A Day in the Life....

I used to reminisce over the smell of vinegar much as Proust, I am sure,  must have with his madeleines.   The darkroom, speak it aloud and some photographers will mist over at thoughts of days and nights spent carousing by the malodorous communal fixer baths.  Nasal bliss be damned, we were artists giving life to our creations in the sacred waters of  sodium hyposulfate.  It's pungent smells merging with the heady perfume of wetting agents and artistic perspiration. We'd laugh, we'd cry, we'd burn, we'd dodge. Never imagining our halcyon days would be relegated to blogs and midnight forum rants.  I know I write heresy.  I have crossed over.  I am digital.

Yesterday was the lab at it's best.  Two artists, crossed paths here.  Margaret Cogswell, a Guggenheim Fellowship award winning  multimedia installation artist, in the process of developing her next piece and  David Frank , once a Michigan photojournalist, now printing landscapes that reveal his second career in graphic design.

I had done some minor work for Magaret's last piece, Hudson River Fugue at The Tang Museum.

Based on that work together she asked me to help her gain a deeper understanding of things CS4 and the like.   She wants to become more comfortable with the digital medium as a place of artistic creation.  Yesterday, as we started wading through the ancient techniques of selection I noticed that her mouse work was, shall we say, suspect.  Now please understand, I have broken bread with Margaret and her husband, Terry,  and I am privileged she would ask me to help with her newest piece, but watching her work the mouse was reminiscent of a 13 year old's attempt at unclasping a bra one handed.  I guided her gently her to my little friend Wacom.  A bit racy you say?  What she really wants is to be able to intuit and flow in programs like Photoshop.  The pen felt infinitely more natural to her.  Let the lassoing begin.

As Margaret and I swam deeper into some of the more esoteric selecting methods available to her with her Wacom tablet and appropriate deep breathing techniques,  David  was  walking by with bold 24"X38" archival prints that dripped pungent colors from the Museo paper he chose.

This was David's fifth time printing here and he is pretty much able to handle all aspects of our printing workflow.  I had walked him through Canon's ipf printer export module for CS4 and we both felt quite pleased with Museo's own profile.  He was printing work for exhibition and for resale.  Talk turned to Margaret's desire to upgrade her video capture, David mentioned his own experimentation with some of the new DSLRs that also incorporate HD video capabilities.  Canon's 5D Mark II  is one of the cameras we offer students here at CPW and I have been quite impressed. 

The exchange of ideas, and perspectives on digital creativity were heady.  Indeed we laughed, we cried we sang Kumbaya.  Now if only I can stop drinking vinaigrette.

If you're in town, come on down.