things i .love. wednesdays

I forgot to mention before that the idea for things I love Wednesdays came from the favorite things blog: http://favoritethingsproject.blogspot.com/. It's a blog where two photographers, who live far away from each other, take a polaroid each week of one of their favorite things and then one send theirs to the other and they are put into a diptych. The combination of the images is pretty fascinating.

Also, a lot of blogs I read do special blogs about things they love and I thought it would be nice to give the blog a personal touch and an insight into the strange brain of little ole' me.

Anyways, onto some things I love.

I .love. this painting by Kurt Halsey (www.kurthalsey.com)!

I bought it at Urban Outfitters in Sacramento when I was living completely alone for the first time. I didn't even have money to eat at the time but I found the $35 or whatever to buy because I felt so drawn to it. Sounds silly I know but I felt like it was a little painting of me. I had bangs and super blond hair at the time and was battling loneliness in my little 600 square foot abode. It strangely made me feel better. Less alone. I knew I had to have it for my apartment so I could have something to make me a little happier. And it always did and still does.

I also .love. .... balloons!!!



I think this is an obvious one but I love them so much that I have decided to revisit my balloon series, only this time sans jumping/floating. It was impossible to get the balloons to behave when they are tied to all your limbs and you're jumping frantically in an attempt to best the self-timer.

Anyways, there is something about balloons that just brings me pure happiness so why not incorporate that into some images? It should be fun if nothing else. =)



Oh and sorry about not doing my "inspired by" post yesterday. I took some photos for it but they turned out awful. So bad I didn't even want to post them.. and that's bad. I will definitely try and do a two-fer next week to make up for it though.

inspired by tuesdays.

I've decided to add another regular blog post, in addition to things i LOVE wednesdays. I will now be posting an image every Tuesday and discussing my inspiration for the image. I get asked all the time where I get my inspiration for my images. This is a very hard question to answer as it is incredibly random and can come from anywhere: other photographer's work, movies, music, life, dreams, books, etc. So this is my way of answering the question by sharing an image and its inspiration once a week.

Like I said before I keep an inspiration journal where I clip out images, etc. into all the time as well as writing down or sketching ideas. This has been the most efficient way to not forget ideas and to never be lacking inspiration. In fact I think I'm overloaded with inspiration which surprisingly overwhelms me and makes not pick up the camera because I can't choose where to start.

I think the key to finding inspiration is to just keep looking at other art all the time. I subscribe to something like 50 blogs and look at hundreds of images everyday (online, in magazines, and in books). Maybe this is overload but I just love looking at what others are doing and using that to figure out what kind of work I want to do.

Enough typing. Time for pictures.

Here's my image for week one of inspired by tuesdays (though this image is more along the lines of an emulation):

... and the inspiration for the image is Henry Fuseli's "The Nightmare"This is my all-time favorite painting. Yes, all-time (at this moment that is). I saw it for the first time in my art history class only a year ago and was so captivated by the image. It really hit me on a very personal note. I don't really care to elaborate on that but needless to say it is an image that has stayed with me in a very personal way. I have been wanting to emulate it ever since I saw it and finally got around to it last night.

...And just for fun a second image that I shot last night:



This was inspired by a dream that I had. I have pretty intense and WEIRD dreams. For instance, about a month ago I had a dream that I was part of a crime fighting super hero team and instead of a flying or using a batmobile we traveled via sewer luge. That's right, we basically had a giant tunnel waterslide underground as our transportation. Awesome, I know. I have NO IDEA where that came from.