Creative February 2022

For the month of February I have joined along on a creative initiative started by Takeyce Walter, a fellow artist from my region. Takeyce is a brilliant painter who draws much of her inspiration from the Adirondacks, a place where I also draw much of my inspiration. Over the past several years Takeyce has run a Creative February project in which she produces a new painting each day for the 28 days of the month. It’s truly remarkable to see, and awfully inspiring. Several artists have now joined her in the project, their work is equally impressive! If you search #CREATIVEFEBRUARY on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter you’ll see some of the results.

As January pressed on I thought I’d welcome the opportunity to participate. I hesitated, a lot. Was I able to put the energy into it? Would I be able to do it for 28 days straight? Would it detract from other projects? I’m not sure of the answer to those questions yet. Time will tell, but today is day 20 and I’ve been really pleased with it all so far. I’ve learned a ton about myself and my work. My vision outdoors has changed. And the response has been very supportive from my audience. I’m looking forward to writing more about it as it develops over the coning weeks.

Here are the first nine images from my Creative February efforts. I placed constraints on myself in this. Before I started I committed myself to shooting all of it on the iPhone 13 Pro because it was a new camera to me. They would then all be processing on the iPhone in monochrome and as a 1x1 aspect ratio. Those constraints really pushed my patience and made me question what I do in the field. My normal camera kit weighs far more than this and is far more cumbersome. But that’s alright, this was all about creative constraints and creative flow. Intentionally going out to make a cohesive, tight body of work with some sort of theme hopefully emergent from it all.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this — good or bad. The internet has become fairly toxic in some arenas, so I’m hoping to create a quiet place here where you can enjoy some of these images.

Day 15

Day 18

Day 11