The extent to which I’m an artist

“You’re an artist,” a friend keeps telling me.
I never know what to say.
My parents always inferred I was rebellious and reprehensible, because I couldn’t worship my father, a Bible-beating zealot.
I wasn’t able to shut him down until after five years of driving transit bus. By then I parried so many crazies they made him seem angelic.
My Aunt May is an artist, sorta, and so am I. I’m not supremely confident; I ain’t Picasso. But I know I can do pretty good.
“You take great photographs,” my friend tells me.
I just e-mailed her a link to my most recent Monthly-Calendar-Report, and she apparently viewed it.
I have seven calendars, sometimes eight. To me they’re not calendars. What they are is wall-art that changes monthly.
Four are train-calendars (I’m a railfan), two or three are cars (I’m a car-nut), and one is classic WWII warbirds (propeller airplanes).
“Only four pictures are mine,” I told her.
That Calendar-Report has 18 photographs. Seven or eight are the individual calendar photographs. I scarf up others from Google-Images, or pictures I took myself, often long ago.
One of my train calendars is the one I did myself. Shutterfly does it, my photos placed in their calendar template.
The photos are train-shots my brother and I took near Altoona, PA, where the Pennsylvania Railroad crossed Allegheny Mountain. The railroad is now Norfolk Southern.
Many of the photos in that calendar are by my brother. Many are by me.
Try to convince a macho Harley dude he’s an artist. He gives me good stuff.
It just so happens the December 2016 entry in my calendar is by me.
My hotrod calendar-report also has a picture by me as an aside. I took it two years ago.
My ’57 Fuel-Injection Chevy is last summer. Follmer’s Trans-Am Mustang is 1970.
A friend in Denver, also a photographer, with whom I once worked, tells me my artistic input is choosing good pictures.
Out of the hundreds of photos my brother and I take, I hafta select 13 good ones — 12 months plus a cover.
Admitted there’s artistic input setting up a picture.
But all too many bomb. And some of our best photographs are scattershot — just shaddup and shoot!
The other artistic input is producing my calendar itself.
-Blue background = “NOPE! Hasta be solid red.”
-Snowflake background or stars? “What you been smokin’?”
-Multiple pictures above the month page? “NOPE; only one picture per month, otherwise it looks stupid.”
-Maybe this font = “NOPE!”
-I try another = “NOPE!”
-Finally “There it is!”
I’m drivin’ this here laptop = artistic judgment at play.
“If my name is on that calendar, it better look good.”
Same thing with a brochure I long ago produced for a local park.
“If my name is on that brochure, we ain’t usin’ no crummy Xerox map.
That brochure hasta be a class act.”