10,000 hours
It’s a new year, even if I’m a bit tardy in recognizing that fact, and I’m going to be taking some new directions. In part that means simplifying my web presence to two main sites. Learning Aesthetics will be primarily day job-related; learning technology, higher education, and the like. SightWork be a combination of things that I make, and things that I like.
I haven’t figured out of style or voice, so you can expect a bit of exploration, which is a polite way of saying stumbling about. In fact one of the reasons I’m so far into the new year is that I haven’t figured out how to explain starting, what I’m doing, what to do. Perhaps some visual aids will help. For quite a while I have been calling myself a photographer, and for the past few years: the work product drawings. This because the images have tended to start out as snapshots and then most of the work has been done in Photoshop. Actually the line between Photoshop and photography has grown increasingly blurry for everyone; as has the line between the real and the ideal. There’s room for a lengthy digression on the relationship between retouching and reality, but I think I’ll save that for later. Also for later some of my thoughts about what counts as art, or maybe the relationship between art and beauty, or art and the sublime. But I was leading up to visual aids. I’m now working in Corel painter, which is sort of like a ghetto branch of digital image manipulation. I just started and Malcolm Gladwell says that it takes about 10,000 hours to get good at something; that’s about four hours a day for 10 years, something like that. This is almost as daunting as putting something up on the Internet in the face of everything that’s already there, or as the Flatlanders put it, “…a lot of those boys make a lot more music than I can.” But who knows 10,000 hours from now I may have figured something out.
I decided to start with dachshunds.