Welcome to Leah and Elijah's art journal.

Hi Friends,

Quick Announcement: our next live show is on May 10th, we'll send an email with more details.

Newsletter number 12!

Our very first newsletter was May of 2019. So much has happened in a year. Wow! It feels like such a milestone to have 1 year of monthly newsletters! We want to thank you all for your support over the last year. Thank you Patrons. Thank you Ashley Wright for putting together a wedding fund from our friends and family which gave us enough money to launch our website, which is how Leijah.Art got off the ground.

Ashley asked us to get something that would help us remember we are supported by people who love us, and that is exactly what we did. With the support of our friends and family, we launched Leijah.Art.

Some highlights of the last year:

• In May, we started our Patreon page
• In June we launched our website.
• In July we cemented plans to live in intentional community
• In August Leah and Elijah quit their jobs to become full time artists
• In September we submitted a proposal for a commission
• In October we were rejected for said commission.
• In November the cold weather kicked Elijah out of the garage, and into a combined workspace.
• In December we made a music video.
• In January we rested
• In February we began learning how to video composite
• In March we performed our very first FB live show and somehow got on the news!
• In April Elijah suddenly became a full time video editor, while Leah became horticultural assistant.

What an amazing year. We feel a strong sense of direction and inspiration for future projects and are so excited to continue honing our craft.

Elijah:

Suddenly I am a video editor. Like life for most of us in the midst of Covid-19, things have changed.

In December of 2017, I was hired at Spirit of Joy Evangelical Lutheran Church as the worship and music director. Little did any of us know that two and a half years later the whole church service would be dependent on the computer I compose with (good thing I bought a new computer last year!).

After Leah and I made Concepción, it became painfully clear to me that I needed to devote a solid chunk of time to learning my video editor, Final Cut Pro X. We both realized that music videos are where our mediums merge, and wanted to figure out how to do that more. On Lynda.com I found an excellent course walking me through the ins and outs of Final Cut.

When news of the stay at home order hit, it wasn’t a surprise, pastor Dave and I had a plan of how to stream the service, but we had no idea how it was going to work. Suddenly the vague plan we had needed to become a reality. Isn’t it funny how suddenly everyone was talking about Zoom.

Our first recorded service was recorded on Zoom, and that was the last one. The sound quality on zoom was so bad that I went home and re-recorded my music, and then overdubbed what I had previously played. Dave was frustrated with it as well, he wasn’t able to just preach and instead was focusing on how to make Zoom do what he wanted it to. After we released the service I thought deeply about what I wanted to do differently and presented the staff with a plan.

Dave and I have always openly rejected the idea of church being a concert, a form of entertainment, a consumer experience. So a tension arose about what the online experience should be. I decided, and was ready to stand my ground, on treating the service as a production, and I was going to do my best to make it high quality.

Since none of us knew how long this was going to last, I wanted videos of church members in the service. Seeing only my and Dave’s face was going to get old, and further, Dave and I aren’t the church, we are a part of it like everyone else.

At our staff meeting we brainstormed, made a plan, and allowed ourselves to make a mess of it.

My weekly schedule as of now:

Mondays: We have an all staff meeting discussing what we need for the following week(s). I try and make sure all my needs for the week are communicated because…

Tuesdays: are my day off. I try and do nothing music. Nothing Leijah.Art. Nothing Church.

Wednesdays: are recording day. Video, audio, anything I am going to need for the service Sunday. Also making sure any of my musicians who are recording for the service have everything they need. I also have a piano lesson.

Fridays: I work quite extensively on the recorded music, adding overdubs, fixing misspoken words, and flat vocals. I mix it down and then sync it with recorded video. I then sync the music video with the slides making sure the congregation can sing along. I focus more on the details of the overall video, timing out prayers, and cutting out the starts and stops of people recording, removing their speaking mistakes. I spend a good amount of time unifying the audio so that the level is consistent, removing the need for the congregation to keep changing their volume (that gets super annoying).

Saturdays: I usually decide that something needs to change in the music and spend way too much time adding some new sound, and so I have to remix, but am usually happy that I did it. I then add the finishing touches to the video, adding transitions, double checking I have everything in its right place, making sure the starts and stops of videos are smooth. Once I am satisfied, I export the video out of final cut which usually takes a little over an hour, and then I upload the final video to youtube which usually takes about an hour and a half. I send the link to our office administrator, and call it a day.

This new life is different. I am a video editor. It is deeply satisfying to make a production I am so proud of every week.

My craft is expanding. I keep thinking about how much I am learning right now, and how it is exactly what I want to be learning. I keep thinking about Leijah.Art’s future music videos. I keep thinking about the timing of everything, and how taken care of I feel, and this uncertain time suddenly isn’t so scary.

Leah:

I love growing vegetables. I am so drawn to it and fed by it. I am very higgledy-piggledy (I tactfully chose this word which means disorganized, messy, haphazard) in how I garden, and I have not had successes like those I have always pictured/expected for myself. My first in-ground garden (a few years ago) was a mess. I picked a spot that highly stressed out my little plants so they got overrun by bugs, I didn’t think to cover them until they got pummeled by hail and baked in the sun, I didn’t take enough time to water them and sometimes just ignored them to avoid the reality of how much responsibility it required.

And I’m not great. A lot of times I’m not good. Also, I’m nervous to say I’m bad at it because that sounds mean… but it isn’t! Cant we all just be bad a some things?

So what does that mean for me? Do I stop? It’s weird being mediocre at a thing that I love. So many times I’ve gotten really frustrated by my ability and my many failures. But I keep doing it. I keep seeing plants dry up and keep getting discouraged and disappointed… but I keep doing it. Inevitably I will get better as I keep going, but I may never be great… do I keep going even with that knowledge, even knowing failure is imminent? Do I keep doing it in hopes of being great? Or can I do it because it feels good? Can that be enough?

It’s perplexing. I guess I have learned along the way that I can only really love the things I’m really good at, and might as well drop the things I'm not good at. I saw this in my Nana. She did not want to do anything if she could not do it well. And thus she discounted her love for certain things and dismissed the potential pleasure of just the experience. It’s so interesting, and I wonder if it's what we all do. Do we all tend to put attention on the things we are good at, whether or not we actually like it?  Have we all been taught that being good at something is more valuable than loving something? That’s what I picked up from the world around me (not my mom and dad!). I loved gymnastics, but I got to a point where my ability did not match that of others my age and I was competing against girls way younger than me. I felt bad at the sport, and it was embarrassing, and though I wanted to just do it for fun, I knew there wasn’t space for that, I had to be good or give it up.

This totally relates to my art practice as well. Sometimes I like what I do and feel my flow is going well. Most other times my work/process doesn’t live up to my expectations of what ‘being good’ or ‘successful’ means, and that’s when I ask “why am I even trying?”. I am because I really love it. It doesn’t matter if I’m good or bad at it.

Does talent or being good at a thing really equal success? Can success be, “I keep killing plants but, hell, I love gardening!”, “This piece of art looks like shit, but, that experience was awesome!”

My Papa (grandfather) had extensive conversations with strangers daily- while on walks or out shopping. My Nana always brought a book with her on their outings because of this. He loved learning about people he didn't know, he asked great questions. What I am most impressed by is how he would quickly get to the core of people by adamantly responding to routine small talk with, "but, do you enjoy it?"

Thanks For Reading!

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