All these beautiful, unique, life changing squares before me.
My gosh. Every single one holds a face that has made me in to the artist, photographer, and person I am at this very moment, after another full long year of connecting with people through squares and rectangles that define who they are in just 1 moment of time.
The beginning of 2015 started out with snow, love, pin ups, and models. I got to photograph people in the first few months of this year that would become friends of mine, have babies, get married, go on to be successful in their careers, win awards… Every person in those first squares are so much more than faces to me when I look back.
At the very beginning of March my husband, Jake, and I went to Las Vegas for the biggest Photo Expo in, possibly, the world, WPPI. On the plain ride home I exploded a small notebook with ideas, inspiration, things I wanted to change, and ideas I wanted to create. That’s when The Revolution was born.
Around May I took about 1 1/2 months off of work. I go through phases with my art, like we all do in life, but at that point I had realized that, if I didn’t make a change NOW I wasn’t going to be able to make that HUGE jump in to the art that I've always been drawn to, that really makes me happy and keeps me feeling alive. I had to make a cut in the timeline, so I disappeared for a bit.
You will see a lot of little squares that are of me this year. It’s not because I love myself that much but I find that inverting inwards helps me understand situations better. Sometimes I find messages to myself in my work before I’m even fully aware there’s a message to be found. Through my self-portraits I pushed past what I was comfortable with, what I thought I knew, and started over. I let go of what was holding me back and pushed towards what made me happy. I found myself outside more, exploring more, and having a better understand of what actually made me happy when it came to creating for others.
From that time The Pillow and The Pond and Floating through the Veil was born, as was another piece I am still waiting to release.
After that the squares starts to shift back to everyone else. The people who keep my art alive- you.
We did so many gorgeous seniors, hot bridal boudoir, families, even a few babes! We got to experience being with hundreds of people for weddings, big commercial shoots, I even climbed 100 feet up in to a giant Michigan Sequoia to get some shots of climbers. You rolled around in leaves, climbed up and down hills with us, got sassy with an old retro truck, sun gazed, and threw around flour. You laid in ponds, jumped on trampolines in sweaty haunted buildings, and stuck antlers in your hair.
You made 2015 beautiful, truly, unremarkably beautiful. And I thank you for that. Over and over and over again.
Here’s to another years of beauty, stories, and fairytales brought to life.
