Praeterita

  Beginning shortly before Christmas, I have been regularly uploading short videos showing me (or at least my hands) at work in my studio. Many of them are short hyperlapse videos, condensing hours of work into fifteen or thirty seconds, to fit the Instagram format and recommended length. Ai imagine that by the end of this year I will have quite an extensive archive of my painting and printmaking sessions.  

I was clearing up piles of sketchbooks and papers over the weekend, when to my surprise I opened one of them and saw this bold drawing that I didn't recognize: It's drawn in black sharpie marker. After a few seconds, I remembered: it was left behind in the classroom by a Film and Video student when I taught a 4-hour journal and sketchbook workshop at Columbia College in April. The student didn't sign any of the pictures, so I don't know his or her name. But even if he/she didn't think them worthy of taking away, I thought they were pretty good, and held onto the sketchbook in case I ever get the chance to reunite it with its maker. There are eleven drawings in total. They start very spare, maybe because they were produced during the 10-second drawing phase. But they quickly become very strong, detailed, and Keith Haring-esque, and I think they read in a narrative sequence (click on any image to embiggen it):

Is it the case that an artist just creates in a vacuum, with no knowledge of the art that came before? Is it really true that it's better just to make your work, whether it be fiction, film, or painting, and not "spoil" or "taint" yourself by getting bogged down in the work of the past? Should you, when you go to college to study any of those arts, be prepared to consider the history of your chosen medium in an analytical way, or should you just learn how to hold a brush, focus a camera, and write a scene, and not bother with all that old stuff? Still from Federico Fellini's "I Vitelloni," 1953 It's an argument that is pertinent to the Film and Video Department of Columbia College Chicago at the moment, which as part of its academic prioritization process is facing the elimination of its Cinema Studies from the curriculum. Department Chair Bruce Sheridan, who I mentioned in my last blog post about the superb film/live orchestra event la...

The word 'film maker' is really a short-hand for the many artistic activities that Bruce Sheridan pursues. It's true that he makes films, and is the Chair of the Film and Video Department at Columbia College Chicago, where he was instrumental in bringing about the creation of the Media Production Center, an architecturally stunning building that opened its doors in the Loop in 2010. You can get an idea of the range of those activities (film, music, philosophy) at the website createbruis.com . After hearing Bruce's presentation for the Story and the Arts panel that we both participated in a few weeks ago, I was keen to get him to expand on his views on creativity, imagination, and the commonalities between different forms of art. Philip : Usually I'd start with a biographical question, but there are links for that , so I'll just jump straight in and ask: what sort of films do you like to make? Bruce : My first instinct is to say that I mainly want to NOT make t...