I slid the light 02.1

I slid the light is a series of abstracts i created that are all about captured motion, about how i feel like i am sliding thru rivers of energy in my life, and how sometimes i don’t exactly feel like i’m in control, like the choices i make are mostly about how i will slide the light, as opposed to what rivers of energy i might have to slide down.  The first I Slid The Light was one of my first pieces - i was experimenting using the camera in motion, as i’d read Man Ray did with his first movie camera.  I’m using “light” in it’s sense as a wave of energy - and in particular, i was sliding down currents of light when i created these pieces, discovering myself as a visual artist, re-inventing my sense of Self as an artist.  When i was young i decided to be an author, and studied Creative Writing at SF state, created my own zines to get my work out there, and was just learning the culture around submitting work to publishers - when suddenly i was a parent and had to focus on making money.  When my daughter got a little older, i got into physical theatre, which is an ensemble based, broad style of live original theatre that is all about being an actor-creator, creating original ensemble plays using improv in a big way.  I was an actor, as well as teaching arts education, so i was writing and directing plays, with children, teens and adults. Plus i was the youth director for an international theatre company. I was doing an enormous amount of work, and then i got injured.  

At first i still worked with my brain injury.  But eventually, i became exhausted, suffering blinding headaches almost all the time, i was so tired during my last show, i couldn’t even clap when my teen ensemble garnered a standing ovation - someone afterward asked me if i was angry.  No, i was just too tired to smile.  The Artistic Director and i agreed that i needed to stop working - his plan was a year, mine was three months, but then neurologist said “forever, you will never be the same” - and work had been my entire identity.  Being a theatre artist. administrator, and teacher had been my entire identity - and my brain injury literally took all that away from me.  My brain injury took everything - i was left alone with my own thoughts, feelings, and ideas.  At first my brain was still churning, want to create - i would take walks and my thoughts would drive me mad, so I decided to imagine creating a youth theatre program, housed in a local movie theatre that was for sale, that was right in the middle of Arcata, a small, rural, college, hipster town.  The lobby could have been remade into a teen hang out, with a YA books and graphic novels, so kids could come by afterschool and do homework, or read, or just chill with their friends.  The theatre was huge, so it could’ve been sectioned off to create classrooms.  I imagined a teaching philosophy and pedagogy, what the lobby would look like, having the teens put together there own council to handle misbehavior amongst them.  I imagined afterschool and summer programs.  

When the neurologist told me I’d never be the same, that dream died, and i nearly died, by my own hand, along with it.  My creative engine, for some reason, was untouched by my injury, but the capacity to create, the mind and body, were broken.  It was like putting the engine of a bullet train in an 19th century locomotive.  I turned back to writing, essays, about my transition mostly at the time, and wanted to create a blog, but my engine just spewed out words at an alarming rate, and every time i went back to edit anything i’d written I’d find myself inspired to write more. I have been working keyboards since i was 12, and i’ve done a lot of writing, so i can type as fast as i can write. One essay about one subject would have so many sidebars, and tangential commentaries, and would often end on an entirely different subject, that they were unpublishable even by internet standards.  

Then i was struck down by a thyroid problem, and i couldn’t even write, so i turned to photography - well, specifically, photo editing art, coz i’d always conceived of doing avant-garde photos.  At first i took self-portraits with my computer to manipulate, and I took photos with my phone - usually with the camera moving.  Then a friend gave m a polaroid.  I’d studied visual art all my life, and grew up with parents who loved art. We always had cool art in our house, and my parents took me to galleries and museums.  In college i’d created my own degree program, a Special Major, based on three components, Human Development, Theatre Art, and Visual Art - i took lots of art history classes, and drawing classes, but the theatre is the light stream that really sucked me in artistically, and i went to a conservatory type theatre school.  

So, i do have an art background. Even all those years i was writing and doing theatre, i still collected art books and prints, talked about art with my parents, went to museums.  I loved Expressionism, Dada and the Surrealism the best.  One thing i learned in Drawing Class was that it would take concentrated time and effort to learn to draw well - but i decided to slide the theatre stream of light instead.  But when i found myself lost, without a stream of creative light to slide, i started to go mad.  But then i began to experiment with photo editing, and all of a sudden this fascinating stream of light opened up to me, and i found myself just creating and creating, learning how to work editing programs, but not with an eye toward fine tuning a photo, but with making it into a different art form entirely.  I did things in editing no photographer would do, boosting colors, exposure, contrast, hight lights and shadows, until the photo fractured and was torn apart and became something else.   Kinda like what happened to me. 

This manip was made from the same source as this one: