Well, I am down for the count with this cold/flu everyone has. So instead of watching TV from bed, I worked on an art project that the Wicker Park Grace Art Forum peeps have been encouraging me to do.

I’ve shared at the Forum some work I’ve done with collage and digital manipulation of photos, and I shared a really interesting book with the group about self-portraits. So Virginia said I should make one.  This is more than one, though, it’s a story cycle told all through one photo, digitally edited to show different elements of the story.

One of the things I love to do with my iPhone is use the many photo apps to apply various filters to photos I take on the phone. I was playing around with this and started naming the photos based on what emotion I thought the altered image portrayed. After collecting about eight of these, I realized they could tell a story if I put them in the right order.

That got me excited! So I began creating more images and imagining a general plot-line that could be used. The plot changed based on the images that came out of the process. I ended up with 71 images, all derived from one self-portrait photo I took with my iPhone.

“The process” includes applying filters on top of filtered images. Some of the iPhone apps also crop and resize or put borders around the images. This all becomes part of the diversity of image which tells the story.

You can read the story and see the images here. Self-portrait :: Story Cycle :: Worth Remembering You can also watch it as a slide show. Be sure to “Show Info” along the top, so you get the words of the story. This obscures one of the eyes in a couple of significant images, but it creates a nice effect of showing the images transform from one to the next. I think I’ll try to make a nicer slide show of this piece.

Working on art like this is a process of making something beautiful and moving which I find healing. I made a healing portrait of a friend by using some of these digital alteration techniques, and surrounded his face with words of inspiration and hope.

Making that piece for my friend reminded me of Sybil MacBeth’s book called Praying in Color. I was praying in color for his healing when I made that, and I think I was praying in color for my healing when I made this Story Cycle. I called mine, “Worth Remembering.”