Johannah Willsey in Richmond, VA is documenting a Year in Blue...
Why did you decide to do this project? Several friends started 365 projects around the beginning of 2011. I saw how much enjoyment and satisfaction the projects brought them, but I had no particular inspiration for a project of my own. One day, daydreaming while my children played, I thought the color blue would make an interesting focus for a daily photography project. It seemed a throw-away idea at first, but it stuck with me all day, and I took my first blue photo that evening.
How has doing a yearlong/daily project affected your life? My primary artistic medium is mosaic, but that work is on the back burner for now. I had been missing the sense of purpose and personal satisfaction garnered from regular creative work. Meanwhile, I’ve been working to improve my photography but needed an “excuse” to take and share artistic photos, something beyond my children’s daily antics and the passing of the seasons in my backyard.
This project has met both those needs, the regular creation of art and the improvement of my photography. I have been enthused at how quickly I meet the goals I set for myself, whether those goals are technical aspects with which I wish to become comfortable, new ways to look at and photograph the world, or challenges to my emotional limitations. Working on this project has set up a sort of feed-back loop with my mosaic work, in that I first thought of myself as an “artist” through mosaics, which helped give me the confidence to move forward with photography, and I now find myself applying lessons learned through this photography project to my mosaic work. I have a broader, stronger sense of myself an artist as a result.
See all of Johannah's blues HERE.
Why did you decide to do this project? Several friends started 365 projects around the beginning of 2011. I saw how much enjoyment and satisfaction the projects brought them, but I had no particular inspiration for a project of my own. One day, daydreaming while my children played, I thought the color blue would make an interesting focus for a daily photography project. It seemed a throw-away idea at first, but it stuck with me all day, and I took my first blue photo that evening.
How has doing a yearlong/daily project affected your life? My primary artistic medium is mosaic, but that work is on the back burner for now. I had been missing the sense of purpose and personal satisfaction garnered from regular creative work. Meanwhile, I’ve been working to improve my photography but needed an “excuse” to take and share artistic photos, something beyond my children’s daily antics and the passing of the seasons in my backyard.
This project has met both those needs, the regular creation of art and the improvement of my photography. I have been enthused at how quickly I meet the goals I set for myself, whether those goals are technical aspects with which I wish to become comfortable, new ways to look at and photograph the world, or challenges to my emotional limitations. Working on this project has set up a sort of feed-back loop with my mosaic work, in that I first thought of myself as an “artist” through mosaics, which helped give me the confidence to move forward with photography, and I now find myself applying lessons learned through this photography project to my mosaic work. I have a broader, stronger sense of myself an artist as a result.
See all of Johannah's blues HERE.
2 comments:
I love Year in Blue!
Thanks, Madonna! And thanks for the post, Noah. Answering the questions was a great exercise for the project.
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