As you may recall, one of my goals for this year is to create at least one fine art piece per month. This seems like a pretty manageable goal since the shoots themselves don’t tend to take too terribly long. Sometimes there as quick as 20 minutes shooting, and the rest is all photoshop work. And this month I’m going to be ahead on my goal which is awesome!

As you may recall, this self portrait series deals with emotions or fragments of a person. The various parts that comprise the whole individual. So far I’ve shared pieces like hope, strength, growth, sorrow, anger, etc… If you missed them and you’re interested, you can check out all of my previous Fine Art work on the journal here. I actually had the idea for this one in my head for a while, but I hadn’t had the right environment to create it in. When we got that little bit of snow a couple of weeks ago, it was the perfect chance to create this image that had been doodled out in my notebook for a while. So I grabbed what I needed and headed out.

The visual idea for this particular piece popped into my head one night last year, after a day filled with emotional and physical pain. I had recently found out that the follicle I was so hoping was growing into an egg was in fact, a large cyst, and I was incredibly heartbroken. Over the next couple days, the cyst grew to an abnormally large size and then burst. The pain from this caused me to become very dizzy and nauseous and I ended up having to go lay down to avoid just sitting doubled over in pain. And while I laid there trying to avoid being sick, this image popped into my head. Stark black and white scenery. A cold landscape. A lone figure in red, collapsed on the ground.

For me this image represents how very alone and isolated I have often felt as we traversed the road of infertility. Nothing I’ve felt or experienced has been visible. So it’s not readily apparent to others that anything is wrong. And for years, no one knew our silent struggle. Through pregnancy announcements, baby showers, family get togethers, and just life… we trudged along with this secret pain. Even once people knew it didn’t get easier… in fact, in some ways it was harder. More than once – my pain (emotional or physical) was completely written off… I was being too sensitive. I was being selfish. Nothing was “really” wrong with me. The looming forest for me represents those ever present feelings, pains, and anxieties. The red cloak represents the pain… something that is so vivid to me and the weight of which often brings me to my knees. And the snow… the sometimes cold world I wake up to face day after day.

For this shoot, I knew exactly what I wanted my backdrop to be. So I trudged through the snow to the the conservation area just down the road from my house, set up my tripod and started working. I didn’t have an actual red cloak, but I did have a green bed sheet – so that’s what I used for this image. Unlike many of my other images this one did not require a ton of compositing. I really only used one image, added a couple snow overlays and then played around with it in photoshop to get the desired look. Below is the video showing a little peek at the creation of this piece.

And here is the finished art:

Obviously this image has it’s own significance to me, but I’d love to know if it speaks something different to you! Leave me a comment below and let me know!