More From Life
About "More From Life"
In 2007 I made one drawing from life each day of the year, on a 3X5 inch index card. The subject of each drawing was arbitrary, just whatever I felt like drawing that day. Those are the "key" drawings for this film. In-between each key drawing I drew 15 "tweens" which morph or transition one key to the next, in the daily order in which they were originally drawn. 6017 index cards make up the nine minute film. Original music was composed and recorded for the film by Howard Kaufman, Bryan Osper and Nick Pires-Moore.
More From Life is a celebration of the mundane ephemera of daily life and how, in one's memory, these things run together, overlap and morph into each other and into other things as well. Also, it is a record of some of the moments in my life that, without this film, would normally have been long forgotten.
For many years I have kept a simple, visual diary of daily drawings, each one no larger than a square on a very small calendar. Browsing back through the months and years is fun because you don't have to ready anything, just look at the tiny drawings and memories come popping forth. One year, instead of a small calendar, I decided to make this film by doing my daily drawings on index cards. And, instead of doing the drawings at the end of the day from memory, these drawings would all be from life. Drawing from life gives the viewer, or artist, a uniquely vivid memory of the subject. I looked around my world each day that year, searching for my subject. Often it was something insignificant and very ordinary; other times it was the highlight of the day.
In memory, when you look back at all of the millions of little things that fill up your days, they tend to blur and distort, sometimes changing the meaning, significance, or lack of it. In my film, the daily ephemera literally morphs, blurs and transforms from one drawing to the next. New meanings are created when one drawing becomes another. It happens very fast, so my hope is that some of it will stick in your brain and, later, come back as a memory of your own.
