Sunrise Monk

Early morning, Hong Kong, 2008. ~ss.

Lost In The Fire

I recently spent a weekend in Portland with a new, old medium format camera. It was my first time shooting medium format and I guess I didn't educate myself enough on how to take care of the film after I had shot it. I lost a lot to overexposure. Here are a few that made it out alive, if somewhat affected by the whole experience. ~ss.

Summer Rain

They say scent is strongly tied to memory, but sometimes I find weather sends me back more than anything. ~ss.

LazyAss da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci had a problem with procrastination. 

This from an article by W.A. Pannapacker in the current issue of The Chronicle Review. Constantly distracted by new inspiration, da Vinci would often lose interest in completing projects after he had conceptually figured them out. New ideas in engineering, science and the arts would strike his brain and drag him away from the commissioned work at hand, instead filling pages in a sketchbook. It made him appear inefficient, even lazy. He was hounded by creditors he owed work to and made fun of by his contemporaries for his eccentricities (fucking Michelangelo!) Deadlines were missed and pushed, sometimes by years. He wasn't hugely prolific like Picasso who once said "Give me a museum and I'll fill it." The number of paintings that survived da Vinci are about 20, a good percentage of those, such as his famed Mona Lisa, were in his possession at the time of his death. He was still working on them. His famed sketchbook is filled with inventions ahead of their time, yet how many of those were ever produced by him? 

You may be asking yourself, 'What Leo did with all his time, besides grow that rad beard?' According to one of his biographers, Giorgio Vasari, da Vinci was afraid of success. He never gave anything his best effort because if you don't really try you can't really fail. Perhaps. I'm guilty of that mindset. After all, what if you do give your all and find out it's not enough? What happens to your dream then? Best to protect it by not quite giving it a full go. Then you can still have "the dream."  We've come to recognize Leonardo da Vinci as a genius, the genius, but he was also an exacting perfectionist and in many cases he realized that the human hand could not achieve the god-like perfection of his imagination. In many cases, he let perfect ruin good. Maybe that's why he never finished so many works, why he was drawn off task to other shiny possibilities, temporarily again. Is it perhaps true that you can't rush genius? His sketchbook helped him work out ideas he would use in later artworks that we consider masterpieces to this day. If a good, diligent Leo would have made all his deadlines and been constantly producing instead of searching, maybe we wouldn't see him as the consummate genius. Maybe he would have been prolifically mediocre. And we probably wouldn't have that cool sketchbook either, which wasn't even published until long after his death. Man, did this guy do anything?

So I say, procrastinate away!(do it later) Think about things. Work them out. Use your introspection and become better. Circle back and improve it. And remember the above when you wonder why this blog isn't so frequently updated.   ~ss.

we hope for better things.