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