I am trying to decide if LucasKrech.com needs an overhaul in terms of style. Part of me thinks yes, that it is lacking a certain aesthetic intensity that would better frame the work I show there. But part of me likes the simplicity. The little visual pun of a blueprint of a piece of my computer drafting is nice. But even the aesthetics aside it is very web1.0. Hell its practically beta. But I am not a programmer. And as Isaac points out even the very successful ones do not make much money at this game, so the advertising budget can not hold a web designer.
But thinking about this redesign has got me to thinking about how to present myself. Before coming to NYU I worked quite a lot in Berkeley and the Bay Area as an electrician. I also did a lot of design and assisting, but far and away my income came from electrician work. Moving to New York I made the decision that I was going to be a designer, and stopped taking work as an electrician. I have not worked as an electrician since the summer after my first year of graduate school.
I still kept up the assisting and of course the design. I do a lot of assisting work, but I am not interested in being a professional assistant. I know plenty of people who do. There are many people who work in Broadway and Opera as professional assistants. Sure they might design the odd show here or there, but what they do is assist. And they are really good at it. They make a decent living, often more in a year than the average designer. But that route is not for me. I am a fine assistant, but more due to my desire to be a designer for larger scale productions, I just can not afford not to be. But I do not so much enjoy it as a thing itself.
But when it comes to presenting myself, I am a bit at a loss. Is it better that I worked as the lighting assistant for two years at the San Francisco Opera, one of the top 5 opera companies in the US, and a world renowned arts organization? Or, is it better that I have done my own opera design, even though it was not even close to the budgets of most regional opera and was a highly unconventional production? Will the one only lead to more assisting work, while the other only lead to “unconventional” work?
The trouble for me is that I am not tied to a specific aesthetic. Intentionally. I do not just want to do one kind of work. I enjoy Theatre as much as Ballet as much as Opera. There is a kind of obsessive detail in realism that can be as enjoyable as the abstract conceptual work of psychological minimalism. I like bright as much as I do shadows.
The fun for me in a show is figuring out the style. Of exploring new avenues of visual thought and discovering where they go. Of taking risks on new projects and finding out if my hunch was right. Every show is a whole new psychological landscape, and there is an amazing thrill I get from weaving in and out of these, of passing through the many currents of mind to discover new places in the world and new places in myself.
The cross-pollination I get between the mediums is fantastic. Insights gained from dance, transfer over to lighting Opera. Opera to theatre. This is also why I am so interested in working in Europe, and why I truly enjoy my projects done with people not from the continental US. There is a further cultural cross-pollination that occurs. Whole new cultural frameworks that one must negotiate are put in place. My entire color sense was transformed through discussions with my assistant on Medea even though the color palette was fairly contained on that show.
Each and every show is so specific, that it becomes hard to convey this interest in diversity through images alone. I can either gather similar images in order to present a style, but run the risk of being pigeonholed into one mode of visual discourse. Conversely, I can have as much variety as possible yet run the risk of being inconsistent. My work has been described to me as variously “unconventional” and “poetic” although I am not sure what either of these terms truly means. I just want to light the play in what is most true to the text.
Tags: advertising, lighting, poetic, presentation, unconventional, website
MattJ
I feel as if I am always battling with this question. And I have a strange fear of getting pigeon-holed, while at the same time I just flat out want to work. It’s a difficult line.
Hello Lucas…I’ve been reading your blog here, and I seem to keep crossing your (not-quite-fresh) tracks. I’m designing at Impact at the moment, and my advisor (I’m working on an MFA) is an SF Opera veteran I suppose you may know, Joan. So I thought I’d introduce myself. I’m Jacqueline. Hi.
Oh how funny. Melissa is great. I have not seen her in several years. Say hello for me. I assisted Joan at SF Opera last fall on a “Fidelio.” It was a production from 1986. Yikes!
Let me know if you steal any more of my shoes.