Some more background on myself and my work

My painting: "Next Move" - oil on canvas

As I mentioned in my first post I've been a painter since the age of 12. Almost from the beginning my paintings utilized baroque compositions and dramatic, single point lighting effects. I mention this because some folks who've come to know about "The Shadow Sea" and seen some of the very early test footage have asked me why I've decided to make such a dark/noirish film. My answer is that it's in my bones. It's who I am. I find inspiration, energy, mystery, truth, emotion and purpose in the dark. Something about the revelatory qualities of light piercing darkness, the way it carves life out of the shadows has always had a hold on me.

That said it shouldn't be any surprise that early on my favorite painters - those artists that made me want to paint - were Carravaggio and Rembrandt. Vermeer and his lonely twilight dramas also exerted a strong hold on my imagination. As I got older and was able to travel I spent hundreds of hours in museums staring at the original works of those and other artists like Georges de la Tour and modernists with their own take on the business of the night like Max Beckmann. I absorbed all that I could and took their lessons to heart; which you can probably tell from my 2006 painting "Next Move" (left).

Maya Deren - "Meshes of the Afternoon" 1943

As for film it would not be an overstatement to say that something changed inside me the first time I saw Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner"; an underappreciated film in its day but one that has come to be rightly regarded as one of the great films of the past 40 years. I had not considered film making before that but afterward I began to devour the noir classics like "The Maltese Falcon" and Carol Reed's disturbing masterpiece "The Third Man". In art school I became aware of film makers like Maya Deren whose "Meshes of the Afternoon" left an indelible mark on my soul and influenced the look and feel of both my paintings and the super-8 films I was making at the time.

So why am I making this noir mystery of a film? Because I can't imagine making any other kind. Because there's life in the dark. Because the truth comes out at night. Because all of my work is, in a sense, noir and to pay homage to the incredible artists who've inspired me.

In my next post I'll talk about the evolution of the story itself.

My painting "Ladies in Waiting" - oil on canvas