well, since I’ve started this process of going through digital files of all my work, and trying to gain some control over them- all I can say is “holy moly!”

There are lots of duplicates of course, and images that appear in various places on my hard drive, but also some scanned images from slides taken sooooooo many years ago. (“Hey, I forgot I did that drawing!”) And I still have boxes of unscanned slides to deal with. As I uncover more treasures, I’ll upload them into the appropriate groups.

For you youngsters, slides are those cute little square things with a positive film image inside a nice 2×2″ cardboard frame. They are what we used to label, mask with silver mylar tape, and put in plastic sleeves with little pockets, then assemble with a printed resume, a large self-addressed envelope, and a cover letter, in order to make packets, which we then sent out in the mail to schools and galleries. I even had two metal file cabinets that sat on my desk to put all my slides for teaching and my studio work, in chronological order by subject….but those were sold years ago on Craigslist!

It just amazes me, at the risk of sounding older than I really am, how much technology has changed in the world of being a visual artist. In some ways, how much easier, and more efficient it is to manage all this now.

Now, when you need to duplicate an image, just click. When the color or lighting isn’t quite right, you open Photoshop and tinker. When you want to assemble a portfolio, just drag and drop. And it all gets sent via e-mail. No more trips to the post office, or getting slide dupes made, xeroxing letters and resumes, or spending so much on postage, etc. And all these changes happened during the course of my professional life.

The first year after grad school, when we were housesitting, we lived about 12 miles from a town of any size. I used a portable typewriter that was sort of electronic. It had a teeny screen where you could see a few words of type to correct if needed…..I think. But each letter or document was one of a kind, and I used plenty of correction tape.

We didn’t get our first computer until I was teaching in Williamsburg, VA in 1990- A Mac Classic – not that we had a way to print anything. No wonder I didn’t look forward to the annual job search!

30 years = Mind blown