The Day Job, part 1

These posts combine visual information from my work in films, music videos, commercials, tv, photo shoots and other entertainment related art and design jobs with my concerns and interests as a fine artist. I want to explain in "The Day Job" posts why production designing, art directing, set dressing, prop mastering and other related jobs have been invaluable to me in forming more developed ideas about fine art and how it relates to the contemporary situation. In this particular entry I will include an image or two from a recent project, making a concerted effort not to reveal too much, to give some interested parties a sense of what I do here in LA and why I've been able to remain interested in it.


So, recently I had, for the first time, the opportunity to actually production design a project. I've managed and made many important creative decisions about other designer's projects up to now, but this was the first, and certainly not the last time that I will be the creative executor of a project. In this project, I had an interior space and an exterior space to deal with. Most people responded most strongly to the changes I made to the interior space of a roller derby rink, but I was most excited about some elements that were on the periphery of the rink, such as the ten foot tall bag of popcorn and one of the fifteen foot team banners pictured above. The space, a roller derby rink, was so sculptural, three dimensional and begged for effects that accentuated it's organic contours and that underscored its sense of scale. I wanted to have some disproportionately large objects to create a bit of scale distortion and and give the rather gray and drab roller rink a heightened level of dynamism. I was excited in this case to be able to get away from what people are often occupied with in this business, dressing rooms, and to begin to move into a three dimensional, abstract compositional space within which people would interact and a drama would unfold, a drama that was to be shaped by the environment.

I will summarize now and elaborate in future posts, that I've felt a chasm between the depiction of ideas 2-dimensionally and the actual three-dimensional world that surrounds us. When last in Paris, I marvelled at the Louvre and the buidings along the river there, how magnificent they were, and how they humbly housed these 2 and three dimensional decorations inside. The architecture seemed infinitely more profound at the time and that impression has stayed with me. I don't think one form, architecture or art, is superior to the other, but I do think that they are married to each other, bound, and I see my work exploring the relationship between an environment and an object within that environment. I forsee volumetric abstraction becoming three dimensional and it's walls if they can be called that, becoming inhabited with visions of the mundane, as fantasies one might have when living in Candyland.