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Lucas Blalock's Digital Toolkit

September 11, 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).

More information and credits

Credits

Art21 New York Close Up Created & Produced by: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Producer & Editor: RAVA Films. Cinematography: Rafael Salazar & Ava Wiland. Production Assistant: Jeewon Shantal Kim. Design & Graphics: Open. Animation: Lucas Blalock & Rafael Salazar. Artwork: Lucas Blalock, Buster Keaton, and René Magritte. Music: Bensound, Evgeny Grinko & Ben McElroy. Thanks: Corinne Blalock, Tessa DiPietro, Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Griffin Editions, Morel Books, Peradam, Ramiken Crucible, Kathleen Ryan, Gabriela Salazar, Self Publish Be Happy, & Chris Wiley. An Art21 Workshop Production. © Art21, Inc. 2015. All rights reserved.

Art21 New York Close Up is supported, in part, by The Lambent Foundation; the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; and by individual contributors.

Closed captionsAvailable in English, German, Romanian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Italian

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Licensing

Interested in showing this film in an exhibition or public screening? To license this video please visit Licensing & Reproduction.

Lucas Blalock

Lucas Blalock was born in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1978 and now lives and works in New York. Citing the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht’s insistence on a theater that reveals its labor, Blalock is interested in revealing the process behind photographic images. Equally invested in both the history and the possibility of photography, Blalock shoots with a large-format camera on film and then scans his images in order to digitally alter them.