As I wait for my laundry,

As I wait for my laundry, I will do a wrap up of my cultural consuming over the weekend. I didn’t physically visit any galleries, museums, performances or public art. After 3 days of art handling, you get the itch to paint and conceptualize your ideas. My coworker described: “an artist working as an art handler is like a musician working as a bar tender at an awesome venue.” You learn, absorb, observe, judge, respect, appreciate, denounce, and ultimately APPLY. You swing on the pendulum from deflation/bitterness to elation/inspiration every week.

A crate full of boxed art scluptures by Takuro Kuwata that I opened at work.

My partner and filmmaker Joe Wakeman helped me do the final color corrections for my forthcoming short film, Coral & Sebastian, and I feel a lot better about it now. I also swapped out a different clip of crowd footage for the opening scene, and rearranged the credit title cards at the end. The few friends I’ve shown it to in this “picture lock” stage have made comments or noticed details that I can describe in no other way as making me feel delighted. My friend in NC said, “I like the colors and city sounds. It makes me miss New York City.” (I didn’t expect anyone would notice those kinds of details.) And my other friend laughed at the moments I wanted people to laugh. And my other friend noticed that the main character breaks down in front of a mural that says “LOVE”. (I didn’t know if anyone would catch that.)

I want to be aware and understanding of NFT’s, so I started listening to Joshua Citarella’s podcast, self described as “… an artist doing research into online political subcultures”. Will report more on the subject later. I was very interested in his interviewee, Professor Holly Jean Buck of Buffalo University, who researches and teaches about climate activism and environmental justice, and how the internet plays a role. I bought her book, After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration and am excited to read it.

Last night we had Joe’s best friend Brendan Winick and his partner Molly Knox over for dinner and to work on some projects. Brendan photographed us as musician characters for a comic book series he is developing, and it was fun to dress up as different musician types… I was the bassist of an Icelandic shoegaze band, and a 1990’s riot grrrl vocalist.

Brendan worked as the colorist for artist Holton Rower for over five years and is master of color theory. I asked him for his thoughts on the painting series I am working on, and how I can more forward with color relationships, within the limitations of content. He introduced me to Johannes Itten’s 7 Colors Contrast. “He’s the first to make a theory about the possible types of contrasts that are produced by the different features of color: saturation, temperature, simultaneous, proportion, luminosity, hue and complementary colors.

7- CONTRASTE OF QUALITY OR HUE

We closed the night by projecting Contact (1997) and I loved it.

Film still of Jodie Foster in Contact, Robert Zemeckis (1997)

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