Thanks in advance!

Since starting Red Line Studio this year I have been on the look out for a used copy but haven’t had any success. It is such a great book I can’t imagine anyone giving it up. So I ended up at Amazon.com, as I always seem to do when looking for used books, and discovered that the author was coming out with a new box set Complete Color Index of both Color Index and Color Index 2, so I pre-ordered the set. Plus they have it on sale for $29.70, regular price is $45.00. The set was released early so I received it this week instead of next month and has made me very happy! Yes, I am a big dork for being happy about a color book but you artists out there will understand. I checked today and Amazon still has them in-stock so buy a copy today!

I got busy this week scanning negatives from winter. This was taken with a very old Kodak Brownie 616. Film is no longer made for this camera so I modified it to use 120. The negatives are a huge 2 x 4 inches! This was taken with Kodak T-Max 100.

There are only two f-stops on the camera (neither labelled so I’m assuming indoor and outdoor) and I have no idea what the exposure time is.  It does have a manual override on the shutter so I can keep it open as long as I want so will be experimenting with some night photography soon.

Taken during the summer of 1990 or 1991; one of my first experiments with B&W 35mm film. Shot with my father’s Pentax 35mm camera that I have since inherited. We spent that summer taking photos all around the area we lived in in southern Michigan and has been a major influence in my life to continue photography as a creative outlet. See my slide show  ‘When We Were Young‘ for more photos from that time.

Over the past several years there have been a couple of things that inspired me. I’m not talking creative inspiration, like in my last post, but more of a life changing, out of left field, didn’t expect it, subtle but once you think about it that is exactly how I feel inspiration. I guess inspiration isn’t the correct verbiage but it will have to do.

This Dilbert cartoon came across one of those Apple widget thingies while I was working at Ruff Haus Design in San Diego last year.

I loved it so much I saved a copy of it to my laptop desktop and look at it all the time. It reminds me of exactly why I reject conventional jobs and it really spoke to me at a crucial time. It coincided with my decision to move back to Michigan and go back to school and pursue my own dreams to work for myself. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my job at Ruff Haus Design but that isn’t what I wanted to do everyday for the rest of my life. In fact, working there inspired me to pursue my passions and do my own thing. So here I am.

The other day, I finally found a copy of Meryn Cadell’s CD Angel Food for Thought. My friend Dennis introduced me to her work via a cassette tape sometime in the late 80’s or early 90’s. Her monologue Job Application summarizes so succinctly my detest for the whole job search/interview process. I’m so tired of having to satisfy someone else’s random, meaningless expectations just so I can be a slave for their desires. To be denied for not jumping through their hoops, or say the right things, or watch the correct TV shows, or align myself with the appropriate corporate identity to later find out that the person who was so much more perfect for the job and was going to solve all of the companies problems suddenly fails to show up for work one day and disappears off the face of the earth, this after working for only 3 months.

Oh, my! What a rant. You get the picture though. So let’s end this post with a fun video!

Cindy Sherman wrote the summary for the book, to some criticism. I’m not usually a fan of artists discussing there own work. They are too close to the subject, censor their true feelings, and usually lack the vocabulary to properly describe their work in the broader context of the art world. The downside of having an art critic write the summary is they tend to obfuscate the topic with their large vocabulary and knowledge of art and just seem to like to ‘hear themselves talk’. Cindy completely circumvents the need to overcome the difficulty of self analysis by simply explaining her motivation and thought process behind the photos. It is refreshing to hear the artist explain her creative process in her own words; to find that it can be as simple as just taking some photos. Art critics are notorious for over thinking the process. A simple smudge of paint or accidental chemical mix turns into some grandiose intellectual challenge to the entire historical evolution of art. Blah, blah, blah. As the great Freud once admitted, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

The other photographer that is exerting major influence over me right now is Jeff Wall. I missed his retrospective exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago, organized by The Museum of Modern art in New York, by a matter of days. I was completely unfamiliar with Wall’s work but happened upon the exhibit book in the book store. It was half off so I picked it up and was instantly intrigued. But what made me purchase the book was not the photographs themselves so much as the technique used to exhibit them. All his photos are color transparencies mounted in light boxes. Brilliant!

The strange coincidence was that I had been floating this idea around in my head for a year or so as a way to mount my 8mm Film Stills. I hadn’t already done this because of the rather large problem of enlarging an 8mm image to 2 feet by 3 feet or larger. Still working on that but do have the light box designed and most of the raw material sourced. As soon as I get my first photo mounted I will post a photograph of it here for you all to see.