Blog — Nathan Christopher Photography

Fine Art Friday. Week #1

Yet, understanding and knowing through learned consequence.

First things first. Thinking in reverse.

I’m really good at starting and stopping. It’s the race that I run in the middle that doesn’t really get as much attention. Perhaps following through needs to more fully integrate with running the race. The journey set before me is walked by the genes that made me. This week I spent some time recalling the blueprint. Then I noticed some patterns. I walked through them.

Fortunately, life moves differently. The education we receive isn’t always the one we wanted or asked for. Ironically it ends up being the very thing we need to get us here. It wasn’t an accident. Your life in mine isn’t an accident, neither was the means by which we understood that.

Lessons never stop learning.

I’m so grateful for my education. I’m also grateful for my disdain for it. I’m grateful for my rebellion against it. It teaches me about my part of the equation.

Life is constantly teaching. The greatest life lessons are learned in rebellion to it.

This thought coming from a guy who once drunkenly fell over his own drum kit and nearly put a cymbal stand through his eye. I didn’t learn that lesson until I looked in the mirror the next day.

That kind of rebellion. The “not of sound mind” kind.

God is good. He provided me a way out of the conflict with my own education.

It starts with following through. That’s why I wanted to make it clear where the blueprint was from. It was also in my possession to follow through with.

I wanted to start this series with a bit of a foundation. I wanted to make light of the concept. When I think about grace for my learning, I need to start with the perfect source of it. This becomes the test and the fail-safe simultaneously. It becomes the textbook to the instrument.

This is grace to understand it again.

This grace is rooted in my faith. The one truth that I fall back on, again and again, is God’s mercy for me. Even when all I focus on is the shadow. His love never fails. Jesus identity in God is mine to witness, mimic and fail miserably at. He will remain the same.

Yet, I don’t fully understand it.

Romans 12: 1-2

John 15: 2

Understanding the renewal of my mind, mirrors the understanding of a unified soul. It is the very nature of individuation to recognize the God that formed the conscious thought to begin with. He follows through with the gift of present consciousness and grace, regardless of how we feel about it. We get to sit with it. Your thought and rebellion against it is a personal choice. Even consciously rejecting grace is a personal decision.

I’m not in control of the gift, I am in control of how worthy I feel I am of receiving it.

I am the one that wants to rebel against it.

I think brokenly, therefore I’m not yet,

Whole.

Not fully. I haven’t understood the power behind the creation. My thinking got in the way. My thought process is the accumulation of learning the hard way, the imperfect way.

Fear, pride, ego, broken history, pain, loss, depression, misguided patterns, etc. These influence the real-time experiment. It muddies the music. The mind is not a clean instrument. When I rely on my own thinking to define who I am, I am not arriving at truth. I am arriving at the broken history of it. The picture is wrong. The reflection needs correcting.

The journey toward wholeness requires confronting what is broken in myself. I didn’t start with potential and a perfect instrument, My identity isn’t what I think, It’s what I’m being called back to. The refining is what brings out the finished product. It’s a process.

This isn’t a riddle. It’s just the conscious understanding that I fall short of perfection. Its why I take the next picture, It’s why I hit the drum again.

Repeat. Again. That’s the cool thing about failing again and again. you get better at it.

The growth is in the correction to the mistake that taught the lesson.

Sometimes that’s in front of people. Sometimes that’s a choice.

Like you, I’m human. We all know what it’s like to stand on a stage for the first time. We will all know the last. That’s the vulnerability part.

That’s where growth, surrender, and a willingness to accept our own humanity begins. It’s where life starts.

I am indeed here, and conscious of it. That means it was for a purpose to do something. That means I should be doing those things with purpose. That means...

Nathan Christopher Sawatzky was made to create, and then fail. Not work so that he can succeed at not being who he is. One is purpose, the other is position. One is calling, the other is a placeholder.

My posture needs to be to create.

This last week I spent so much time considering what it meant to go to work. Because last week I decided not to.

I felt like I needed to push myself into the deep end of the pool. I needed to follow through with actually being the artist. I say this all the time, I shoot when I feel, but don’t always share. I keep it to myself out of fear. It’s paralysis by analysis. “Its not ready, the store isn’t up, its not organized” etc. It’s the lie I tell myself. The gift I had been given had been hiding from the bridge to the provision. I just needed to start crossing it.

I made a choice this week to be a full-time artist, not just the critic of my process and product. I’m selling the work of my hands and mind to feed the human life that was created to share it. Once again, I don’t know why it took me so long to arrive at that conclusion. It’s probably because it’s personal to me. The images are my photographs, I worked for them. I sought them out. This work is not the result of a wedding I shot, or a family portrait session. The things that I’m selling are the things that I actually spent time creating with joy. They’re the result of me choosing to point my camera in a certain direction because I saw something. There was beauty to be witnessed. Something captivated me. Time needed to be stopped and looked at. For some reason, I wanted somebody else to see it too.

Joy begets joy.

The value of a creation is directly relational to the pride by which it was created. That’s why people give value to something, it’s because they are proud of it.

I am proud of myself. I’m proud of my work.

That means I’d better show results of my labour by the end of the week. Truth is, I’ve been holding back a lot.

I’ve been so busy manifesting the fear that was restraining the very blessing I had been given. I shouldn’t do that.

If Christ is first, then create second. Even if that means falling down and failing to fully explain why.

Art often does that.

This is the art of it on a Friday. It’s “fine”.

-Nate

Purchase Here.

*reference Images not sized to perfect proportions. Visual reference only. The actual print size is exactly 48'“x 23'“ inches.

$2100 for 48’ on the long edge. Pricing varies by the size of print. Prints up to 96’

These prints are produced on premium aluminum composite panels with a semi-gloss l finish that delivers incredible color depth, sharpness, and longevity. The metal surface gives the image a luminous, almost backlit quality that no canvas or paper print can match. Scratch resistant, moisture proof, and built to last decades without fading, this is archival grade wall art engineered to the same standard as the photography itself. At 48 inches, the structural rigidity of the aluminum means it hangs flush and flat, no warping, ever. This is not a poster. This is a lifetime piece. Shipping is world wide.

-Nate.

Custom sizing:

*Disclaimer -store in the building phase. If you have any questions or for custom sizing, don’t hesitate to fill out the form and we will begin working together to find a solution that’s best for you. I will get back to you promptly. Please include the image size requested.

Switching gears, and picking up sticks,

I turn to a different instrument each week to spend time away from the camera and the computer. My other outlet. The drums have always been the other instrument where I process, express, and learn. There is no composition to frame but the song that I feel. There is no light to wait for, but the inspiration driven by it. Just time, rhythm, and the decision to play something that hasn't been played before. It’s the song of my soul. The solo of the week is exactly that. One take. One song. Whatever needed to come out, came out. It is the drumming version of pointing the camera at my rhythmic shadow and pressing the shutter. I felt compelled.

Here is a solos posted this week to Bandcamp. Complex compositions that require both feel and the artist or they don’t exist at all.

Sounds human enough for any given Friday.

https://nathanchristopher.bandcamp.com/track/friday-nights

As, always, thank you for turning your time and precious senses toward me. That is validation enough for any artist.

-Nate.

Monochrome Monday.

I think, therefore I am, not.