One of the great challenges of leaving behind my personal Stone Age is finding a useful balance between who I am by nature and what I am trying to achieve by effort. Given my formidable inner desire for inertia (a.k.a. Laziness), the main trick is to find entertaining enough ways to achieve any wanted result that I’m willing to actually get up off my leaden posterior and Do Stuff.

One of the greatly intimidating challenges, for me, is learning anything that smacks of the technological. Whatever my reasons and/or excuses, I’m timid about those things that require elemental knowledge let alone mastery of anything with Parts, anything requiring Processes. Machines. Electronics. A bicycle, for heaven’s sake. So it’s hardly surprising that I should be nervous about figuring out how to use techno-tools for art, along with any other Luddite fears I may harbor in my dimly-lit soul.

Having three sisters who are all skilled at using numerous sorts of computer equipages and their various companion software programs, I should feel, at least, the camaraderie of the struggle, if not the surrounding angels of educators. But of course, besides the little problem of living thousands of miles from each other there is the larger problem that even on those rare occasions when I know how to describe what I’m trying to do, posing the question to the Three Graces of computer wizardry is still impracticable, because they–unlike me–are using their computers to do useful, practical and normal things like handling spreadsheets and communications. Me, I am trying to make the computer my pencil, pen, paintbrush, eraser, scissors, glue, welding torch, carving chisel, and serendipitous doer-of-things-unexpectedly-artistic. Not their sort of problem, you see.

My solution: mess around and see what happens. I do realize that there are classes, really fine and useful classes and innumerable tutorials, available both in person and online for this sort of thing any time I should step up and behave like an intelligent adult. But, while I am in the interminable queue that wends its way toward maturity, I remain stubbornly ill motivated to learn things via proper channels and techniques, and instead spend my time poking at the keyboard and zigging and zagging my fingers around on my trackpad at irregular speeds and intervals and just seeing what happens as I go. What does happen is just often enough entertaining enough that I continue my willfully aimless art-making in this mode and sometimes hit upon something that seems recognizable as a picture.

Who knows, this might be my own version of the correct method after all.

Louise Brooks tags along with me into the 21st century . . .