Not Stop-Motion
This scene from Parks and Recreation always plays quietly in a corner of my brain.
Ben is without a job, wearing a grubby concert t-shirt he may have worn for days, denying that he’s in a full-blown depression. He holds as proof a figure he has made for the stop motion short film he’s been working on for weeks and asks: “Do you think a depressed person could make this? No.”
Creating things is part of how I maintain my mental well-being. I have re-occuring issues of depression and anxiety. They are the co-morbid riders in the sidecar of my ADHD.
There are times it is hard to tell when I’m focused on my creating in a way that is alleviating my issues and bringing richness to my life or if my hyperfocus on making is a symptom of my issues that is distracting me from something I need to deal with.
I need to be able to tell if I’m in a depressed state so I can take counter measures.
Depression and anxiety don’t make my art better.
My art can handle low grade levels of depression and anxiety. In fact I feel that some lows and some buzz of anxiety can be useful. The damage only comes if the depression gets out of hand because that’s when I make…nothing.
The tortured artist isn’t a helpful concept to creatives with mental help issues.
But that’s not why I’m talking about this scene right now.
Once more, someone who knows me well has suggested that the next step in my artistic journey is to create animation with my dolls.
Nope.
I’m not going to say that won’t ever happen
I’ve TRIED to say that. I argued about how crushingly time-consuming stop-motion would be to an art-friend who quickly countered with a possible program I could be using to animate them in other ways
Yet I don’t think that animation, classical stop-motion or other forms, is the next step for me in how to create additional art and narrative with these 3-d things I make.
Why?
I am not excited by the idea telling sequential stories with my visual art.
Meet Tank Girl, I recently finished her. She’s proof that I do enjoy consuming sequential narratives like her creation by Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett.
Creating possible plots and stories isn’t something I find enjoyable.
In blogging and journaling my satisfaction (and epiphanies) come from taking the disparate events that happened, or what I am thinking, and figuring out how to structure a narrative from those grab bag of parts.
I am semi-chaotic. A cacophany of visual stimulation is often what my muse demands. I groove on the juxtaposition of unlikely parts. I feel comfortable with a certain level of surreality that is never fully explained.
More and more what I’m creating includes 3-d physical mashups that combine dissimilar characters and concepts.
But no, not Garciraptor. You stare at him and he just stares right back. And that's when the attack comes-- not from the front, but from the side, from the other two raptors you didn't even know were there.
Like when I write, I enjoy corraling that malstrom of disorder in my art.
In 2-dimentional art, my drawing for instance, my work is almost always figurative. I am depict non-abstract humans and animals. When I did photography I was happiest photographing people… or creating Cindy Sherman-esque visuals with my own face, costumes, and makeup but sadly CIndy Sherman already existed.
My narrative style in 2-d isn’t sequential, it’s a tableau.
I bring together visuals and the story comes from how your mind interprets the whole.
Let’s lean into the idea of a tableau: a living picture of models/actors posed silently to depict a dramatic scene.
Right now my art focus isn’t 2D, it’s 3D. I’m making figurative sculptures and creating posable custom dolls (human representations) and creatures.
For me the next step in expanding that world isn’t to jump to sequential narrative, a world that would require a steep learning curve and plotting (non-linear or linear) the next step is this:
I spent part of today walking along Lake Michigan with an art-friend, his dog, three dolls I’d packed, and my iPhone camera.
Because THIS is what I feel is a component of my art work I need to expand on. Putting my creations into environments, both found and created by me, and capturing them interacting with the environments and each other.
It takes existing skills and resources I have (photography / a cast of characters I’ve created and will creative/ 2D figurative composition ) with ones I am actively working on (I’ve now got access to a woodworking space for the express purpose of making doll trunks and doll environments).
It also creates something I potentially need if I’m to set up a Patreon or similar subscription to my work. I don’t have products, tangible or non-tangible, to offer potential tiers of supporters.
I’m not yet prepared to reserve some blog posts behind a “pay wall”, or offer exclusive video content of process/ techniques/classes. But if I started doing more photoshoots/tableau of my work it wouldn’t simply be artistically it could be a way to offer physical prints/ postcards/ notebooks/ buttons/ stickers.
A depressed person didn’t make this.
And damn does it make me happy, and that is important.
