Seeing Color
I follow a disproportionate number of visual artists on social media, which means there's an overwhelming amount of great art being shared every day on my feeds. But I also remember the first Tumblr I ever came across and how I was blown away by the visual imagery being shared, so much so that I signed up for one just to see more of it. From then on, the floodgates were open.
A big part of the filmmaking process is just gathering references, like a scavenging raccoon, then making something new from the soup. Moodboards on moodboards on moodboards. Moodboards to center your vision before the writing begins. Moodboards to convey that vision to your crew. Moodboards for production design. Moodboards for cinematography. When I get stuck, I just do what I've done since I was fifteen years old: the low-stakes collection of images I like, images that resonate with me in some inexplicable way. The work of explicating that resonance is the art that comes later.
When I first discovered art on the internet, I would make note of the artists' names. And if I really liked their work, they became a bit of an obsession for me, a quirk to try on as I tried to make myself into the cultured, intellectual being I wanted so desperately to be. (Me and every mildly bookish girl from California going back to Joan Didion and beyond.) I carried the work of someone like James Jean like a secret through the cultural desert of my suburban high school, where I felt surrounded by STEM-worshippers who didn’t have time for art and literature if it wouldn’t get them into college.
Two years ago, I got to see the piece that started it all, Maze, in person at a gallery in Seoul. I drank in Jeans' sketchbook pages, the towering canvases that stretched across an entire wall, the fantastical imagery that had first drawn me in with its subtle weaving of Asian motifs into surreal, magical concepts. His work had been one of my early inspirations in its compressed, pixelated form on some art aggregation blog, and now I was standing in front of the piece itself on a film-related work trip halfway around the world. It was dizzying.
Although it’s just as likely I was simply dehydrated.
I look at more art than ever now on a day-to-day basis, and yet I hardly see any of it. I scroll and scroll and occasionally I file one away for future reference, but none of it sticks. None of it's changing my life the way Maze did. Part of it has to do with age. Everything hits so much harder as a teen because it's the first time you're experiencing it. Was Arizona Dream that good, or did I just love it because it a) starred Johnny Depp and b) was the first movie I saw that embraced irreverent surrealism, with a world that felt alive because even the background characters seemed to be living full-fledged lives in the space between cuts? Was it good, or did it just meet me at the right time? Should I stop telling people I love this movie? I'm afraid to rewatch it and find out.
There's a never-ending flurry of content in all forms these days, and a dwindling capacity for attention in this brain. Over the past year, I've begun to crave depth in what I create and what I take in. Telling myself that it's okay if it takes years to finish one project, it's okay if I can't fart out two short films a year or even one short film a year. It's okay if it takes five years, ten years. It's okay if you don't post on social media for months and months and the algorithm banishes you from the colony like Jonah and that weird baby on a sled, the Giver waving sagely goodbye from his socially distanced hut.
I want to see color again.* I don't care so much about seeing every picture posted on the internet every day, but I do want to pay better attention to the few I do see. I want to look up the artists' body of work and trace their creative compulsions over the timeline of their lives. Who are their inspirations, and who have they inspired? What’s the context in which they create? The internet has largely orphaned art from its context, but context is what gives art meaning.
I haven’t written all winter because I haven’t had anything to say. Rather, I haven’t had anything to say that was worth saying in a public space. More and more, it feels like everything is an unwarranted take, and the takes that you do share have to be justified from every angle, with every possible counter-argument and caveat accounted for. I have never felt qualified to enter the fray, even when I was getting my degree in hot takes and forced to participate twice per class, and I would much rather listen to people who are directly involved before contributing my piece.
But when I think about looking at the world around me with more depth, and possibly sharing what I find as a vehicle for that depth, I find myself being moved to write again.
So hello.
*This has been an unexpected and overly extensive metaphor about The Giver.
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