Lucas Blalock's Digital Toolkit
Art21
documentary, digital series, 6 min, 2015
Have you ever wanted a Photoshop tutorial from an artist?
Filmed in his Greenpoint studio, artist Lucas Blalock creates uncanny pictures using simple tools in Photoshop. Blalock demonstrates how he tweaks analog photographs—all taken with a large-format camera—by digitally erasing, masking, cloning, and drawing on scans of images. Approaching each picture as a game of enhancing visual relationships, Blalock preserves the clumsy quality of his alterations in a kind of slapstick full of pathos and whimsy. Collaborating with the filmmakers, Blalock’s studio process is staged through a series of reenactments, sleights of hand, and animations that overtake the video itself.
Featuring the works "Boob bag," "A physical feeling," "The Smoker," "two lettuces," "untitled," from "WINDOWS MIRRORS TABLETOPS" (all 2014); "Blue Bottles," "The Guitar Player," "Kathleen," "Picture for Mark I," "PLANTS," "Shoe," "three, three, three" (all 2013); "Accurate Walking Style I," "Both Chairs in CW's Living Room," "caned, chair, arm, hole," "Coffee Pot," "Gabriela as a Bunny," "Picture for Jennifer (record player)," "Untitled (lozenges)," "Untitled" (all 2012); "The Mallard," "Straw Picture," "Tenting" (all 2011); and "The Contender" (2009).
Lucas Blalock (b. 1978, Asheville, North Carolina, USA) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Learn more about the artist at:
art21.org/artist/lucas-blalock/
CREDITS
CREATED & PRODUCED BY
Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich
PRODUCER & EDITOR
Rava Films
CINEMATOGRAPHY
Rafael Salazar Moreno & Ava Wiland
PRODUCTION ASSISTANT
Jeewon Shantal Kim
DESIGN & GRAPHICS
Open
ANIMATION
Lucas Blalock & Rafael Salazar Moreno