4 minute read
An Accidental Artist
By Ken Long
I wasn’t supposed to be an artist.
And for most of my life, I wasn’t. Oh, I had made some art in school, just like you.
But my kindergarten teacher sent a note home to my parents because the violent nature of my army battle pictures was a cause for concern.
And in junior high, the superhero parody comics I drew in the back of the class, when I should have been taking notes, were sometimes confiscated.
That accounted for most of my art experience for the first sixty-plus years of my life. I had no formal art training beyond eighth grade and never took an art appreciation class.
I wasn’t supposed to be an artist. And then I was.
It happened slowly, a few years after digital cameras came out. I bought a Canon point-and-shoot camera with zoom. Suddenly, I could take photos and see what I had taken without having to wait for prints to be developed, and then I could share the photos electronically. Easy-to-use editing software also became available at the same time.
I sometimes supersaturated the photos I took to make the colors pop and give the image a painting-like quality. I posted some of these on Facebook and got positive feedback on them from friends and family.
A few years later, the first publicly available “deep dream” neural net software was introduced. This enabled me to combine a photo I took (the base image) with a second image (the style image) to create a composite of the two that was a new beast entirely. A few examples of this accompany this article.
When I began to post these processed images on Facebook, I got even more positive feedback and then, surprisingly, requests to buy them.
This eventually led me to create my own small business, River PhotoCraft, which today generates annual revenue in the thousands.
I wasn’t supposed to be an artist, and maybe you weren’t either.
But you can be one if you want. Really. All it takes is the desire and a bit of effort.
Try lots of different things. Make lots of mistakes. You don’t have to show them to anyone.
Eventually you’ll make something you like. If you’re lucky, others will too. But if they don’t, that’s okay.
Consider what Kurt Vonnegut said on the subject: “Go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.
Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem.
Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
I became an artist accidentally, rediscovering the joy I found drawing exploding bombs and soldiers when I was five, sixty years later when I began to take and alter photographs digitally. There’s no one way to become an artist. Whatever path leads you there is a good one.
Ken Long, who lives in Rocky River, Ohio, specializes in creating processed and composite photographic images. His work has been displayed at such places as BAYarts, the Carlisle Art Gallery, and the Rocky River Nature Center.
You can find more of Ken’s work at https://www.facebook.com/riverphotocraft and contact him at riverphotocraft@outlook.com.
