For a couple of days I got a bit obsessed with drawing eyeballs in PhotoShop. In my graphic design class students are designing a CD-cover and I wanted to give an example of how to draw things from scratch in PS. I got so caught up in the drawing process, that I kept adding details and refining my designs, with every drawing the detail of the irises I drew became more elaborate. The eyeballs continued rolling throughout the evening and late at night I rounded off my eyeball marathon by projecting and animating one of the textures I made onto a 3D sphere.
At different moments in my life I have been obsessed with eyes. I remember when I got my first video-camera (a Hi8 Sony Handycam). The first captures were close-ups of the eyes of my family members.
Four days later and I’m still animating spheres with eye textures…
I’ll post some more of these in the next couple of minutes and then I’ll probably get sick of eyeballs and go deleting the whole thing again…
(btw this drawing looks pretty much like a poster/cover/design for The Residents :)
When I type in my name in Google Images a bunch of my images appear, arranged neatly in rows. Some would say this online representation of imagery from my hand is an accomplishment, the countless sites featuring my work an achievement. And yet it doesn’t often feel like this.
Falsely confident by likes, comments and reblogs I stumble along. This blog as a stream of seemingly effortlessly produced snaps is a misrepresentation of my life as a photographer. There is nothing effortless about it.
Most of the time I am slightly anxious, obsessively color-correcting my way through previously color-corrected images. As my first exhibition on this continent draws to a close I feel like this ought to be a benchmark moment, a time to reconsider things.
It’s sunny outside and on my radio plays some anonymous violin, it’s time I leave the house.
Pilgrim
Last weekend I spent some time down the coast. Every time I get back to the Wollongong-area (East Coast of Australia) I get overwhelmed by nostalgia. For two whole years I spent my Australian ‘infancy’, my early days as an immigrant, in this place. Unemployed, except for a 5 month gig at a boat factory, I explored the area with my pushbike. Every 10 meters of the Princes Highway going from Wollongong to Corrimal is covered in a thin layer of meaning.
Everything was new, the air, the light, nature, isolation. It was just C and me, nothing else. The escarpment, a coastal mountain range extending for kilometers, my sanctuary filled with lyre birds, snakes, black cockatoos and infinite adventures. A year into living in that area I started this blog (a bit over 3 years ago).
Two people who fulfilled a certain substitution for the lack of parents and social contacts were the landlords: Mr and Mrs Gupta. So every time I’m down the coast I have to pay these guys a visit, like a good son. And so it goes, they both are very proud I ‘made it’ in Canberra. We go through the old routines: reminiscing about the past, updating the man’s laptop, sharing a cup of tea.
After catching up with the Guptas I rode off towards the foot of the mountain, gear-less (I’m a film shooting, single speed racing hipster after all) I pushed my calves half way up my old mountain, a few sidetracks took me to familiar places where I was welcomed by armies of leeches. At the old mining site (not the one in the previous picture) a teenager was blazing around on his motorbike.(I fucking hate the sound of anything motorized when you’re out in the bush, I can’t avoid being intimidated by the roaring sound of engines in a place like this) I flew back down the track and left Corrimal behind me.
This story has no end, my history is fused with these places and people.
