• Hard Drivin Woman

I wanted to find out, what we can can. I felt since I got to know you, that I have to do at least one common project with you. Your long air-swirling dreadlocks, your attracting, secretfully arresting lips inspired me already to many different art pieces, I even started a new concept called „zoom“ there were drawings about you, and then I did a series of painted roses. /I never thought I would ever paint roses!/ Leaving the circles finally behind me was a risky but an essential step into finding a new language of expression. In this new concept I intended to show how to get the whole picture through physical distance, or just loosing yourself in close blurred details. The power of seeing. But for some reasons one day I did quit to paint at all, and was on to move the still picture into a moving picture. Probably it was a logical extension to my blues photo database on which I worked already since years. Even with that I already left the artistic way to work on my own career. Instead of that I wanted to catch a piece of (music) history, collecting a documentary of my time of my generation, by supporting other contemporary artists, promoting them with my photos, now with my videos, and although I got a much wider public on youtube /my nickname is bluesvoice04 on there, guess why?/ as ever with my exhibitions or websites, I had to realize soon, that the people dind’t want to see my work, only the pictured musicians. Nevertheless I got a new passion recording and cutting music videos. I did them with a joyful obsession, (mostly) only with one camera, I called them „lomo“ videos. It was a new challenge into a still unknown area, it did suffuse me with indescribable much pleasure to cut my own material, making short movies from A to Z on my own, to live dayslong and becoming one with a single one song, to discover and to enhance its harmony through visualisation, to feel the rhythm and set it in scene, to accentuate and complete it with colors and lights, focusing the picture through getting them out of focus, to merge them in a different context of thoughts, giving them another sense (actually a new message) by making up a different story with a parallel cutted story, so it was almost a must, to do with you a video project. You did like the idea and said „yes to everything“, so I booked two airfares in a row in February (for the Mardi Gras time) and for April (2009) when the festival season started. (French Quarter Fest, Jazzfest and so on.) I didn’t have a script, or any concept about the movie in my head yet, I had to act spontaneously, as I didn't know what covers the "everything".  I wanted to see and capture a part of your life, to go along with you everywhere, hidden behind my camera, to record actually everything, selecting the rarely precious raw material first at a later time, since I didn’t know yet, what could be important, which little detail I would miss later. I hoped to get a bit closer to you, even if only through the project, to be able to spend some time with you (which was already limited with my stay) not only backstage but private, without camera, too.


SHARRIE WILLIAMS • HARD DRIVIN WOMAN