Burnout, continued frenzied photography, pottery - Why Am I Making This? Issue #11
Hey there!
It’s the end of another month! The trees are (finally) blooming, it’s getting warmer outside, the days are longer, and I remain on the struggle bus. How about you?
I’m Julien, and this is my monthly creative updates newsletter. I hope that sometimes it transcends that description, but for the most part it kind of is what it is. I’m doing okay, really. The struggle bus is my home now. It’s cozy here. I have something like 10 new photoshoots to share with you, which is totally wild. I’ve been steadily making pottery. I have been scanning polaroids and getting 35mm film developed. I have a new vintage camera! My partner and I watched all 8 seasons of the indie (maybe not the right term) anime RWBY in a week in the middle of April. Soon after I send this newsletter, I will be playing New Pokemon Snap. In the evenings, I have been reading Alastair Reynolds’ first novel, Revelation Space. (One of his other series, Poseidon’s Children, are some of my favorite books ever.) Life is fine, scattered, busy, boring.
I can’t stop myself from being busy with art, which is a little bit of a problem. I keep scheduling photoshoots, planning paintings, and making pottery, even though I’m feeling pretty burnt out with everything. I make myself take a break sometimes, but then I get bored (because there’s nothing I want to go out and do) and start working on a project, and then I feel exhausted. I think the pandemic has heightened my tendency to hyperfocus on my creative interests, and a year of doing that has me feeling pretty tired. But when I stop, I’m bored and listless. I think I need to read more books.
Film Photography
That’s my new camera! It’s a digital photo of it, of course. The rest of the photos in this section are film (although not all of them were taken with that camera).
I’ve had a strange relationship with digital photography lately, which I’m hoping that using film more can help fix. For the last few photoshoots I’ve done, I’ve gotten a little obsessive over the photos I took, feeling like I can’t relax until I’ve looked through them, picked my favorites, and edited them, going back several times to tweak things I didn’t like on a first pass. I’ll usually take somewhere from 100-400 photos in a digital shoot, and it stresses me out to go through them all right away, fixating on certain images. But I can’t stop myself from doing it.
Film forces me to chill out, because obviously with a film camera, you take each photo and can’t see how it turned out. You also probably take a lot fewer photos. Usually I’ll kind of forget exactly what shots I took until I get the film back, weeks or months after I took them. I think my obsessive behavior comes from being able to look at the photos without any time to reflect, and I’m hoping that the time-delay and uncertain nature of film will help me relax a little bit.
Anyway, here’s a few photos from a roll of an experimental film called Lomochrome Purple that I took throughout March and very early April:
Here’s some photos from the first roll of film from my new vintage camera!
And here are two spring-y Polaroids from a few days ago, on some expired film with an interesting purple shift.
Digital Photoshoots
Photos, in chronological order, from shoots I’ve done since the ones in my last newsletter. I’ve tried to limit myself to 2-3 photos from each, max. I have been struggling with how to present my sets of photos - I do post them on Instagram, but that's not really the best. It might be time to put a blog on my website for photo sets. We'll see. Anyway, I'm really proud of all of these, and proud of myself that I got out to take them all! Even if maybe I overdid it a bit.
You might remember that I was looking forward to the arrival of flowers in my last newsletter, and obviously they are here now! I am so glad I’ve been able to take the flower photos I have, but my frazzled, obsessive brain has been giving me photography fomo whenever I walk/drive past a flowering bush or tree, making me feel like I have to come back and photograph it. I know that I don’t, so why do I feel that way? Maybe because I have been looking forward to flowers, and little else concrete, for too long? Whatever the reason, hopefully I’ll be able to let go a little bit soon.
Pottery
Some shiny new pottery pieces! These are mostly for sale if you’re interested in any of them. Plus a few workspace and in-progress photos.
Another photography project... (No! Stop! Don’t burn yourself out!) - I’d really like to have nicer photos of my ceramics in home settings, not just with a white background...
RWBY
I’m including the anime RWBY as a topic here because the week that Filip and I binged it was the first time in a while that I really felt like I was taking a good, genuine break. It didn’t last, of course - the bored/busy tension returned as soon as I couldn’t fill my time with watching it anymore - but it was meaningful enough to me that I wanted to write about it a little bit.
I’ll start by saying that RWBY is not exactly a good show. Many would even say it is a terrifically bad show - I don’t know for sure, but I think it’s something that a lot of people online love to hate. It is made and fully funded (I believe) by an independent studio, unrelated to any networks or streaming services. The animation in the early seasons is startlingly bad (it looks kind of like a late-2000s video game, with stilted character movements and blocky backgrounds), and in the later seasons is roughly passable. The writing is wildly inconsistent, but sometimes really wonderful, with character moments that rival any of my favorite shows and films.
The plot and inconsistent pacing of the seasons make it seem to me that the show was made with a much lighter editorial hand than most shows of this kind, which I think is what, ultimately, endeared it to me. I love media that’s a bit rough around the edges - newsletters, blog posts, webcomics, indie video games. This felt like the tv show version of all of those, and I unironically love it. But I’m not sure I’d recommend it unless you share my taste in heartfelt, homemade-feeling, arguably-low-quality media.
Here’s a drawing of Weiss, my favorite character, which I may or may not ever finish.
I can’t stress enough how much I love this show. We are rewatching the whole thing at a slower pace, a few episodes at a time, and I’m enjoying every moment.
Until next time,
Julien