The Pixel Painter
Hal Lasko spent his working life as a commercial graphic artist, retired, and at 98 years old is still making new work, only now on a computer instead of a drafting table. His family sets him up with a basic PC and Microsoft Paint, expecting he might dabble, and instead he builds a second career out of it, working the mouse pixel by pixel for up to ten hours a day. The film watches him construct images the way he once built halftone illustrations by hand, an approach that lands somewhere between pointillism and 8-bit video game art, dense fields of colored squares that resolve into landscapes and portraits from a distance. His eyesight is failing, which makes the precision of the work more striking rather than less. There's no narrator standing between you and Lasko's process; the camera mostly just watches him work and talk about why he kept making things after most people would have stopped. It's a short, plain record of a man who found a new medium late and used it hard.