This Week

Each week feels like a blur, like a swish pan. What even happened this week? Maybe it's too ambitious to try writing one of these posts once a week. I was planning to write every two weeks.

I'm preparing some work for a show at my local library, which will feature a mix of my paintings and 3D work. I started painting again about three years ago and always seem to be drawn to it when I’m between projects. I think it’s because painting has a certain meditative quality.

I've always been a photographer. It was my first real exposure to art. I took my first photography class as a junior in high school, and it was like a door opened up to me. If I go back further, I always wanted to be an artist. At first, I wanted to be a cartoonist—my parents even gave me an apparatus for copying art. That's probably where it all started.

But I concluded that I couldn't develop an original cartoon, so I stopped until I found photography. From there, I discovered the work of Jerry Uelsmann. He used photography not to capture reality but to create it, and that idea captivated me.

From there, I explored film, then history, and finally returned to photography for my graduate degree. So much time wasted. But I think, in all that time, I discovered that I was an artist and that it didn't matter what I used. Whether it's film or digital, paint or plaster—whatever I need is what I use.

I am returning to photography lately with my Lone Earth series. I have always photographed models in my studio. For my grad degree, I worked on a project that was my interpretation of what my parents went through growing up in 1930s Germany.

This models have always been pretty big. Lately I have been scaling them down and photographing them with a macro lens.

Its an attempt to make the work more immediate more painterly.

I have also been watching Guy Maddin's films this week. They are not easy, they are so packed with imagery and references, but they are well worth it.

One film I particularly like is The Forbidden Room. It’s a story within a story, a cinematic version of Guy Maddin’s website Seances. The website uses technology to create lost films from hundreds of clips, recombining them into new narratives that disappear, never to be seen again.

I love this idea.

I got so inspired watching his films that I tried to recreate an old film burn using acetate and ink. There I go copying again.

Finally, I had the incredible opportunity to trade a painting for a stack of signed books by author Jonathan Lethem.

I started reading Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture. It’s essentially about all the art he has acquired by writing stories for artists.

Why do writers always want to become artists, and artists want to be writers, photographers, or painters, and vice versa?

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