Photo by Justin Heininger
It’s been two whole weeks! Where did the time go?
I’m going to start out by relaying a saying I’ve heard here in Vermont most of my life, “if you don’t like the weather, wait 5 minutes.”
Mother Nature is chuckling somewhere. I thought I actually heard her laughing, then I looked outside and saw my first robin of the spring, hopping from yellow-green, winterized grass patch to the next. I’m guessing I heard the robin.
You see, on March 14th I was outside in 58 degree weather with the sun shining testing some inflatable paddle boards to make sure they were in sound condition. Then this past weekend, we got a solid 8 inches of snow (some places in Vermont got over 2 feet) and the temperature was down around 14 degrees. I guess it’s a good thing I resisted the temptation to pull up the snow markers around the driveway. Today, the sun melted most of that snow and the robins are happy because there is a lot of exposed grass now for them to forage.
Now let’s see, where did I leave off last time?
Questions Answered
Where did your artistic journey begin? (Part 8 - Dabbling in Art)
Hmm, where did I leave my college narrative last time?
(Looks through some notes…)
Oh, okay, I see…yes, that’s right, I was feeling isolated from my peers and very overwhelmed with college studies.
My second year in college was a bit different. At the end of my first year, I decided I wanted to live on campus. If I recall correctly, I had taken a film class in my first year and along with literally making film cuts of super 8 movie films, the class had also covered video editing. Not the kind we can do on computers now. The editing machines were big and used VHS tapes. The professor noticed my enthusiasm for film and video. I think he also may have heard me lamenting my choice to live at home my first year.
The result?
He told me about a program at the UVM Living and Learning Center (it’s a special set of dorms setup for immersive learning where students work on projects associated with specific fields of study.) It was the Film and Video Suite and he convinced me to try to get into the program.
So at the beginning of my second year, I moved lots of clothes, a mini-fridge my brother had during his college years, and my stereo, into a single room of a shared suite of 7 college kids. I began making friends. It was a nice change, though it didn’t help me read any faster than stated in my last edition.
Inspired by my decision to become part of the Film and Video program, I had started to sign up for elective classes related to Film and Art in general. I was still an English major at that point and took a fair number of classes, both required and elective. The self-portrait included in this edition is from a black and white photography class. During that class we were required to make our own pinhole cameras. It was quite an adventure because you only had one negative in the camera at a time. The ones we made were made out of used oatmeal boxes, aka, a cardboard cylinder. I won’t get into the construction aspect of it here, but if you want that in detail, email me. (I still remember that a #10 pin is about 1/100th of an inch.)
The adventure part of it is that with a pinhole camera you basically need the camera, an exposure calculator to help you make an educated guess as to how long to expose the film for, a watch to time the exposure, and a lot of patience. To take a picture, you would find a subject (possibly even yourself) and then use the exposure calculator to calculate how long to expose the photographic paper inside for. After that you would “remove the shutter” (the shutter is a piece of black construction paper and some tape to hold it in place over the pin-hole so the photographic paper inside isn’t prematurely exposed) and then, using your watch, you would do you best to time the exposure before covering up the pinhole. Then you take the entire thing back to the dark room, remove the photographic paper, develop it to see what you got and then start all over until you are happy with the photo. It’s very time consuming. Especially because it’s pretty hard to tell from a negative whether the photo was good or not. In order to really see what was going on, you let the original negative dry (because developing it uses liquids chemicals) and then do a contact print of the negative using an additional piece of photographic paper.
Other classes I took during my second year were, Intro to Fine Metals, Ceramics 101, and a drawing class. In between all the art classes were English Literature classes, Spanish (a requirement that ceased the year after I barely managed to fulfill it) and probably some other required classes that I don’t seem to recall now.
The drawing class really was inspiring. It was taught by Frank (Francis) Hewitt.
He was an amazing teacher. I never heard him say anything negative to any of the students. He would always emphasize your strengths and help you focus on building up the areas and techniques that you were having trouble with.
I always left his classes feeling in your head and heart, “I can.”
At that same time I was in his classes, I was becoming disillusioned with my English classes because one professor shot down my elicited opinion of one of the Canterbury Tales writings. Apparently, you can’t have an opinion of English literature that doesn’t agree with established scholarly ideas.
Anyone who knows me, knows I am a very verbal person. At some point I lamented disillusionment to Frank in addition to my excitement for learning how to finally draw, with the hope of learning how to paint.
Frank suggested that maybe I might want to consider changing my major to Studio Art.
My response was something like, “you can do that?”
After reflecting upon everything, and speaking to an advisor, I decided maybe Frank was right and began the process of switching my major. I even, very excitedly, changed who my advisor was to Frank. I was very excited.
As the spring semester of my second semester neared the end, I also began making plans with some of my new friends to get an apartment the next year. Things were looking up, at least until I relayed the apartment bit to my parents. You see, in their minds, it was cheaper to live on campus. After a bunch of math, and lots of optimistic salesmanship, I managed to convince them to let me get an apartment with three other roommates, across the street from a bar. The hitch, I had to get a job and pay for utilities, food, and my college books.
So now you had a very excited 20 year old, looking for both apartments and jobs in between classes as the Vermont winter faded away, just like the heavy winter clothes people had worn for the previous 5-6 months.
Next time:
An unexpected tragedy and how it caused me to really forge ahead with my artistic path.
News of late
- I managed to fix some of the formatting issues I found on my online store (hurrah!)
- Shopify updated the theme I use, so now I need to test my store because I have some minor changes that might not work with their updates (boo)
- I went through my seasonal position’s orientation training yesterday
- Silver is being engraved with my designs for bracelet cuffs
- Spring went back to bed last weekend and now seems to be waking up again
In the Works
- I dropped off a sheet of 16 gauge sterling silver for engraving (16 gauge is about 1.3 mm thick) last week and it's currently being done! (as noted above)
- Still working on creating some tests for laser cut wood earrings (It’s a long slow process)
- Finished a new vector conversion of a design and began a new one
- Purchased some fancy equipment for the sand casting kit that came last week (a cookie sheet so all the sand doesn’t go everywhere and a taping knife normally used for drywall installations to break up the chunks in the sand.)
Until next time,
Justin