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).
From the series, "New York Close Up"