H.o.p. is furious at me. He believes I lost a drawing of his. I probably did. I probably threw it away. He draws ten thousand pictures a day and it’s impossible to keep them all, which he would do if he could. We haven’t the room so I sort them out occasionally and throw away the obvious prep drawings and many others. He says, anyway, that up front was a drawing for an animation he was doing and it’s gone now. So, he is mad. I think it is also the cold. We have both hit cold-cranky.
Attempting to clean up the enormous mess of files on my computer, art and photos everywhere, I started sorting through all our digital files from the middle of 2004 when we got a digital camera. I was also sorting out pics of H.o.p.’s art and have been reflecting the past few days as to what happened where throughout 2004 I did a pretty good job of recording and scanning H..p.’s art and this somehow collapsed in 2005. I realized, going through all the folders of photos what happened.
Everything became art. And it became too much to keep up with.
Going through the photos I realize there isn’t a single thing eventually that isn’t art or performance here at home. I knew that at the time but it has been so much a part of daily life that I didn’t really how *everything* was art. There were no more plain photos of H.o.p. It was H.o.p. in costume, H.o.p. performing, not just drawings and scans of drawings but photo after photo of digital drawings he was doing on multiple computer programs, turning everything into art, spoons rearranged to be art, whole sections of rooms rearranged to be art, a sudden multiplying of sequence art, photo after photo of sequenced drawings or puppet performances. And finally H.o.p. took over the camera (my dad had given me a better one) and began taking hundreds of photos that were all art exercises, conceptual art, blurred and apparently nonsensical images as well that he did on purpose going for a particular effect, photographing everything not to record it but to make something new, to make a story. And ultimately hundreds of digital photos we had also to discard as there was no saving all of them, still leaving a copious record. He’d also begun experimenting with video but then our camera broke and our replacement camera turned out not to have sound, which took a lot of the fun out of it. And now tons of animations. He was going through them last night and was scrutinizing his older ones. “That’s no good,” he said. “All my older ones look just like separate pictures. They don’t look like animation.” He was saying he didn’t want others to see them because they weren’t like real animations and weren’t any good. I told him no, they were excellent for what he was doing at the time. That he needed to do those to learn, all part of the process.
Below is a picture he took in February. Deliberate. He plays with the camera continually, jiggling, doing high contrasts, dark against light, seeing what he can get out of it. “Isn’t that cool?” he says. I was going to adjust the levels in Photoshop but it softened the contrast and he didn’t want that. “Change it back,” he said. “I want it like it was.” He had done several videos first, the camera on the chair, so he would know exactly where to stand to get the effect he wanted.
There were a number of images that were almost all white, such as all white with a streak of blue-white, that he got out of jiggling the camera wildly while taking pictures of the white plastic venetian blinds. “Isn’t that cool?” he said. Done deliberately.
And always loads of stills from animated movies or flash animations so he can study them.
Against ceiliing light
2006
H.o.p., age 8
photograph
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