I slept horribly. I have a headache. I seem to wheeze when I sleep in my Grandma’s bed, so doggy and I slept in the RV last night. The RV is my bed, and I feel great in it, but when you’re already having an active asthma flare, it can just keep going regardless of environment. I’ve always been SUPER impacted by my environment. Asthma never let me just chill.

If you’ve known me since we were kids, you probably remember my asthma. I had the worst asthma of anyone most people knew. I still do.

Discovery, discovery, discovery

I spent a lot of yesterday doing discovery calls for courses, mentorships, and certifications. I’m trying to understand how to keep building skills for what I’m doing. I ended up going with a photography mentorship. I’m excited about that and also hate hate hate spending money on my craft in that way. I just feel like I should be able to figure it out, and when I can’t, I’ll just struggle. I feel like I shouldn't have to spend money for help and that it shouldn’t be this hard to figure all the business stuff out. It is going to help me, and I’m moving shoulds out of my vocabulary if they’re going to keep me in the same place I am.

What I’m doing now, being in Montana, living in this RV, getting trained at the hat shop to sell and shape cowboy hats, is a photo project. My life is the art, and everything I’m doing now is to capture that story of transformation. I also have thousands of photos, unedited, sitting in hard drives, that I know are good, and are waiting for the opportunity to be shown and printed and appreciated. I see my photography like I see my painting, big, on white walls, where you can walk right up to it and feel like you’re inside the scene. I want you to feel the moment and connect right back to it.

I’m not a photographer that’s going to start taking moments of you and your baby and your potbelly husband in a field. I’ve thought about it. A lot of photographers can at least make money from their craft that way. People love those photos, but I mostly hate them. There’s no story, the light is always just bright. There’s little mystery. They’re for the reminder that we looked like this on this day. I want photos that capture how you’re feeling and more. I’ve seen a few wedding photographers that capture story more than object but they’re far and few and people don’t pay for them. The real visionaries will though, they just need the right person to work with.

And, I’m here to be a storyteller. I like storytelling (it’s also in my human design). I like documentary photography, where we feel only a moment of the narrative, and the viewer gets to craft their own. Photographers like Matt Eich, Cindy Sherman, and Sarah Palmer have been on my mind and in my browser tabs lately. I want to emulate someone who took photos that people want to view for generations, because they say something meaningful, because they are real.

The artist is an internal battlefield

I struggle to move through the “shoulds” I keep in my body. I know what they feel like at this point. They’re the moment of confusion after some excitement. They’re the voice that’s like but what about this. They’re the closing in and the tightness. The things that make your world feel smaller and narrow. Life is not small and narrow. You are not small and narrow. Get SHOULDS out of your vocabulary. This is a reminder to myself as much as I hope it’s a war cry for you.

“Shoulds” are the soul-shrinkers we’ve been programmed to use for our safety or conformity. They don’t help you grow, they help you perform. They keep you obedient to some invisible authority that isn’t even watching. They’re like rust on the inner mechanics of creativity. When I’m in “should,” I don’t make anything good. Instead I stop and analyze. I get out of my body. I get out of flow. I start thinking that I can think my way to the right end and that’s not art. We actually don’t know the end, just like we don’t in life. “Shoulds” make us make something safe. It’s why financial strains on creativity (Rick Rubin talks a lot about this) can be the death of all good art. Because “shoulding” my photography might be to say, well I should just go market myself to take high school graduation pictures. They would pass in a classroom, undoubtedly. But true art is about saying I’ll make something simply because it wants to be witnessed.

AND, I’m gonna figure out how to make money from it.

And, we have to remember, God just wants you to show up and make the work that you know deep inside of you. There’s a deep knowing of the stuff you want to bring through. You know when you see it and you know when you don’t.

God speaks in impulses. In mess. In the color outside the lines. God also speaks in precision and process, but neither of those means we make our art for a false God: a “should”, “an audience”, your potbelly husband paying the check for an engagement photo. And every time we “should” ourselves into something, we step a little further away from that divine channel, from getting one step closer to seeing the thing in front of us that we know we know we know. It truly is like a thing that wants to come through, that if we follow the impulse for what it is, we’ll get to see and be with it and know that it is both ours and not.

“Should” is often the voice of culture. “Should” is the voice of your mom or that one bully who told you you’d never be successful. “Should” is the ghost of every authority figure, classmate, or Karen (in my case, it was a Carey) who told you how to stay in line. It’s never the voice of spirit. Spirit says try. Spirit says keep going. Spirit says follow until you can’t stop.

If you want to make art that’s alive, if you want to live a life that feels like art, then keep removing your “shoulds”. There’s only you and what wants to come through you. Refine, create, refine, create, share, witness, make, fail, design, make more, ah ha, that’s it.

Love,
Val