Creatively, I consider myself a blue-collar artist. I did not go to a fancy art school or leverage a Yale MFA for the golden ticket into the art world. I make my art as part of my every day life. I sympathize with the every day workers specifically in the creative field. Right now there is a writer’s and an actor‘s strike in Hollywood, something that I personally support. In a larger sense, I am a supporter of unions protecting the rights of workers.

Recently, I joined a union myself. Not a worker’s union per se, though some might consider it an art workers union. I recently joined an online group, called the Union of International Mail Artists. This group has been active for decades, and centers on the sharing of artwork via the Postal Service. Their credo aligns perfectly with how I feel personally about my art. I believe in sharing freely and I really enjoy when art has no financial entanglements attached to it. The main activity of being a member of this group is finding mailing addresses of members on the UIOMA website and then sending these members artwork through the mail. It has been a satisfying endeavor so far for me, sending out my handmade postcards to strangers around the world. Perhaps even more satisfying is having random pieces of art show up in my mailbox on my front porch from time to time.

There is a subversive anti-establishment streak that permeates this group that appeals to my own small version of fighting the system. Sometimes finding like-minded people out there in the world is all a person needs to be reminded that they are not alone, and that they are on the right path.

The union forever!

When I was a kid, one of my hobbies was collecting stamps. Every few Saturdays I would walk to the next town over where they had a stamp and coin collection shop, and I would browse the cardboard boxes of canceled stamps that sat on the counter top. I’d spend about an hour filling up an envelope with (easy to find) postage stamps to add to my collection. The more I got into the hobby, the more I saw the value in finding stamps that had unique artwork or especially stamps from far away countries to fill my album.

I had these thoughts in my head as I checked on the traffic for this website earlier this week. It’s interesting to see where visitors to the website come from, especially when they’re from far away places. As a photographer and an artist, I always wonder who is seeing my work. The majority (I’m guessing) are people I’ve never met. This is especially true when it comes to people visiting the website. I enjoy seeing the names of small towns and obscure locations scattered all over the globe when they pop up in my web traffic analytics.

Again, it reminds me of being a child and wondering about other places in the world; how people lived, what they ate, how they dressed. Even then I think that I had a curiosity about the world that would grow into my desire to travel when I got old enough. It also manifests itself in a desire to interact with people (specifically other creative people and photographers) who in one way or another share a common aesthetic or sensibility with me and my work.

I might never visit these countries, the cities, these far-flung places… But just the idea of knowing that someone somewhere halfway across the world is looking at my work, that’s still a thrill for me.