Good news. Wait no. Great fuck­ing news.

I met with Frédéric, the own­er of the Salon, and after show­ing him a port­fo­lio of my pic­tures, he agreed to let me have an exhib­it in the next show in February.

As this was­n’t only his art gallery but his house as well, I offered to let him make the deci­sion after see­ing my com­plet­ed work. He told me there was no need, as he trust­ed me based on what he had seen in my port­fo­lio, which I felt was a very nice com­pli­ment.

As artists (and I use this in the loos­est sense of the word to describe myself), we’re very dif­fer­ent. I told him that I like to study pho­to­graph­ic tech­niques, espe­cial­ly in pho­tos that I like, and apply those tech­niques to what I want to express or show. When I look at a piece of visu­al art, I look at mean­ing and intent. When I cre­ate, I keep the same thing in mind. Frédéric, on the oth­er hand, is more of a gut-feel­ing type of artist. He does what he feels is right, and does­n’t wor­ry as much about the under­ly­ing mes­sage.

He asked if I was sin­gle, and I told him I was. “Good”, he said, “That’ll help you focus”. It made me think of a quote by Alexander Dumas:

Woman inspires us to great things, and pre­vents us from achiev­ing them.

I made a remark about how I’d have a forum to devel­op my ideas now, projects I nev­er pur­sued because I did­n’t have a way to get them to a wider audi­ence. He told me that I should­n’t wor­ry about an audi­ence, and gave me an exam­ple to demon­strate his point: if you cre­ate the most beau­ti­ful thing you’ve ever done and you keep it in your base­ment, it isn’t art because no one sees it¹, but to get caught up in that dilem­ma, and to not cre­ate sim­ply because of that, is a tragedy.

So now I can pur­sue and devel­op one of my pho­to project ideas. I have to decide on a theme. I have see how much enlarge­ment I can do to my pho­tos with­out too much loss of qual­i­ty. I have to decide on the size of the final prints. I have to decide on the frame size and shape. I have to get the final prints framed.

I’ve always want­ed to cre­ate acces­si­ble art².

Perhaps this will be my chance.

1. An inter­pre­tive answer to the Zen kōan of the sound a tree makes falling down in the for­est, I’m sure [↩]
2. As opposed to some­thing such as poet­ry, which is less acces­si­ble to the com­mon per­son. As a medi­um, film, pho­tog­ra­phy, and music (with lyrics) are more eas­i­ly digestible. [↩]