Joelle Steele's Blog - Creativity

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06/22/2021: Photography and Me

I have always loved photographs, but I have never wanted to collect them. Instead, I have several books on photography or on photographs by certain photographers or of certain places or subject matter. I'm always drawn to things French, so I have books of old photographs of Paris by French photographers.

I also liked taking photos, and my mother gave me her old Ansco camera when I was nine years old. The first photo I took with it was of Lone Cypress in Pebble Beach, and I still have the lit- tle original (framed). Up until about 2004, I almost never left the house without a camera.

Over the years I've owned many different cameras, mostly 35mm, including Leica, Minolta, Pentax, and Rollei. The Rolleis were my favorite cameras, with their crisp Zeiss lenses. I had three of them that were old at the time and I bought them used. One was a 35mm SLR, one was a Rollei that shot small square negatives, and one was a Rolleiflex TLR (twin lens reflex) that was my all-time favorite camera. Its large negative format produced the most beautiful photographs, picking up the tiniest of details with perfect clarity.

It is a shame that so many of my oldest and best art photos have been lost, the prints and negatives deteriorated due to improper storage in my earlier years. I sold some photographs to people who liked my work, but I never had my photos in galleries or shows.

It was in the 1980s that I actually made money shooting photos. I did headshots for wanna-be actors and musicians (d.b.a. as Hollywood Hot Shots). I also did artistic portraits of people, and I photographed portfolios for interior designers, landscape architects, and landscape designers. I also did illustrations and photographs for publishers, mostly of plants, landscapes, and cats. I met some interesting people along the way.

In the early 1980s I met the late architectural photographer, Marvin Rand. He was known as a genius in the field and was especially known for his documentation of the city of Los Angeles. I met him when he was photographing a new restaurant and I was there making some large flower arrangements for the opening. We got to talking, and he told me how he felt about the artistry of photography, both in black-and-white and in color. His words had a huge impact on me, and I saw him several times over the next ten years. I was truly honored to listen to his opinions and thoughts on both the history and the future of photography.

While living on the Monterey Peninsula, I made the acquaintance of Pat Hathaway (whose mother's name was also Joelle). Pat was a photo archivist and owned California Views. I met him when I was a webmaster for the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove and was looking for old photos for their website. He was an interesting man who did an incredible job of collecting images of California, of the Monterey Peninsula in particular, documenting the history of the area. I spent many hours browsing his archives and hearing his stories about many of the photographs.

I got interested in restoring old photographs back in my darkroom days. Not that I ever had my own darkroom, but I used to rent them by the hour. At one of those darkrooms in San Mateo, California, I met a guy who taught me the ins and outs of restoring old photographs by reproducing and retouching them. This sounds so incredibly old-fashioned. Nowadays, I do it all in Photoshop software and it is so much faster and easier, and the result is far superior to what could be done in the darkroom (or else I just never did it as well in the darkroom).

One of the advantages of Photoshop and other online photo editing software is that you can do more than just retouch a photo. You can actually repair a severely damaged photo and even reconstruct missing/damaged parts of that photo. I have reconstructed ears, eyes, and mouths. I have even reconstructed half of a face on a couple of occasions.

I also liked to experiment with using artistic methods to enhance photographs. I did a lot of hand-tinting of photos in the 1990s. I staged still lifes and tinted those, but I also took some of my older black-and-white photos and tinted them. I used color inks and watercolors at first, but found them too difficult to work with. I had a lot of Rit powder dyes left over from the days when I was decorating clothes and shoes ten years earlier, and decided to give them a try instead. The results were much better, probably because the dyes were absorbed better into the photo media. Also, with the dyes, I could get much better variations in the tint, ranging from very subtle colorations to more vibrant ones.

I also enjoyed taking photographs of landscapes and architecture. For about fifteen years I photographed the landscapes done by landscape contractors for use in their portfolios. I also liked to photograph landscapes in general. I love nature, and to me almost anything in nature is worthy of a photograph. I have a lot of photographs that I refer to as "nature close up." Instead of taking a photo of a landscape, I get in close to a rock, a tree trunk, a leaf, or a petal with interesting colors or structure.

Over the years I've taken photographs in the many places where I lived or visited, especially the Monterey Peninsula. So many of these photos represent places and things that are now long gone. I sold quite a few of them in a stock photo collection on my website. And I also took a few oddball photos, such as Venice Beach in a very soupy fog, as seen from a window in my apartment. Also a garbage-ridden alley with an ironic message on the wall that compelled me to take a photo. The day after, the entire area was cleaned up, and the day after that the wall was painted. I guess they saw me take the photo and thought I was turning them over to the health department.

02/14/2023: My Life in Art - An Evolution from Childhood to the Golden Years

Art has always been one of the most important things in my life, yet I don't often write or blog about it. I didn't become an artist overnight. I had a lot of help and support from people during my earliest years.

My mother was my earliest influence. She liked to draw and she was crafty. She crocheted, sewed, and did a lot of needlework. When I was only 4 years old, we would sit at the kitchen table with a tin of watercolors and paint colors into the black-and-white cartoons in the daily newspaper. Both of my parents liked art (and photography), and we had at least 100 books on art and various artists. I spent hours looking at those books.

From the ages of 9 and 18, I took private art instruction from two Carmel artists. In elementary school there was art in every class every year. In junior high and high school I took more art classes. And my Italian step-grandfather, classically-trained artist Leo Perrino, was always there to take me through galleries and museums in San Francisco, teaching me how to look at art and appreciate it in all its forms and styles. This was when he wasn't taking me with him when he painted en plein air. He taught me how to improve my drawings by drawing right over them, correcting my vanishing points and teaching me composition skills. Leo also taught me how to mix colors to achieve realistic ambient colors in a painting – something no one else ever taught me. By the time I was in high school, my art had been exhibited in nine student art shows, and I had begun collecting art. In college, I took only three art history classes. I dropped out of a fourth one because I didn't feel the instructor added anything to the subject matter that I hadn't already studied on my own.

In my mid-20s, I received further support in the form of art sales. I had two art exhibits in Burlingame where two women, who became my life-long friends, each bought a painting. So did my employer at a publishing company where I was the creative director. And so did my previous employer at an advertising agency where I was a senior illustrator. The owner of a recording studio in Sausalito bought a large oil and six photographs. My partner in a recording studio hung my art in our studio and several musicians bought pieces. While I was living with a professional violinist, three of his fellow musicians also bought some of my photographs and art.

The 1980s was a time when I wasn't doing as much with my art as I wanted to. I was ill for a long time and lived in a small studio apartment. My focus at that time turned to writing, publishing, lecturing, and teaching. I did manage to complete a few watercolors and some fine art photography along the way. But when I participated in two art shows in the mid-1990s, I only managed to sell two watercolors and one ink drawing. It was shortly after that when I turned my attention to doing more design work, selling cover art for books, CDs, and magazines; designs for letterhead and business cards; and advertisements of all kinds.

Today, I collect art, mostly decorative European etchings (about which I wrote a book), original small paintings, and art prints. I am currently working on a short art appreciation book about how to look at art and distinguish good art from bad art and what constitutes personal taste. Art has always been with me, and probably always will be. But it may have escaped me entirely if not for those who helped me and supported me along the way.

02/23/2021: The Meaning of Art

I'm pretty opinionated, ergo, I blog. When it comes to art, I think that in many ways the art world is changing, being more open to artists of all kinds. But one thing that still irks me is why-oh-why a piece of "abstract" art has to have an agreed-upon meaning? Why does art need to have meaning at all? If I paint a picture of my cat, do I have to convey anything other than the fact that it's a picture of a cat that I obviously liked enough to paint?

I have never been able to get behind the philosophy that abstract art should have a meaning or a message. In my mind, if I want to send a message, the written word is always going to be the most effective way for me to do it. Words are far less ambiguous than are the vagaries of abstract images. After all, just because an artist tries to send a message through his or her art does not mean it will be received in the way it is intended. A painting that symbolizes an artist's radical political agenda may be seen by a viewer as something other than a social statement and may instead be interpreted for the personal emotional chord that it strikes in that viewer.

Saying what your art "means" doesn't guarantee that it will ever be a reminder of that message to the buyer who hangs it over the sofa in his den because it matches the room's décor. My abstracts are never reflective of some inner struggle and they do not harbor any esoteric meaning, unless the viewer wishes to attribute some personal meaning of their own to my work. And they are always welcomed to do so. I'm not in love with my art, so once it's out of my hands, the buyer is free to think about it in any way they please. And that is what I think is the true meaning of art: whatever it means to the person who views it.

09/18/2007: Ideas, Inspirations, and Creativity In The Real World

Among the questions I am most frequently asked are those about where I get my ideas, the source of my inspirations, and how I translate these things or concepts into something creative, such as a story, a poem, a painting, etc. I think it is safe to assume that, based on my experience with other creative people, I am inspired with ideas in the same way that they are. You see, hear, feel, or even dream about something, and you're off and running with it, finding unique ways to express it in your choice of media.

But because I create for a living, I have to create on demand, turning the mundane or everyday product or service or ordinary idea into something magic -- the final creative product. This is considerably different than creating when the mood strikes you. It means you must find inspiration for something on the spot, and you must immediately put it into words or images that are suitable for your client's needs. It also means that you cannot work in a vacuum. You must instead create within the confines, the restrictions, the limitations, of someone else's ideas or vision. You must interpret what they want and then produce it in the style appropriate to their project. In some ways, this might appear to take some of the fun out of creativity, but after over 30 years of creating on demand, I have learned to see it as a challenge and a learning experience. The more I create for others, the more proficient I become at interpreting their requirements, and the easier it is for me to do the job and enjoy it.

I have always particularly enjoyed designing covers for books and albums/CDs. These small projects give me an opportunity to do paintings, illustrations, photography, and a fair amount of computer enhancement. I also enjoy selecting and setting the fonts and sometimes even writing the book blurbs or liner notes. There is a wonderful interplay between a book or CD and the artwork that accompanies it. I always read the book and listen to the CD because then I really know what that item dictates in the way of design and art to sell it. And I always try to remain mindful of the fact that designing a cover is creating a marketing tool for a book or music publisher. What I create will have a direct impact on the salability of the work.

Not everything that I create is for a client. About a third of my creations are for my own use, such as writing or illustrating my own books that I self-publish, writing short stories or articles for my Web sites or for a class I'm teaching, writing lyrics and poems, painting pictures in acrylic or watercolor, sketching in pencil or charcoal, taking photographs, restoring family photos, typesetting my family histories, making handbags or beaded jewelry and other items, doing designs for my own garden, and sewing curtains, pillows, slipcovers, etc., for the house. In all these cases, I am just doing my own thing without restrictions or deadlines.

As a creative person, I think I speak for others like myself when I say that we see the world differently than most other people do. For example, when I walk down the street, go into a store, enter someone's house, bicycle through a park, etc., I see a story in everything. I can write a poem about it. I can paint a picture of it. I want to photograph it. I have a need and a desire to interpret it in some way. I can't help myself. I have no control over this. It's not because I was born looking at the world differently; it's because I have trained my mind over three decades to see the magic in the mundane. And I apparently did a very good job of it, since it is now an integral part of who I am, and I'm always on automatic pilot, so to speak. In fact, there are many times where I wish I could turn off my brain for a short while to have some relief from all this mental activity. Creativity is born from an awful lot of synaptic energy!

With inspiration and ideas comes a need to keep track of them all. Like any other kind of project you have in mind, any goal you want to achieve, you need to put it in writing and remind yourself of it regularly. Often I find that my list of creative projects begins to form a pattern, which in many cases turns into a book that I write and illustrate. Sometimes it becomes a series of paintings or a collection of poems or lyrics. By writing everything down or making quick sketches, I never lose sight of my ideas and I can work on them whenever the mood strikes, or whenever I have a client who needs something just like what I'm already working on.

Do I ever draw a blank? No, I can't say that I do. Creativity is like a muscle that has to be exercised regularly, and when you do that, you are far less likely to become creatively blocked in any way. Handling life's problems also clears your mind for new inspirations and provides you with the mental fitness and freedom to create. While some creative people insist that they create best under the influence of alcohol or drugs, I have rarely seen such people produce much in the way of work, and I have almost never seen them achieve any financial success or recognition for their endeavors.

Creativity and success do not always go hand-in-hand. Does that mean that a creative person is doomed to financial failure in life? Hardly. There are thousands of people who have healthy bank accounts thanks to their creative pursuits. Many companies and industries need creative services. There are tens of thousands of advertising and public relations firms alone. There are museums and art galleries galore. The entertainment industry employs a good percentage of the world's creative population. Even fine artists have more opportunities thanks to virtual online galleries and eBay stores.

For freelancers, it's a tougher road, and you definitely need some basic business sense to make a go of it, but everywhere there are countless opportunities to ply your creative trade, whatever it may be. Finding those opportunities just takes some time. And speaking of time, creative people rarely, if ever, retire. And why would we? We've got some of the very best, most exciting, and challenging jobs in the world!