Film Studies

In 2021 I began painting small studies from film stills. I picked still images from a single film which had won or been nominated for an Oscar for cinematography and painted a small study of each still. I started painting them six to a page of wax paper about 3"x7" each, but now paint them larger and three to a page. I've seen some of these films in their entirety, but not all of them and sometimes it is productive that I haven't seen the film I am working from, interpreting the images through composition and mood.

The studies began as a simple "get your hand moving" exercise for my mornings, but have evolved into an exploration of cinematic framing, serial imagery, and of the type of super-stimulus which movies have become in our lives. Films provide in a dense and powerful medium most of the aspects which other arts used to provide, such as catharsis, mimesis, imagistic power, with the addition of access to internal narrative and most crucially, time.

Working on the studies has also made me think about the way painting allows me to filter my experience through painting, as well as how we all filter our own internal experience through imaginative encounters with images and stories.