There's something unsatisfying about photography, because all the hard work is conceptual, or cerebral.  Unless you have your own darkroom, you don't spend much time actually physically making any images.  I do take lots of photographs, and the building of a body of coherent work that is satisfying is really hard.. but it's not the same as pushing around clay or paint.  The medium, in those cases, poses physical problems that require solving and often involve just messing around until things work themselves out.  (Or more often don't work themselves out and end in a drink and a long walk.)  Photography, at least the way I work, is more like writing.. a writer (as Walker Percy points out) is trapped in his cerebral cortex.. marooned and waiting for an idea, or a sentence, or a word to begin with.  A painter can stretch and prime canvas, fiddle with pencil drawings, pastels, paints.. anything to trick yourself into overcoming the inertia of not painting until you find yourself working on a painting.  A writer sits and looks out the window and thinks.  Or sits and looks out the window and drinks.. or wages an attack of his choice on his brain that refuses to cooperate.  For me, photography is like that.. I don't shoot any particular subject as a documentary photographer would, or fashion, or portraits.  What I want is complicated to explain (and I'm not going to try right now) but essentially it is based on being able to see in a way that I can't bring about by force of will.  I just wait, and have a camera around, and try to look hard.  Unfortunately what I want is very specific, and elusive, and borders so closely to being wrong in so many different ways that it can be very frustrating sometimes, and I just switch to painting for a while.

I worked in ceramics for about ten years, and the images above are from that time.  I don't have but a couple of small things of the couple of thousand I guess I made.. they were dispersed as gifts or mostly sold at shows and the gallery in Atlanta that I was represented by.  I stopped working in clay because I didn't see anything to do that felt right.  I couldn't find any way of working that felt relevant or personal.  It seemed like I was trying to hang on to a period of time that ended with the industrial revolution, and I was just very unsatisfied with everything about clay.  Maybe I'd like it better now; I don't know.  What I do miss though is the ability to sit down with a hundred pounds of clay and make pots on automatic pilot for an evening.  To be totally out-of-mind in the best way.  Nothing is so immediately responsive to your hand as clay.  I used to have a recurring dream that I would walk through the wood-fired kiln I used, and stand in the fire arranging pots so that the flying ash that glazed them would fall in the pattern I wanted.. standing in the white-heat turning large jars on their sides so that ash would melt and run around them.

I've been taking a break from shooting anything for a couple of weeks, and working on a few paintings instead.  It's not automatic like ceramics was, but I like standing there and physically pushing around colors.  The two paintings above are from the past week.