Sincerity in All You Do

Sounds like a goody-two-shoes statement, and there are many levels of upstanding, but it's a statement that floats by in many frequencies. I believe it's the foundation of creating something inspiring and innovative.

Although all visionaries need to deal with their personal convictions, artists often bear the brunt of whether they, in the course of their careers, are doing what they believe or whether they're selling out.

Many outside the creative circles have the idea that once an artist--doesn't have to be a visual artist: could be an actor, a writer, a jazz musician or a rocker--gains a certain popularity a.k.a. money, fame, real estate (!), that their creative morals are compromised. 

Is there any truth to this?

For many friends and colleagues who are fine artists, their lives aren't fraught with poverty--real poverty. They're not poor; they're monetarily strapped. They could, and in fact, do something--many things, to earn a living and make art. Really poor people can't do that. What artists have to deal with is the horribly difficult balance of making their living expenses and subsidizing their work. The highly demanding work ethic pounded in by most day jobs leaves most people exhausted, and artists often need a third job to subsidize their second; forcing projects' timelines and risking dilution of the original passion that fueled the concept. Or, as in my case, working in a related field that aids expenses but sometimes wields a stamp of disapproval from the arts community and employer alike.

The composite analog negative of
"He speaks with a smile", the lead-off
image of See My Voice. Note it was
"stripped" in rubylith, with windows
cut out for the black-and-white film
negative and the text. This method was
used to expose offset litho plates before
CTP (computer-to-plate) desktop publishing
 became the standard.

As a fine art photographer, I needed funds for equipment and film. To subsidize my projects, I held a job as a print production manager. I used the technical smarts learned in the daily grind to produce the large prints for See My Voice. An offset press with a copy camera exposed the fiber-based roll photo paper I provided with a composite negative made up the actual 120 mm film strip (yes!) and the high-contrast text neg called a Kodalith. I thought I was a technocrat because I got the text output on film by a service bureau on Canal Street. While it took a lot to convince the prep-room foreman to do an "artsy-fartsy" job in his shop, at the end, everyone loved the work; it didn't matter how I did it. Part of the magic of that work--the prints and the images--is that it's analog.

Today, as I sit in front of my sleek, brushed aluminum computer to "edit" my images and "post" them to my printers' FTP site, I think about those days. Is it a sell-out when the acquired knowledge permits projects to be executed in a different work flow? The answer to that doesn't matter. There's no video tape of me working in a hot, dirty pressroom in Long Island City, and I wouldn't care if there was. I did what I had to do to get the work done to my expectations.

However, I immediately aver that the driving passion is still there, regardless of the machine or the method that makes it happen. Every step of the way is carefully considered, and not an inch is budged without reflection and love.