a little bit of reading (my favorite is the little yellow one near the top)

For part of me, the kid in school who always wanted an A “right” seems pretty important. “Right” means that you can go out, read enough, ask enough questions, do something in a way proven to have worked well for someone else and you’ll hit it. Make the mark. Doing it right means study and questions and getting the recipe perfected.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am an over achiever, I want to know everything I can about something to be sure to do my very best. But sometimes doing your best means letting go and letting your intuition take you to the next level, show you the next step.

I’ve learned with art setting the goal to doing it “right” is a recipe for mediocrity.  Looking at the process and saying I am going to get it “right” is the surest way to taking a tourniquet and cutting off the flow of blood to your vitality and your creativity.

I always always love to learn new techniques and figure out how people are doing the things they do, it interests me. I look at art and images all around me for inspiration. I brush up on basics too, because there is always something to be worked on. BUT I’ve discovered that just because I know how to do something, that doesn’t mean I have to like to do it that way and sometimes something may surprise me, something that I didn’t think I dug I will and that there are no rules to art, there are no rules to growth, there is no chart as an artist that you can go and plot yourself on to see if you are in the right percentile, thank god.

It happens every so often, I’ll be sitting editing my images and not like what is happening. When this happens I have trained myself to stop and walk away, do something else (even if it’s Taxes or paperwork or cleaning out my mail box). I step away and when I go back and start again I have a mantra. The mantra is simple: “forget about right”. Right implies there is some rule, some ‘thing’ that is already in existence that is the only outcome, it implies one dimensional, it implies status quo, it implies stagnation, it negates inspiration, creativity, it negates that intangible thing that is the soul of art. I take a breath and remember that I just have to do what I do.

I stop thinking about “right” and while that can be scary I try to remember that simply every moment, every frame taken or worked on in that freedom of creativity is a frame that will resonate, that will move me. If it moves me it may just move others. Every person I capture unbounded by anything but the connection we are making will show not only that persons soul, but the open heart of the artist who took it. So every time my brain wants to tell me that I need to do it “right”, “get it just so”, every time my mind out of a very caring desire to please says “make it right” I just tell her it will be okay it can’t be anything but, if I’m going in with an open and full heart.