacted by the pandemic, so there’s no rush in the formal submission, which provides me with some time to tweak this project a bit more. Who knows, maybe something for 2024? (Yes, a book publication can take that long).
Last, I am still working on the Quantum Elements series. The artwork above was started during the holidays and I find a lot of intriguing visual aspects of this particular abstraction. It is a two-phase refraction (one these two phases is known as ‘constructive inference’), a wave-function explained by particle physics (a wave refraction is determined by the change in wave speed and the initial direction of wave propagation relative to the direction of change in speed). At the moment, the artworks featured is also one of my favorite from this series. I am going to try printing this on some other reflective media over the next week as another alternative as to how it’s presented. Cool! I am feeling a bit more creative just writing about this; really good therapy, eh?
The artwork LSTa9793 is 24 x 48″ (2 x 4 ft), printed on Rag Metallic, edition of 5 if you are interested.
Cheers
Doug
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Featured artwork, above; LSTa9793 (Quantum Elements) copyright 2020 Douglas Stockdale
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Exhibition, Portfolio Reviews & Workshops
January 21 – 24th, 2021; Los Angeles Center of Photography (LACP), EXPOSURE WEEKEND, a series of virtual portfolio reviews, and I will be on the team of available portfolio reviewers available that weekend. Sign-ups started December 1st. More information here. You might want to sign up for me if you would like some feedback on Project Development, Editing, Sequencing your work, Book design & layout and Publication advice.
February 20th – March 20th 2021; Photographs’s Eye gallery, Escondido, CA, a solo exhibition of my Memory Pods series (lens-based photography). Exhibition reception February 20th, 3-7pm. NEW: Artist talk February 25th, 5:30 – 7:00 pm (PST), sign-up here.
March 13-14, 20-21, 2021; Developing Your Creative Photo Book, a workshop that I am leading again in collaboration with Los Angeles Center of Photography (LACP). Workshop dates are March 13 – 14th, and March 20-21st from 9am – noon PST. Four days, two consecutive weekends, a virtual workshop on Zoom, with time between sessions to develop your book dummy. Sign-up here.
Singular Images 