Night is such an interesting challenge. To shoot at night takes enormous skill, so that in itself is difficult. To conceive of art in darkness, dark spaces, or at night is not as common, so this should automatically force our brains into a different headspace. There is so much we could do here! Landscapes, conceptual, collage…

No matter what you do, make sure you focus your efforts on the theme or visual of night, whatever that means to you. To me, it’s lots of stars.

I’ll pull some of the art that I see this week to feature!
Use the hashtag #PromotingPassionChallenge so I can find you!

Here is some food for thought. Enjoy the challenge, and remember to push yourself creatively!

I declared 2018 my year of NO travel, and that will be true…after June. So far I’ve spent a month away in India, Sri Lanka, and Florida (that sounds a lot less exciting after the other two). Soon I’ll be heading to Tennessee and Wisconsin before going to Greece and Maine. That’s all by the third week of March.

With that pace it is extremely difficult to keep up routines. I find myself in airports, hotels, Airbnbs, grandma’s houses. I move so quickly from one place to the next that they barely have time to stick in my memories. When your circumstances change, how can you keep a routine? I do my best. Yoga everyday, even if it’s only for 15 minutes. Lots of water. Emails every morning. Reading everyday. Outside of that, nothing is the same.

I’m home for a few days in between trips, exhausted from traveling, body aching, but all I wanted was to create – freely, without interruption. Instead of pushing myself beyond what is wise into the cold for a photo shoot, I searched my computer for long-forgotten images. There I found the spark of something interesting. I didn’t know what it was, just that it could be.

I found an underwater image that struck me as graceful and full of emotion. I had already edited those up for the most part, wasn’t interested in redoing them. I wanted something new. I started to look at the image differently, thinking that the bubbles looked like stars. And so I began creating what I knew could be something interesting. Watch the editing process here:

It is wildly important to act on our creative urges, in whatever way is available to us, in whatever way feels right. I find it necessary to keep motivated. So often we talk about what is recommend to stay healthy: good food, exercise, fresh air, etc. But something I vehemently believe we need to add to that list is creativity. An outlet for our imagination. And I would put that before most else.

How often do you exercise your imagination, release your creativity and make something for yourself? 

I’ve spent a long time letting go of the word “good” in this context. I bet everyone here has had the experience of not creating because what you were making didn’t seem good enough. Now that I’ve had some distance from my process of creating, from my body of work, I can see much more clearly. There are works I create that are good and bad. Some that will remain, others that will be forgotten. In the moment they all feel so important, and they are. But what is important is not how they are judged, but how they made you feel while creating them.

When was the last time you did
something completely for yourself?

Do you notice a change in your health
when you set your imagination free?

“Moonrise”, February 2018

Model: Sara Silkin
Dress: Michelle Hebert

Another day, another learning curve. Sometimes I go months at a time never learning anything significant. Since I started this challenge I learn something EVERY GOSH DARN DAY. It is the most beautiful thing. As an artist, do you ever have those moments where you learn something and you simply cannot believe that you didn’t know it sooner? That was me today, in so many ways…

“Wow, stop motion is so easy, even when doing it myself with a remote and timer!”

“Wow, the sun came up and I’m still able to shoot…who knew?!”

“Why don’t I make chia pudding every day?”

You know, the usual.

I got up at my new regular time of 4-something-ish and headed out the door, but the sun caught up with me today. Turns out, stop motion takes a long time to shoot when you are by yourself with no one to push the button for you. Picture: I’m alone in the desert with my remote, pointing it at my camera, waiting 2 seconds (when it decides to even trigger), and then posing for the image. For 300 images. OF COURSE the sun came up! So, I had to shoot my body in various parts so as not to get direct sun, but hey, it worked! I didn’t melt! I came out smiling! What a day!

Today is the 4th of July, Independence Day, here in the States, and naturally that had me thinking about stars. I wanted to use a sparkler for this image, but there is a fire ban where I live. We don’t even do fireworks; we do a laser show. Yeah, I said it. A laser show. It is about as interesting as you’d expect. So, fireworks being banned, I rethought my concept.

If you are celebrating today, be safe! On a personal note, I’m particularly excited because I’m making a fake-meat-fake-cheese-barbeque-sauce sandwhich…which sounds super uninteresting, and actually kind of gross, but I eat foods like that infrequently so I’m kind of excited to indulge. When I woke up this morning I rolled over to my husband and said “It’s barbecue day!” So, that’s an indication of the level of giddy I get about very unimportant things.

And if you’re not celebrating anything in particular day, keep in mind that it may be Tuesday, but it is the ONLY July 4, 2017 you’ll get, so make the most of it!