Open Forest In Fog
Open Forest In Fog – Albion, Michigan
original photographers
Urbex Collaboration
To prep for 2016, I did something different on New Year’s Eve: I urbexed with other people.
Jamie and Seth are two of my local photo buddies. We haven’t done a ton together, but we know each others’ work from Facebook and Twitter, and did a Kelby photo walk two years back. Seth has been a good guy to talk to about some artistic goals I have this year, and Jamie is someone I’ve wanted to go exploring with for a long time.
So we picked a place and made it happen on a cold December morning. We had a lot of fun – especially with shooting portraits of each other.
Seth wrote up a little post about our adventure on his photo blog.
More collaboration and adventures – it’s what I hope to do in the new year. Most of my abandoned work is solo: I find something, I explore something. This time, it was fun to explore something with other photographers.
Happy Holidays
Quiet times around these parts. I’m lucky that I get the week between Christmas and New Year’s off from work. This year, it was lots of festivities with the family, quality time with the kiddos, and taking it easy.
Lots of projects in the coming year. Hope you had a great holiday, too.
Artists In Jackson: Doug Jones
“This place lacks confidence. That comes out in so many ways, and it’s important to me for people to recognize that they’re valuable.”
A few years back, while living out west, Doug Jones came across an art gallery in Sante Fe, New Mexico, and noticed the gallery was featuring a single artist.
Doug was attracted to the work’s bright and bold colors, so he walked in. After talking with the gallery director, he found out the artist – who was selling his work for thousands of dollars – was from a little town in Michigan.
The town? Doug’s town. Our town. Jackson, Michigan.
That discovery got Doug thinking.
“There was this fire inside of me that wondered, ‘Why do I have to move away from Jackson? Why can’t someone make it as an artist here?’”
Now, it’s almost a mission for him: finding untapped potential and creativity, and letting it loose on the world.
It wasn’t always that way for Doug, a corporate lawyer turned community developer turned painter and art community organizer. He was going to turn his University of Michigan education into big money somewhere outside of Jackson.
But a couple of things happened that brought him back. For one, a trip to New York during college switched on the aesthetic part of his brain. For two, working at Lifeways helped him identify with the needs of the community, spiritually and artistically.
“I found myself surrounded by incredible history and remarkable talent in Jackson,” Doug says. “And people here didn’t seem to recognize it. So I started to encourage people around me to paint.”
That encouragement came in the form of live painting and art events – bringing creative people out of the wilderness, in a sense. It all comes from understanding what the power of positive reinforcement and encouragement can do.
“I remember what it was like when someone first took notice of me,” Doug says. “If I can encourage someone to do something positive, I’m passing on the beauty and blessings that I’ve been given.”
Personally, art acts as an outlet for the suffering and pain Doug sees in the world. Working with Lifeways and other non-profits, he saw and heard gut-wrenching stories from clients about pain and loss. He saw a tough guy break down in front of him, and he helped a girl struggling with suicide.
“I saw things that helped me realize how fleeting life can be,” Doug says. “With all the stuff going on around me, I have to get it out and do something with it.”
Doug recognizes the pressures that a small, blue-collar town can put on up-and-coming artists. Helping artists realize that what they’re doing is valuable? That’s the goal.
“That self-actualization makes my entire world better,” he says. “It lets me know that the generations that come after us will be better because of what’s happening today.”
While there is more happening in the Jackson arts community – a Public Arts Commission, more and more shows popping up, collectives (like his own, The Singularity) forming – Doug sees a lack of self-confidence in town. One way to help is to bring in more creative professionals from outside.
“People recognize what Jackson has on the outside,” he says. “We just need people here to feel that, too.”
DougJones.art
Artists In Jackson: Melissa Morse
“It’s true for most artists, but I’m an extremely emotionally-driven artist. I want people to feel something when they look at it. I put my heart and soul into what I do.”
You don’t have to look far to find great talent, says Melissa Morse.
“All the real artists aren’t in the big cities,” she says. “They’re everywhere you go. And we have our own arena of talent here in Jackson.”
Melissa would know. As a painter and mixed media artist, she’s seen what it’s like to be an artist in the biggest city – New York. She traveled to the Big Apple in college and lived there for many years as an artist.
After several years in New York, she came back to Jackson wiser and embraced her home community.
“It was the best thing for me, to stay in Jackson and raise my daughter,” Melissa says. “Coming back here, you realize that you can run all over looking for a place to be happy. But if you have inner peace, you can be happy in Jackson.”
Melissa explores happiness, loss, and faith through her art. She’s also a bit of a self-made artist, stretching her own canvases and creating her own frames from recycled materials.
“I think it makes for a better product. You put more into it,” she says.
Putting more into her art is a goal, Melissa says, whether that’s trying out new styles or putting pieces together to make something new. It helps her express what’s inside.
“It’s true for most artists, but I’m an extremely emotionally driven artist,” Melissa says. “I want people to feel something when they look at it. I put my heart and soul into what I do.”
And as is true for most people, that heart and soul can go through dark times. That’s where art can help, like when Melissa lost her parents.
Melissa participated in Grand Rapids’s ArtPrize showcase the year after her mother died. Melissa doubted that she was even worthy of being there. But the year before, her mother encouraged her to participate in the event.
“There was so much healing in that,” Melissa says. “It was a difficult journey, but in the end, when I was there and sharing my story, it was just what I needed to do.”
Being an artist involves going through ups and downs. It’s true of creatives everywhere. But it is possible to be successful in Jackson, Melissa says. Artists just have to be willing to communicate and work together.
Take art shows. She notices that when there’s low turnout at an area show, it’s often because people are what she calls “touch lazy.”
“I see a little bit of procrastination,” Melissa says. “Someone will say, ‘Maybe I’ll go to it,’ and then not show up. Something needs to shake it up a bit.”
In her own creative life, Melissa is the opposite of lazy. Recently, she became an art teacher for kids at Ella Sharp Museum during their summer camp series.
“It’s the best kind of challenge, working with kids that age. But it’s so rewarding,” she says. “When you can learn as much as the other people are learning, I really love that.”
Artists In Jackson: Stephen Ziegenfuss
“I would prefer to make guitars and give them away, if it was feasible to do that.”
For Stephen Ziegenfuss, it’s easy to love wood.
Its strength, its smell, even its taste – wood is a noble material to work with.
That’s why Stephen loves to make it sing as a guitar maker. An engineer by training, he loves to shape and bend the material into sonic works of art for his Ziegenfuss Guitars company.
Stephen has been building guitars since college when he tried making his own bass. From there, he built more guitars for friends and family, especially the parents of friends who could help him pay for parts.
“They kind of paid for my education – they’d pay for the materials that went into it,” he says.
From there, he worked on repairing guitars, learning about their inner workings, and before long he had a name brand and a website set up to sell his custom bodies.
More than that, Stephen likes to make things with his hands. Woodworking was prevalent in his home, he says, and he’s always enjoyed tinkering and making. That’s how he got into engineering. It was his artistic side – both in guitar playing and photography – that helped shape his guitar projects.
It started pragmatically enough. Stephen remembers seeing a guitar that he would’ve liked to own, if it weren’t for the high price tag. What would happen if he tried to mimic the design and build his own guitar?
“There’s a certain group of people with my personality who say, ‘I’ll just build it myself,'” he says. “Making a guitar was the perfect crossroads of all those things: working with my hands, engineering, and music.”
That first guitar didn’t exactly hit the mark. But over the years, he’s built his skills up enough so that he can build his own guitar at the level that originally inspired him.
Business-wise, Stephen is working on forming relationships with artists and getting name recognition in the boutique guitar industry. It’s one thing to make a quality guitar, but it’s another to make yourself known to the instrument-buying public.
When it comes right down to it, though, Stephen makes guitars to participate in the magic of music making. And to get his hands dirty in the process of making.
His senses get involved, too: Stephen loves the smell and the taste of the woods he uses, like African sapele (tastes great) and rosewood (the smell).
“The variability of the material is so cool,” Stephen says.
Walnut, cherry, sassafras, spruce, ash, hickory, walnut – these are his raw materials, and he appreciates the engineering quality of wood, too. Stephen says that wood, as a composite material, is great to work with. It’s robust and durable, and its strength-to-weight ratio is top-notch.
This is why Stephen makes other things out of wood, like bike frames. Stephen says he could make a bike frame that competes with metal in terms of durability. And, he says, the ride on a wood-frame bike is really smooth because the material absorbs high-frequency vibrations.
“Certain days, you just feel inspired to build different things,” he says. “And I love using wood as my medium.”
Stephen, along with his wife and three daughters, loves the lifestyle that Jackson affords.
“The pace of life here, for us, is just right,” he says. “If I were somewhere else, I wouldn’t nearly have the time to pursue things like this. It’s such a tremendous value added to life.”