Looking Back

When I look back over the past year, art-wise, it was a year of photography. It's not that it was any special priority. Instead, I had several, tremendously, enjoyable experiences taking pictures and I think I got some good shots.

What I like best is using the 60x zoom on my fancy, but older model, point and shoot camera to capture candid moments. It's become almost a game to try to capture what I want to capture without cropping or editing the picture afterwards.

Drawing and painting was not at my core like it's been the last several years. I suppose the best thing is that I got past my first long hiatus. It surprised me how hard it was to get my regular practice back. While I am back to painting, I hardly drew at all. When I looked back at my blog posts in 2019, I was surprised to see that I started the year working on cross-hatching. I would like to work on that in 2020.

Going back to photography, here are some of my favorite images.

Most of my favorite photos came from the week I spent at the Tofte Lake Center.

This one is new and is from Christmas Eve of a very little girl contemplating a very large box. This present wasn't directly for her, but it didn't matter.

The single most important picture from this past year is not one of great photography. In fact, it's a picture of a high school yearbook picture of my biological mother. I found it at the public library in the community where she grew up. She, along with all of her immediate family, have already died, so I don't have many opportunities to get pictures or information, so this picture is very precious to me.

I didn't write about it much on this blog, but I spent a lot of the past year making discoveries about my biological and adoptive roots.