As usual, I am always trying to get to the core truth of things. In the process, I discard layers that turn out to block what I’m trying to get at.
When I first started a blog in 2009/2010, it was to get my work “out there.” While my formal studies have always been in traditional academia, I have never given up my pursuit of art, which has been an ongoing necessary “evil” for me, some might say, before I ever went to any school or had any formal education (yes, since I was a very small and new child in the world). Throughout my life I have outwardly followed the traditional path, completed my schooling and with very nice honors, held various jobs while single, held more various jobs around the country after I got married, had children and settled, with some security. However in the life I claim all to myself, my artistic life, my route has not been as straight. Because I have not earned a living through making art, I have been free to explore as much as I wish, within my limited timeframe, and around the responsibilities I carry from day to day, and year to year.
My “column,” Every Thursday, has been a mainstay since my very first appearance as an artist in the online world. Through it I have expressed many things, sometimes every day, sometimes with much longer pauses between posts. Like much of the writing (via individual blogs) on the internet, this column has been a sort of public diary.
Since almost the beginning of this year, I have found myself feeling a very strong pull inwardly. Sometimes, I almost want to retreat completely from the public world which is the internet. In light of that, I have slowly been eliminating my presence in many places there. When I think about all the communities I have explored over the last six years, I have to laugh about the accounts I forgot about and probably will never delete, they have become a kind of virtual set of fossils, or a footprint of a creature in a forest who has left no other clues behind. These things, I have little desire to deal with anymore. They can stay as electronic evidence of my presence at one time. It doesn’t matter to me.
I have changed my site over the years, but it’s been on WordPress for the longest amount of time, in various incarnations. At one point, I actually had two WordPress sites as I was trying to figure out how to fit my photography/photo-based art together with my videos. More recently, I’ve started to develop quite a mass of street photography, though much of it has not been shared, and if at all, mostly on Instagram. As with many things over time, especially due to my health and my age (the first impacting the second in an unrelenting way), I’ve had to eventually decide what I most like to spend my energy on, and let go of all the other things I’ve been exploring. It’s not a decision I necessarily want to make, because I’m endlessly curious and love to try my hand at new things, and maybe somewhat optimistic in that I might, one day, combine them all into one, big, spectacularly unusual series of works. But due to my current constraints, I keep finding that I am trying to bite off way more than I can chew. I kinda want to keep my teeth intact.
After all this, I’ve come to the conclusion that all of these explorations and alternate directions pale in comparison to my love of making films. Film is a very flexible medium. You can put pretty much all the arts into it, though the experience of watching film is much like live performance – ephemeral. You remember a movie. Now you can rewatch it on video (or CD or DVD or Blu-Ray or whatever the latest tech is), but in my youth, you saw it in the theater and if you wanted to see it again, you had to go to back to the theater. After being on the internet for six years, I think about this early experience with film. I also think that while it’s a good idea to maintain an internet presence, I don’t really want all my work to be solely virtual, nor experienced in the usual ways. So… I have thoughts about this, which I am not going to talk about here. These thoughts are in development.
I guess what I am ultimately saying in this post, is that this site is going to undergo one last huge restructure, with the ultimate focus on my filmmaking. Everything else will become the past, archived here, and maybe eventually (or even sooner), disappear from this site altogether. Including Every Thursday.
This is my last post for Every Thursday.
Odilonvert 
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