Most of my time is spent finishing a novel and teaching a graduate fiction workshop at Northwestern. But I’m also keeping a small film and art practice going—short visual experiments that seem to inject energy into my writing and allow me to play with ideas.
This past fall I exchanged postcard paintings with filmmaker and artist Laura Harrison. (I’ll write more on this exchange soon.) If you’re not familiar with Laura’s work, she has an incredible, flexible imagination that allows for all kinds of visual and narrative surprise. She works on multiple projects and collaborations at once. I can’t emphasize enough how wonderful it was to get a random text late at night with a photo of one of these paintings. Or the slight anxiety/excitement of staring at her images and making myself respond quickly on a blank 4 x 5 piece of paper. Laura has been helping me to be faster and less precious.
With that aim in mind I am making very quick and short weekly films. I’m a perfectionist and I tend to overwork ideas. This tendency has kept me from learning as quickly as I would like, and from finishing projects.
This week’s challenge? To take one of those postcard painting and use it to create a one-minute film, adding just five more sketches. For what I thought would be my central image I used a self-portrait in a clown nose. What happened to this woman before she sat down at her kitchen counter, put on a clown nose, and dug into a sundae?
I imported my images into Davinci Resolve and tried to turn them into a tiny story. The nose, the cherry. That bright-red circle. I leaned into that shape and color, and used my limited knowledge of film editing to telegraph a transfer of energy.
The resulting film was a little wonky, but also oddly touching. I shared it with my friend Janaki Ranpura, another favorite multidisciplinary artist, and she encouraged me to add an image to signal the disruption that led to this “utterly ridiculous,” vaguely sexual sundae moment. I found myself thinking about the film Brief Encounter. The sundae was no longer consolation. It had transformed into a brief and disorienting affair.
Watercolor sketch film: A Brief Romance