Jes Lee

Long weekends and lots of film

I spent this past long weekend hanging out with Mr. Fictitious Nonsense and doing all sorts of things around our little city that we always say we will do, but don’t always manage to. In a round-about-way, these are the things that are inspiring me now. The day-to-day, the ordinary you don’t always look at, think about, or slow down for.

Friday we biked to our favorite brew pub for dinner. We go there quite often, but this is the first time we biked together. It was a lovely ride. You see your surroundings, the streets you drive on every day, the neighborhood you drive through all the time, a bit differently on a bike. I am really enjoying that now, and really enjoying biking as many places as I can. I love my car, but I am getting very tuned in to biking. Biking makes it easier to stop and snap a few photos on the way as well ;)

Saturday we stopped at a coffee shop, walked through the farmer’s market in the rain and bought a few fabulous things. I love farmer’s market season! We went out to brunch, and went to the Walker Art Center. There are sadly many times I miss an exhibit I want to see there. That is not a good thing – we are members, we don’t have to pay the admission fee, and we are so close! We made it to see the Lifelike exhibit (just before the last day!) and I happened to find my new camera (yay birthday present!) in the gift shop! I have played with this little guy a lot this weekend. There will be photos posted soon! We also went to a little soiree party, celebrating two very good friends getting married. It was a lovely party! It gave us a chance to visit people we don’t get to see often enough, and sit in the park in a picnic shelter watching the rain. It was lovely!

Sunday was a working day, but Mr. FN and I still managed to have lunch together, and a late dinner, while watching the storms. The storms and rain have been crazy here lately. I finished off the night reading a new poetry book I picked up at Pocket Lab Reading Series a couple of weeks ago. Mortal Geography by Alexandra Teague. It is amazing! I need to read it again. I am carrying it with me in my bag, to read bits of it again when I have a chance.

Monday we biked again. This time through the neighborhoods to do some thrift store shopping. Though I did have a relatively minor wipe out on my bike, it was still a wonderful ride. We are really lucky around here to have so many parks, and it always amazes me how often you can go out on your bike here with a specific destination in mind and have part of your path go through one of the local parks. It is a gorgeous place to live because of that.

I have taken a lot of photos, little snapshots of random life bits. I have even been going back to more 35mm film lately (a bit because of my new camera) which has been a good little change. It is good to change things up every so often. I will hopefully have some new work and new pieces to share soon. For now, I am gathering and constructing. There are days I worry, when I think of shows coming up a little too fast, of schedules and studio days filling up with other things, I worry the gathering and constructing will take me too long and I won’t have anything to show. But I can’t worry too much. I can’t rush this. I can only keep working!

Day by day.

History

8 years ago today…

Wedding day

I married my sweetheart for the second time!

Wedding day 2

And I would do it all over again :) (Photos by Heather Fine!)

Dewey

1 year ago tomorrow we adopted this fuzzy little bun!

Even days that seem so normal when they start can be giant moments in your life history.

Happy anniversary love!

 

 

Crunch time

I was on a roll posting daily for a little while! … Ok, just a few days really.

Right now I am in what is commonly called ‘crunch time’. The time when deadlines are no longer just ‘coming fast’ but are actually knocking on your door and asking to be fed.

I have a lot of work ahead of me today, and since Mr. Fictitious Nonsense will be gone most of the evening at a meeting, I have the whole day to work. I’m hoping someone kindly reminds me to take a break to eat. (I really with Chipotle delivered!)

I will have a lot of prints for sale at the upcoming events! I have worked hard on this. There will be a fair amount new prints as well. Getting these new prints ready has taught me two things:

1. I really do have a favorite enlarger out of the 4 enlargers I have in my darkroom. It is the first enlarger I purchased when I was putting together my studio. It has a very nice, clean lens, is hooked up to the best darkroom timer I found (on of the large dial ones), and it is the perfect size for making the print sizes I usually make. Sadly, this favorite enlarger is waiting for a new light bulb at the moment. I think any of my other enlargers could become ‘second favorites’, but they do need a bit of tlc/upgrading to get there. I hope to work on that soon though!

2. I finally get what many people have said about running color film through a camera with a plastic lens. Wow! The color saturation is intense! Since I was not able to make many good black and white darkroom prints to add to my portfolio, I started going through some of the color images I have that I haven’t added to any compilations yet, looking for something different to add to my portfolio. I was a bit amazed at what I found, and I am looking forward to printing them today!

I have updated my ‘announcement‘ page with the new events that are coming up. Hopefully there will be more ‘new artwork!’ updates coming soon as well!

I have ideas for a couple of the ‘quickly upcoming exhibitions’ and will hopefully soon have a bit of time to try some of them out. In the mean time, I’ll just keep taking pictures :)

 

Plans for the weekend…

…include:

printing more prints for the art festivals!

going on a photo walk with my sweetie back in the nature preserve I was wandering in on Thursday.

printing bunches and bunches of coasters on the platen press at the Coffee House Press Biblio bash!

designing and printing new business cards…

finishing off the last two packs of expired Polaroid integral film…

scanning lots of film and organizing negatives!

adding to my pile of black and white film to develop this week!

making up my mind about contacts vs. glasses…

devising a plan for my sketchbook.

Here we go! Hurrah for weekends!!