apparently, these words are about to become obsolete… why am I browsing dictionary.com in my lunch hour instead of going to get something to eat, you ask? 

Well, never mind about that.  The point is, Alienism is a great word, and I am determined to save it.  Maybe it’s the title of my perpetually drawn out screen-play/graphic novel.

I’ve posted a lot of words lately and not so many pictures, but I suppose that’s a good thing.  I don’t know what I’m trying to accomplish with this blogging thing other than an occasional distraction while I am multitasking and a place to keep me grounded when my head is swimming in numbers.  Whatever it is I guess words can only help to form a complete picture of the enigma that is my public online self.

So, with that in mind, I have decided that I was crazy to try to maintain two separate blogs on Tumblr, and I will be merging everything onto this one.  I was trying to spare you all from my obtuse and sometimes overly serious ramblings about the creative process, but since I haven’t scared you off yet, I guess I can risk it.  Bottom line is that the stress of maintaining multiple online identities was beginning to cause me some discomfort and I could feel my brain trying to split in two.

What that means in a nutshell is that I may end up spamming some posts from my other site as I load them all into this one, and also that there also will be a shift (let’s call it an evolution) on this blog towards something other than just posts of my own work.

-k

As it appears that I have been using this blog mostly for uploading my art portfolio so far, and it will probably end up being my main on-line portfolio, I guess I might as well say a few words about my art and why I create. After all, people navigating here from my professional links may be confused as to why a marketing and finance professional chooses to devote this time to an apparently self-indulgent hobby…

Well, the answer to that question quite honestly is that I don’t compartmentalize modes of thinking. Right brain, left brain, blah blah blah… to me it’s all the same. Exploring a concept visually is not much different than exploring a business concept strategically or mathematically. I approach everything as if it’s the first time that I’m doing it, and in the process I take something nebulous - whether it is a blank sheet of paper or a database of apparently random numbers or an unidentified market need - and create a story out of it. So it is about giving shape to the formless, and in this way the discovery process is the same. Albeit, there may be some minor differences in applying paint to a canvas versus creating a vlookup formula in excel, but there is a lot similar between psychographic segmentation of a customer base and subjectively putting yourself in your audience’s shoes in order to determine if your artwork tells the story that you want. So for this reason, I find that thinking about and creating art enhances my ability to think strategically and creatively about business, and vice/versa.

In regards to my art specifically, what does it portray? This is something that I try to avoid answering, and although I hate to say this, this in itself may be the answer. I always strive to avoid deep meaning, and for things to be understandable to a wide audience. I don’t think that art needs to have deep meaning to be valuable. I only want my art to appeal on an aesthetic level. If I am successful in translating my vision to an image (or film, or writing, etc.) then someone can get some kind of a glimpse into my thought process. If in doing so, some viewers may chose to read into my work psychological significance than this is great, but what you read is on you. I do not put concepts in my work because I’ve seen how easy it is for artists in any genre to go down the spiral of self-referentialism. Conceptual art often ends up referencing the art history of it’s own genre, and in doing so alienates a wide portion of the potential audience that is not in the know. We as artists complain about the public’s lack of interest in the arts, but we create work that they can not relate to, and feed the general public’s understanding of contemporary fine art as a self-indulgent pursuit. Don’t get me wrong, I can appreciate and enjoy conceptual art myself, but I have no desire to create it. essentially I am a populist, which is why filmmaking is my medium of choice and why I ultimately moved into marketing strategy.

I just found this old idea for a script in one of my notebooks.  It’s probably not anything that I would ever shoot, but it’s kind of interesting.  It was sort of a stream of consciousness exercise where the first paragraph of whatever words came to my head dictated the plot concept, and the whole thing was done in 5 minutes.

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Woods - sad - alcoholics - trucks - cabin - party (bonfire) - parking lots - grey sky - cold river - abandoned buildings - dogs - deer - car dealers - memories of childhood - barbed wire fences - historical graveyards - satanic graffiti - poison ivy - dams - coyote - geese - lichen - gas stations - crazy war veterans - telephone poles - rocks with quartz veins - rusted metal things - dirt bikes - three wheelers - fishing.

A young man has gotten kicked out of his parents’ house for selling drugs.  He spends two days looking for a place to stay, going to a party, and being angry.  He decides to stay in an abandoned mansion.  He sees things which remind him of his childhood and he is able to come to terms with his anger and forgive his parents and himself.

Conflict: Two punks from out of town steal some drugs from him.  Throughout the film our protagonist and his friends are planning to hunt them down and attack them with bats and/or guns in revenge.  In the end he decides that violence is not worth it.

plus some words of Willam Gibson on my dashboard this morning got me thinking about one of the first title sequences I designed when I got out of college. It’s not my best work, but this was a crazy production. New Rose Hotel by Abel Ferrara. It was truly insane working with this guy who was very unpredictable, and there are stories I could tell but I’m not going there because they could be interpreted as slander. Let’s just say that watching the dynamics between Ferrera, Ed. Pressman, and Abel’s editor was like watching a daytime soap opera.

The film was … well I understand that they wanted to capture some true urban grittiness a la Kings of New York, but Abel doesn’t just portray urban grit, he lives it. His film method was not that suitable for sci-fi, and all the effects that we added (all traditional analogue composting)would have been much better if there was some forethought and discipline while shooting. There are some interesting aspects, and I understand it has a cult following, but ultimately the only thing that stands out for me is that I have a credit it the end title scroll.

I found a copy of the title sequence on Youtube that I’ll post, but there is one thing I want to point out which amazingly no one ever caught. Kanji fonts were very expensive at the time, and my boss was another very interesting character who didn’t trust Pressman to pay the bill (and he was right). Bottom line, we cut corners everywhere we could. One way to cut corners was to not buy a Kanji font or translator and just make up the Japanese titles ourselves using a freely available Katakana font. I just wrote the English titles phonetically in katakana and no one ever caught it. For those that don’t know, Japanese has two alphabets and Kanji which is their version of Chinese characters. You could write Japanese in the katakana aphabet and it would be unusual but able to be understood. What I wrote would just appear to be gibberish to a Japanese speaker. It’s just amazing to me that after all these years no one has caught it.

This is a theme that I have come back to many times in my art - particularly in film or linear storytelling - over the years. I am fascinated by meaning that is hidden in patterns and or symbols, yet is so deeply buried or is missing so many crucial pieces that the true meaning is always out of reach.  It’s not the actual meaning that interests me so much but the sensation of experiencing this, which has a surreal quality that I very much enjoy.

It’s like the feeling of grasping the cosmic censorship hypothesis or the black hole information paradox for the first time … or if you read some extremely dense philosopher’s work and almost understand what they’re getting at (because they don’t actually know either but they’re just circling around something).

The problem with this is that as an artist, and I think this is where a lot of people fail, is that in order for you to really capture that feeling you have to make sure that you know a whole lot more than your audience.  Many people try to do this with tricks and misdirection, which works only once.  Fool me once, shame on me …  So they have to keep coming up with new tricks and formulas to stay ahead of increasingly sophisticated audiences.  Instead, I try to show bits and pieces of meaning that appears as symbolic, yet I have not actually ascribed any meaning to it consciously.  So theoretically, my subconscious could be saying something, but I don’t know what the big picture is, so there’s a good chance that the audience won’t know either.  And they aren’t being fooled, because it’s an honest exploration.  Whatever meaning comes out of it is personal to the viewer and not plot driven.  If I want to convey a specific meaning in film or art, I’m not going to be elusive about it, because what’s the point in that?

All in all, not a very original approach.  In fact quite common (at least in art, maybe not so much in mainstream film these days).  But bear with me, because I’m just committing this to writing on my blog so that I can better understand my own artistic motivations and intentions. 

I thought that I’d go out last night during the blizzard and get the shots around my neighborhood that I was looking for. Of course I forgot the obvious, which is that falling snow in a populated area means very diffuse shadows - the white sky reflects all the street lights around.  I got a few shots so it wasn’t a waste, but not really what I was looking to do.  Anyway, I’ll upload what I have over the next few days and then think about going back out when the conditions are right - hopefully we’ll have a clear and shadowy night before all the snow on the ground is gone.

on a side note, working from home today, so that is good :)