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 little 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. The digital scans of many of those prints were lost in a computer crash in 2005. 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 (dba 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.