Okay, here’s another one that I definitely would not have chosen had I been the one doing the choosing. But since AI has randomized this process, here we are, with Even Kaczynski. The implication is, even Kaczynski is a saint, and it says, Saint Ted, down at the bottom. The original plan for this Saints series of images was to try to find the beauty in the most unlikely places, and to use the process of portraiture in order to do that. With the underlying idea that… through drawing a portrait, through spending the time with somebody’s appearance, you develop a certain empathy for them. And so, the early saints were all sort of notorious or infamous characters, and the image was a documentation of the process of trying to understand (appreciate the beauty within) them. That is kind of what I was going for here. You know, to try to find some beauty in an unlikely place. Now, the way the series ended up though, was that all of my friends wanted to be saints, and so I ended up just doing a lot of portraits of friends – and that was fun, too. But the original intent had more to do with figures like Kaczynski, where… they were not, um, regarded in a kind way. I guess that is the way to say that. So, anyway, this is a St. Ted from the Saints series, which I did in the early 2000s. This one probably was from 2001 when I was first starting out.
Addendum: While I was checking, just now, to verify that the date on this was really 2001 (my recollection was right – It looks like May 2001 – I might have still been fiddling with it at the beginning of June), I noticed a couple of other states that I like – I think more than this one. The first, below left is already in the Saints gallery on the website:
The second (on the right), I discovered in the original Saints development folder on an external hard drive where I keep such things. The resolution on all of these images is embarrassingly low – both of them are under 600 pixels on the long side, I think back in those days 600 px was the maximum dimension size I’d upload onto my website – just goes to show how different things were 25 years ago when dial up connections were the only option and download times were universally slow.
By the way, This is the 11th of these Random Daily posts, and from here forward – for the time being anyway – I’m changing my workflow slightly. Rather than using the Google docs voice-to-text feature as I did for the first ten, I’m now talking into my phone’s voice memo app. It gives a more accurate transcript, and of course it also records an audio file. So, I’ll include the audio recording with the blog post. I’ll still be editing the text between recording and posting, so the text won’t necessarily match the audio recording, but with practice, I hope to need less editing – I just need to get better at talking! I’d like to streamline these so they become mostly effortless – we’ll see.