Inspiration
Black and White
I was reading some of the “Eisner Mller” today, a book of conversations between Will Eisner and Frank Miller and it inspired me to pick a simple picture for today. I hope to paint it soon, though I don’t know what medium I’m going to use.
Andrew Wyeth
Andrew Wyeth passed away this week (along with Batman, Patrick MacGoohan, and Ricardo Montelbahn, bad week for people who work outside of the system). His painting Christina’s World taught me what art was and could be.
Wait for it …
JL
So in college I did five photoshoots. I should talk about all of them some time, but right now I have to talk about one. The model was a girl who I saw at a party my Junior year. I saw her for a few seconds and though it was a dark house party, she looked like she had a spotlight on her. She had purple hair and an amazing, regal, confident quality about her and I thought to myself “I would love to try and capture all that in a painting.” I blinked and she was gone.
Fast foward to my Senior year and I was at Chucks and saw her again. Turns out a friend of mine knew her. He spoke to her on my behalf and we set up a photoshoot.
She was amazing and the poses and expressions she had have influenced my subsequent work in the years since.
However, at the time, I sucked as a photographer. I was trying to get tricky and many of the photos are backlit. There’s no contrast. They’re a mess. For a few year I tried to do the best I could with the pictures, but eventually gave up.
I always felt bad about the shoot, not only because I missed an amazing opportunity to produce great work with such an interesting person, but because I promised her that I’d show her the photos and give her some prints, but got busy with graduating and packing up and never got around to it. I never forget promises like that, and later Facebook was invented, so I found her, wrote her, mailed her a CD of the shots which she got yesterday. Also – we’re talking about doing another shoot. I hope to have some paintings to put up here in the next few months that try and capture that unique quality of hers.
Meanwhile, here are some paintings I did from the shoot:
Inspiration
An artist who’s work I like was interviewed recently and said that they were inspired by the following people:
Karl Lagerfeld
Stan Brakhage
Kenneth Anger
Francis Bacon
Helmut Newton
Posting these here so they’re easy to find when I have time to research their work.