I see the writing on the wall. Set in concrete the letter I. Not something I am aspiring to.
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This is one of my favorite photographs. I captured it entirely unintentional, as I accidentally pushed the release button, before I had finished changing the settings on my camera. But I love the result for its colours and painterly properties. In my opinion it looks very haptic. I want to touch the surface, only to be disappointed. As it is a photograph it has of course a completely smooth surface.
In reality it is a close-up of a steam train at dusk taken with an extremely slow shutter speed. I called this image “Accelerated Standstill.” Finding one’s intrinsic speed is a recurring topic in my work.
Another one of my building site images. It shows Nothing. I particularly like the scratch marks around the nothing :)
Sadly I won’t be able to do much art this weekend. We have to attend to our renovations. We are half way through and I am so over it! I went around the site this morning to take some images. Yesterday the glass for the windows was delivered. All the panes are leaning against the wall with little blue stickers on them. Through the lens it looked like they were floating.
This week has been pretty stressful but I still want to keep my blog going. I know from experience once I start slipping, it will turn into a land slide in no time flat and that would mean the beginning of the end.
So I went through my image files and found this one here to describe the current situation. It shows the most important thing in any New Zealander’s tool box. A piece of No 8 fencing wire. It is said a true New Zealander can fix anything with this. It is a reference to the creativity and ingenuity of the early settlers in adapting to living so far away from the ‘mother land.’
Ah well, it shows I am not a true New Zealander. My piece of wire is tied up in a serious knot and it doesn’t look as if I could untie it in a hurry. Maybe the weekend will fix it!
I am extremely concerned about L’Artiste. Last week he was very frustrated and I thought I would help him out by making him the star of my short film. Originally he was quite chuffed, but when the feedback came in, he changed his mind. Even though we had some good responses and Socialite was so excited and wanted to interview him, it didn’t help. Strangely enough, negativity always seems to be remembered longer than positive remarks, doesn’t it? Sure enough, after cooling down for a while L’Artiste became convinced the film had ruined his reputation. He choose to have some time out and has withdrawn from the Dede community for the time being. I am well aware of how much he needs his solitude every now and then. So I left him to his own devices sitting high up on a ladder yesterday, while I worked with a few other Dedes on a pilot for a new film. Much to my surprise, when I came into the studio this morning he was gone. Only his robe was lying around where he was sitting yesterday and next to it a bottle of high percentage schnaps. Can you understand my worries?
When you know the whole picture, I have to confess, I have sugar coated our situation just a tad. I am actually not working in a studio. I am trying to keep up appearances here and studio sounds flash and established. In reality, I am working in a building site. The site currently has no roof and is shrink wrapped. This protects the building from the elements and gives me the perfect diffused lighting for photography. As it is the Easter holidays there are no builders around. If you have ever lived on a building site you know how awkward it is. As you can imagine the creativity suffers a little. I’ll try to make the best of it :)
But if L’Artiste really has taken to the bottle and wanted to go skinny dipping in a puddle outside the house, as his discarded clothes suggest, he might have come to grief. I had better go searching for him.
It is really sad. When I was younger I never realised how many people cared about me. This token was given to me by someone who was under the impression I was constantly broke. (And he was certainly right). The little plastic thing would have given me a feed in the student canteen at Munich University once and it had a home in my wallet for a very, very long time. Obviously I wasn’t broke enough to use it, or more likely, I wasn’t brave enough to go to the student canteen as I wasn’t enrolled at Munich. I was too afraid I might get caught out.
The Dedes might complain about the lack of consultation, but I decided to have one day per week where I put up images unrelated to the Dedes and I am starting today. (Nothing in my life is entirely unrelated to the Dedes, or to put it another way, the Dedes are very much part of my life.) If Devil was here he would tell me off now for waffling, so I will leave it at this.
Anyway, the image I have put up today is from a photo series called “worst friend ever.” For this series, I photographed mementoes of people who once were dear to me, but I have long lost touch with. I have a lot of these (mementoes and people I have lost touch with). The title of the series is of course a reference to me, not the friends I’ve lost touch with.
This little glass penguin is shown larger than it is in reality. It is in fact only about 1 centimetre tall, but it is larger than life. It was given to me by one of my dearest friends when I was in my early twenties. He brought it back from his first trip to Italy. It was an extremely significant trip for him, as it was the first time he was allowed to leave the country after he was realeased from prison. I can assure you this precious one centimeter high piece of glass carries an entire book inside.
The other day, when I was taking the images for the “Embrace Diversity” series, all the Dedes were on their best behaviour. The idea was to photograph puppets that wouldn’t normally go together, like Rob the thief and Bobby the policeman. Surprisingly, when they forgot about their professions, they are actually not that different at all and they shared a good old yarn over a beer. Foxy Lady – who tangoed with Harvey, the rabbit – told me afterwards how much she enjoyed the dancing. She admitted she was brought up hating rabbits. That was just the way it was at home and she never questioned it. Not in her wildest dreams would she have thought Harvey could be so much fun.
I got six images I am really happy with and they are already on the tshirts now. The only pairing that didn’t work for me was Mrs Esta Blished, the fairy godmother, and Devil. These two where whispering to each other all afternoon. When I looked at the pictures later I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. When the image is cropped to their heads only they look okay. It just looks like Devil is letting Mrs Esta Blished in on a secret. But when you see the entire image, it looks more like he is hassling her. I better watch this. Despite being a devil, I have never had any complaints about him so far. But then, it could as well mean that nobody dares to speak up. Until I know the whole story I can’t really use this image.
Yesterday I had lunch with a good friend of mine who I hadn’t seen for a while. While she is a real Dede fan, she is not keen on reading online and doesn’t read the blog regularly. So I usually give her the run-down on what has happend in the Dede World since we last met. Of course she hadn’t heard about my latest scheme. When I told her about the coffee mugs she got quite excited and immediately thought of a friend she could give a Monkey cup to. The problem was, there was no Monkey cup planned as yet. In the afternoon I sat down and created a second series with just head shots of a few puppets. They are ones who I definitely know have fans out there in the big wide world.
I don’t really want to talk about the Zazzle store every day. Unfortunately that is what is on my mind at the moment as I need to get my head around it all. I promise next week I will move on to other stuff again.
dedepuppets 