To create the images of the man used in the Existential Crisis Series like Anonymous and A Mid Level Bureaucrat Contemplates Power I borrowed a leaf blower and took a video of myself pretending to blow leaves on a hill in front of Minges coliseum. I then dragged the movie into iMovie and picked out the best still frames. The image below is a screenshot of the film in iMovie.
The image above was the main image used for that series. Each image below can be clicked on to enlarge.
There were many variations of that image including this one, in which Michael Meadors silkscreened dental diagrams on top of my print of a collaboration done with Janie Askew. I then printed, painted and drew on top of all of that.
Through this process of editing both digital drawing and painting as well as drawing and painting on the physical objects, I changed the images which, in turn, changed their meaning as well as the direction I thought I was going to take.
I decided that I wanted people in my world, so I started taking pictures of some of the men that worked around the art building as well as using temporary online references as stand ins. But I could not find, or seem to capture the point of view I wanted.
I borrowed a leaf blower and very quickly realized that it was even harder to take a picture of myself blowing leaves than to do what I was doing previously.
One day I accidentally opened iMovie and there was my solution. I could take a movie of myself pretending to blow leaves, and pick the perfect image out using a movie editing program to generate still images.
