Update on The Motive - Mrs. White

Thank you everyone so far for your support on this project.  We've still got a long way to go but as promised, since we reached the $500 mark, here is the first photo to be released publicly from The Motive.

It took me a long time to find the right model and a hallway that would work for my purposes.  The hallway was probably the hardest part though you wouldn't think that would be difficult.  I did shoot this show on a shoestring budget, though, and didn't want to rent locations if I could get out of it.

That being said, my friend Nicole was kind enough to let us use her upstairs hallway to shoot the photos for Mrs. White.  I wasn't sure if it would work but I'm pretty pleased with the result.  I wanted the photos to have a simplicity about them, so that it was easy to see the important parts of the art without a lot of distracting excess all over the place.  I would have loved to shoot this show in an old Victorian Mansion but didn't have one available.

If we can make the next goal of $1,000 I'll share another character from the shoot.  Whoever is the donor who puts us over the top will get to pick which of the five remaining characters to see!  Thanks again for your support and I am really looking forward to seeing where this goes from here!

The Council of Eyes also known as the dead fish picture

The image below might be a little creepy for some tastes and that's all right.  I can't imagine someone reading my blog and not being at least a little bizarre, a little twisted, so to most I'm sure it's fine.  It is, for those of you who are curious, a bunch of dead fish staring up at the camera.  Go look if you are interested, I'll wait right here.

Okay, now that it's out of the way.  My thoughts on this #photograph.

It strikes me, every time I see it, the line of dead staring at me, in a way that human corpses can't.  A line of them in this manner would be too much for me to take in, I wouldn't be able to look.  I don't have the stomach for real gore and death even while much of my art deals with those themes.  But give me a mirror and Medusa's gaze becomes much less unpleasant.

I had gone with my friend Claire to Seafood City, an Asian market on Olive in University City.  I took my camera along, well because that's why we went, to see if there was something awesome to shoot.  There are long rows of very colorful packages, lots of symmetry and a ton of cartoonlike characters and bizarre things to shoot.  When we got to the fishmarket side of the grocer, I was enthralled.

I actually took a lot of pictures of the fish that day, many varieties and colors, shapes and sizes.  This is my favorite shot for a lot of reasons, not the least is the aforementioned awareness in the eyes.  But I like the patterns in the photograph.  I like the colors.  And I really like the textures.  The combination of contrast, color, and composition (the three big C's in graphic design) really brings me to a stop every time I see it.

Yes, I know it's a little weird and a little dark.  But then again, so am I.

Incidentally, I highly recommend Seafood City if you are in the St Louis area and looking for Asian ingredients for cooking.  As you can see they sell fresh fish (much of it actually live) but they also offer all sorts of noodles and spices and even cereal from over the Pacific at a very reasonable price.  I like it more than Jay's because it's much bigger and doesn't have all the hipsters clogging the aisles.