Narrowing down 2,280 photos to 4
And some new European truck portraits!
Art making is a series of decisions, one after another. And maybe a few thousand later you have something that you like. Adore possibly, when lucky.
One of the decisions in my work is which images to paint. I have thousands of images that look like this:
And then one will be like HOT DAMN:
A great picture like that is hard to get. When I’m driving towards and under an overpass the camera struggles to focus with the movement or the weird light, and I miss it and yell, “Fuck!” Then I mentally toss it onto an overflowing pile of missed moments.
I’ve thought of getting a dash cam for years, and with a little of that 200 Days Show money I finally bought one. And it sat unopened for 5 months. I felt resistance to it until I was about to drive to Texas and knew I had to turn it on. I used it on the trip and, surprise, the videos sat unwatched for a month or two.
This resistance to new tools is either (or both) my fear the new tool won’t work as hoped, or the new tool will change me/the work in some unexpected, unwanted way. Fear of disappointment and change—ah yes, hello old friends. But new tools, like anything new, can expand what’s possible, especially for a girl like me who wants to paint views that are only seen while moving at 70mph.
I finally watched the footage on my computer and found out how powerful this tool is going to be for my work. Here’s a few stills:
With all this new footage to catalogue and consider, I also catalogued and considered all the road pictures I’ve taken over the past few years that were scattered about.
Of course I have a numbers breakdown:
2,280 photographs gathered from the past 4 years
43 stills taken from 23 minutes of video
199 images chosen as possible paintings
13 of those chosen as favorites
4 of those chosen to be paintings
Looking, observing, cataloguing, choosing—all of it is done on gut instinct, with a little consideration of the rule of thirds thrown in. The decision of what to paint is actually many decisions, where I say yes to what feels right instinctually and say no to what doesn’t. In this case I said no 2,276 times.
The lucky 4 will be happening in the next year or two. Here’s one of them:
in the studio
I’ve been working on the last few Europe truck portraits, sisters to the Rome street sweeper from last time. I saw the one below in Dublin, and it caught my eye with that empty metallic bed and stacks of cones.
And this one I saw in Rome and it has to be shorter than 4 ft. I included the reference picture so you can see it in context. It’s the tiniest truck I saw the entire trip and I thought, is this driven by adults?! But god, those stickers and graffiti 🫠
things worth sharing
BOOK: When I think of narrowing down thousands of images I think of Robert Frank’s The Americans, a canon photography book. He took 28,000 photographs over three years in the mid 1950s and published only 83 in the book, the above being one.
QUOTE: “You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds except the one in which you belong.” - David Whyte, poet
See ya next time!
that quote is amazing