About the Picture
So, about the picture that appears at the top right hand corner of this website….. I’m somewhat reluctant to tell you what it means to me, because it’s been more fun to read the emails and hear what some of you speculated it might be. I do realize that not everyone has viewed the movie Sunset Boulevard – to those who are familiar with it, the floater in the swimming pool is an obvious nod to the movie. William Holden’s character floating face down in the pool in the opening is a classic scene in movie history.
When I began work on the logo, I wanted an Oasis feeling to the art. Once I added a pool to the picture, my thoughts went to the swimming pool in the movie and figuring out how to also make it symbolic of my situation, but not mine alone.
Now, what the picture means to me, on a personal level. Well, it’s nothing macabre. I’ve made the fellow in the pool part of the background, not the foreground. It represents past, not present. Relationships come and go, and when they are gone, they leave us changed in some way. Most likely we view life differently than we did before these people came into our lives. Sometimes it’s good and sometimes we just have to work with the changes and try our best to understand our new perspective. It’s just part of the process.
The picture is a collage of a combination of real objects and created objects, put together in Photoshop. The street sign which is color enhanced, is from a black and white photograph of the actual street sign that graced Sunset Boulevard (the street and the movie) in 1950. The figures and the backdrop were created in Poser 6, something I am still learning. I love this program and I hate this program. I love it because of how much it will help me to illustrate my website with my own unique pictures and I hate it because it feels like math class. It’s a more complex program than I have used before, and just when I think I have the hang of it, I’ll export a picture and realize the figure’s eyeballs are on the floor. I have no idea how that kind of stuff happens. If you’d like to see some of the earlier attempts and some of the processes along the way, I’ve arranged them on Flickr and added comments.