The Work.

Following up from last week, I thought it might also be interesting to share a bit of my story as an artist - my journey, how I see myself, and what I've learned.

I've been making things as long as I can remember. Drawings and paintings as a kid, then years of photography. A love affair with poetry started somewhere in middle school and is still going strong.

And that one - maybe that one is worth looking at a bit more closely.

See, in my 20's, I wrote a fair bit - doing both traditional poetry and performing spoken word. But around the time I turned 30, I decided I needed to step it up a notch if I was ever going to write something good.

I was feeling, as Ira Glass puts it, the gap. The gap between my taste - as someone who loved Eliot and Clifton and Merwin - and my ability.

So, I did a very Steven thing. I found a small room for rent in the corner of an industrial warehouse, told nobody in my life where it was, and turned it into a poetry studio.

And I went to work. For 30 hours a week, nights and weekends after my job, I was in the studio. Reading, writing, trying to replicate and understand the greats. I rotated through a new poet each week, reading as much of their work as I could, then trying to write in their style, to see how they were doing what they were doing.

I spent two years straight like this, honing my craft, discovering writers who became like friends, living in books on my wall. Found writers I respected but deeply disliked. Covered the walls with drafts of my own and took them all down and covered them with better ones.

And at the end? Well, it'd worked. I knew how I wanted to write - at least that version of me. I wrote things I was happy with, that moved and inspired me when I came back to them months and years later. They weren't Eliot or Clifton or Merwin. They were Steven. I'd bridged the gap.

More recently, in the last year or two, I've picked back up my photography practice again. And again, I'm feeling the same tensions, the same gap between the quality of my work, and the work of photographers I love. And there is a gap. When I see Sean Tucker or Adrien Sanguinetti or James Popsys - let alone Cartier-Bresson or Salgado - the part of my brain that has taste says "THAT'S IT!". And when I review my photos, it says, "Hm. It's not quite there."

And so, I think, it's time again for me to put in the work. I've started carving out time to specifically study and break down what those folks who have bridged the gap are doing. To actively, not passively, fill myself with quality work that makes me ask questions, and helps me understand. To go out and shoot specific things, iterate, learn.

And it is working - and it is also frustrating as hell. My brain and heart are just kids in the back, yelling Are we there yet?? And I have to keep saying no, no, we're not, and we're still not that close. Settle down and play the license plate game, kids. It's going to be a long drive.

But I know when we get there - it'll have been worth all the work.

With lots of love, -Steven

p.s. The best thing I saw all week was this wonderfully animated video explaining what one person's experience of being diagnosed ADHD as an adult has been like. I love getting a glimpse into someone else's experience of the world, and Jaiden of JaidenAnimation does it so authentically with this.