When I shoot
something out of the blue, and I still want to show it, it may well end
up on this page.
Everything you see here — and a bunch more
more mundane activities — happened within a couple of hours on top of Winfrey
Point on April 14, 2013. I was there to meet Anna, but I brought my little Panasonic
Lumix G5 and two lenses, just in case something photo-worthy happened.
Like this.
There was a wedding, at least two photo shoots,
maybe three, and an energetic family picnic. It was all fun to watch and great
to capture.
I also photograph birds forn my Amateur
Birder's Journal. I journal about
two of my favorite (and newest) cameras, like my Panasonic Lumix
G5 and the G2 that
came before it, and my last couple years with my Nikon
D7000. But my major opus on the topic of photography
is How
to Photograph Art or just about anything else, which I update
and add to often.
I write personal stories into my ThEdBlog,
which is pronounced and spelled thed blog but with odd capitalization and no
spaces. Almost nobody reads it, which is fine with me, since it's more for me
than them, although I generally have somebody in mind when I wrote it.
I write every day, just not always about art.
Today, as I write this, it is early Monday morning at 6:21 February 25, 2013.
I've just watched a movie, and before I put it away, I wrote a quick review to
add to the sixteen hundred some-odd others I've written this century. Yesterday
morning, noonish, afternoon, evening and night and well into this morning, I
wrote about art and worked pictures up to show what I am telling about.
That's what this site is about. I know better
than to claim I'm doing it "for the community." I'm doing it for me,
because I love combining my two great skills of writing and photography into
something that people will read. I might clear about a thousand dollars
a year doing it. I don't sell ads, because I don't want ads in my text or competing
with my photographs.
I'm retired and am on partial disability from
my short vacation in Vietnam. I am incredibly lucky I don't need to make my living
off this website, but it is my life, and I like that it works out that way.
I sometimes think I'm too old for this. I'll be 69 on my next birthday, and I
no longer feel obligated to write about art forever, but I still feel obligated
to write about art sometimes.
I'll post the current art story, which of course
is about me as much as it is about the art and artists I write about, by the
middle or maybe a little later this week. First I'll post a notice on the cover
that I'm working on the story. After I post it and link it to the cover, I'll
keep changing things on it, making it simpler, easier to read, more explanatory,
repetitively check my horrid typing and spelling, rewrite things to say what
I meant to all along for a couple weeks, till I'm finally just so sick and tired
of it, and at the same time, proud of it, that I can leave it alone.
My personal website is JRCompton.com/. vitae
I publish DallasArtsRevue, which
I've been making in this medium all this century. Before
that I published it on paper from December 1979.
I also do a bunch
of other things in that and a couple other pursuits, generally switching among
them according to which is least boring at the moment. But through it
all, I always, first and foremost, consider myself a photographer, although sometimes
I forget and wander around lost awhile. When I come back, likelier than
not, it's from taking photographs.
I've been a photographer
since 1963, had photos
published in Life Magazine, Jet, Texas Observer, The Dallas Times
Herald, The Dallas Morning News, Dallas NOTES from the Underground,
Hooka, The Austin Sun, Texas Monthly, The Dallas Observer and a
bunch of other rags all over the world, and I have been in at least 99
exhibitions, a couple museums and even had a photograph
of Mel Farmer in a floppy black hat and polka-dot
shirt sandwiched between two other photos collaged
on the
cover of Grand Funk, Grand Funk Railroad's best-looking
LP cover.
In the 1970s, I edited and published
underground newspapers, including Dallas NOTES from the Underground and HOOKA and
later worked at Fort Worth's Trinity
River Messenger, The Austin Rag, The
Austin Sun and
San Antonio's River
City News.
In 1974 I published a newsprint book
called armadilla about
nine-banded armadillos, which publication begat,
five years later, DallasArtsRevue. I also photographed for, designed,
then co-published Texas
Jazz. My work
generally has to do with creating and maintaining a sense
of community.
Since graduating from
the University of Dallas, where I co-edited The U. D.
Shield, I've spent most of my life in Dallas, Texas, USA. With only one
little side trip into the Air Force, a podunk in Kansas and a little place in
Southeast Asia called Viet Nam, then back here again. I know where things are,
and I can usually find my way there and
back.
D-Magazine, who correctly claimed
that I've been been publishing stories about art
longer than anybody else in Dallas, called
me "Dallas'
best local arts promoter" in 2007. They haven't named anybody else that
since.
To support myself and my various media
habits I've done a variety of jobs:
Night Watchman at a Massage Parlor,
Yellow Cab Driver
Worker Bee at Mary B's Barbeque
Secret Film Courier in Viet Nam
Instructor of Desktop Publishing
Macintosh Computer Tutor for artists until OS X
Web maker
for artists and galleries
Art Critic
Photographer of work that is art and
Photographer of other artists'
work.
Samples of my photographs are
all over DallasArtsRevue.com and
my personal site at JRCompton.com.
I have been on several boards of directors, which
is why I do not have one of those and do not wish to have
one, and my participation in this website will stop when I do.
I have been:
- Editor/Producer for the Artists Coalition
of Texas. I'd already self-published some issues,
but they contracted with me to publish more. Later,
they insisted I change the name
to Texas Arts Revue. Then they broke our contract
by ordering me not to publish stories about other
art forms, so I took it back. After Mary Wachovia
Ward proposed they become a center for art in Dallas,
ACT became D-ART, D'art, Dallas Visual Art
Center, The Dallas Center for Contemporary Art and
The Contemporary.
- The P R Guy and Founding
Board Member of Dallas Artists Research & Exhibition
(DARE, which became The MAC, — a little, maybe,
but usually not much, although they think it did, although they're
the only other art center around who even tries, and they often do a bang up
job of it.)
- I was
also on the board of the trailing edge of Allen Street
Gallery, which disappeared off the face of the earth
shortly after they fired me. I was
the Program Committee Chairperson, and they did
not find anyone else to do my job, so their benefactor
took
"their" building away when they stopped planning
exhibitions. They fired me because
I warned about nepotism, a lot of which was
going on at the time, but it got worse.
- Before that, I was a board-member of Electronic
Graphic Artists of Dallas (EGAD!), a Macintosh Users
Group, for which I had previously been the Disk
of the Month (DOM) Guy — a
much more interesting, important and fun job — distributing fonts,
utilities and shareware programs on floppy disks
I either gave away or sold for one dollar.
Now I know better than to get involved with any boards of directors.
DallasArtsRevue is not a bona fide 501{c}(3) nonprofit organization,
primarily so I won't have to kowtow to a bunch of idiots telling me
what to do. I've always had issues with authority figures.
As it is and shall be, I do what I want when I want. Mostly — although
I ask for advice, especially from Supporting
Members of this website and friends..
JRCompton.com has
many more photographs — and ideas, including some you
might not expect from whom you may think I am. There's
my words about
philosophy, psychiatry and romance — as if I knew anything
about any of those, my
full resume, list
of exhibitions and exhibitions
produced and lots else, too.
There's always my Amateur
Birder's Journal usually about White Rock
Lake — I've been
writing about and photographing birds in that since
June 2006.
I also write and produce
the immensely popular (140,000 hits now as I update this text yet again.) How
to Photograph Art, plus a bunch of squiggly others including Cameras
& Lenses Useful for Photographing Art, my Nikon
D7000 Journal, my Panasonic Lumix G2
Journal, my Canon s90
Journal, ThEdBlog -
about me being me, How
to Start Showing Your Art and How
to Design
& Produce An Invitational Postcard on this and my personal websites,
among many other topical and/or personal web pages.
