I started serious training for Berlin in June, 2023 with the best of intentions but in July there came a training run where I could not finish, the pain in my heel was just too great. I got 3 miles into a 12 mile run and had to stop and walk back to the start. I went home and on the next Monday I called a foot doctor I had run with to get a second opinion from the Orthopedic surgeon I had been seeing.
Cutting to the chase, I am not running in the Berlin Marathon on Sept 24th, 2023. Instead I will be having surgery that month. The surgery will be what’s called a Haglund Resection. Basically she will detach my Achilles tendon, cut off a big bump on the back of my Calcaneus heel bone, remove the big nasty bone spur now embedded in my Achilles then reattach the achilles and anchor it back in place. I will then take 4-6 months to recover.
Here’s the thing. 7 years ago I had the exact same surgery on my left achilles. And I was running after 4 months and ran a marathon within a year and had a 21 minute PR to boot! I am feeling positive about the chances of a similar outcome. Is it guaranteed? Nope. But I believe most of my recovery will be up to me, so I choose to look forward with the best case scenario firmly in sight.
What that means is that for the last month or so I haven’t been running. Instead I have been swimming, cycling, weight lifting, climbing, walking, etc. I am not keeping up my fitness to the marathon training level, mostly because my achilles hurts like hell all the time, but I am still getting workouts in and getting ready to rehab from the best possible position.
Here is part two of Dream Eye. These images are all photo-collages from various series I’ve done over the decades. Some are close ups of larger collages so you can see the dream eye portion.
I started working with a drawing app, Sketchbook Express by Autodesk, on my ipad mini last year. The method was pretty simple. I had a total of 3 layers to work with. I started with simple photographic portrait as the base layer. I then did some finger painting on the layers above. I started interchanging layers and opacities, erasing and layering again, until I got something interesting. I got a piece of gear to use with the ipad called ‘pencil’ which is just a stylus. I sometimes use it but most of the drawings are still basically finger painting. The photos are of my friends and family. Most are online friends, either on Periscope, the live video app, or on Facebook. Some are images they took themselves and others are screenshots I took of them while they were doing their live videos.
To see the slide show, just click left or right on the image. This is an embedded gallery from my flickr.com site.
I wasn’t expecting it, but they have begun to sell. If you are interested in having one done of you on commission, or in buying one you see, let me know.
Hello and welcome to the redesigned martycoleman.com site circa 2014. The last redesign was back in 2009, a LONG time ago.
In 2009 not only did I redesign the site but I also migrated my blogger blog, ‘The Digital Human’, over to WordPress. The intent at that time was to eventually integrate it into the then new site. However, my other blog ‘The Napkin Dad Daily’, pretty much took over my life at that point and I put this blog on hold.
The Old is New
I never did get rid of it and when I decided to redesign this time around I also decided to activate the old blog as an archive. There are a number of years worth of entries and I didn’t want to lose them. They also speak to many issues about photography and art that are still interesting so there was no reason not to include them in the site.
The New is New
I will of course be adding new posts as time progresses but for now, enjoy the new site, take a look at the new galleries and peruse the old blog entries if you would like.
I will also be adding more information about me, my work, where it can be seen and purchased, as well as adding new galleries that flesh out my creative history over the decades.
My local newspaper ran these two articles about the napkin drawings today. I feel pretty lucky that people have caught on to the story and the napkins!
I am a complete sucker for our elections in general but nothing in my lifetime is as grand and wonderful a statement about us and our predecessors as Obama’s election yesterday. I am not talking about him being a democrat and I am not talking about his policies.
I am talking about the people of America taking our obligation seriously and really paying attention to our world and what we want to see happen in it.
What I love most of all though is that how I raised my daughters, to be color blind and focused on who a person really is, is something that many of our generation taught our kids and it has come home in reality now.
In the end the vast majority of baby boomers and children of baby boomers (including the ones who didn’t vote for him) didn’t care if he was black, white or biracial. They cared that he gave them hope in their country and hope that we can be who we said we wanted to be 232 years ago. And the answer to any who doubt, here and around the world, is Yes We Can.
I am going to do another week long series, this one of night images I have done over the course of the last 2 months in Tulsa. This first one was serendipitous, the graffitied woman’s face and the box were already on the brick wall. I saw the idea pretty quickly, that the woman in the box would be dreaming to get outside it and the floating image of the graffitied woman’s singing/orgasming/yearning face would be her dream face.
The model Z was great, understanding what I wanted and game to make it happen.
Yawning in the McDonalds restroom midway through the 24 hour bus ride home from Disney World. The restroom was so visually vibrational I was just glad I kept my eyes shut for most of the time I was in there. I liked the contrast between the red and the BW.
