By @JustinWetch

Daniel Koeth wasn't allowed to watch Jaws. He watched it anyway. Shortly after, his family took a trip to Florida, and he spent the whole vacation terrified of water. All water. He was afraid to sit on the toilet because he'd convinced himself a shark might come through the plumbing.

"I had this crazy idea that a shark might come through the toilet," he says. "I remember hovering over it the entire trip."

He was old enough that this was slightly irrational and young enough that it didn't matter. The fear was real. But so was the fascination, and on that same trip the family went to Universal Studios, where the entire park is built around film, and something locked into place. It wasn't long after that he convinced his dad to let him use his camera, a Sony Handycam that shot MiniDV tape, and started making little movies with it. He still has that camera. It still works. He's using it on new work for the first time this year.

The other obsession was Tim Burton. Hyper-obsessed, everything Tim Burton, all through elementary school. He almost forgot about it as an adult until he looked at his own work and realized the aesthetic had been living there the whole time: characters in black and white striped shirts, the blue sky world overlapping with something like the neighborhood in Edward Scissorhands. His first trip to MoMA was for a Tim Burton exhibit. Marina Abramovic happened to be performing The Artist Is Present in the same building, sitting in a chair across from strangers, and Daniel thought it was the stupidest thing he'd ever seen. He was in junior high. He had no context. Years later, he understood what he'd been looking at and wished he could go back.

By fifth grade he was making films with his sister, an actress, and kids from the neighborhood. Silly stuff cut together in Windows Movie Maker, burned onto DVDs because YouTube didn't exist yet. By seventh grade he was entering short films into festivals. By high school the work had gotten serious, narrative pieces with real ambition, and from there he went straight to film school.

He graduated in 2017 with a degree in narrative filmmaking and almost immediately pivoted to commercial work. Video, photo, graphic design, web design, a Swiss army knife of marketing and branding, primarily in the cycling industry. He ran his own business for exactly ten years.

"It's pretty soul-sucking after a certain point," Daniel says. "The creativity is only really utilized in trying to work within the limitations of the client. It's a totally different muscle."

He could count on one hand the projects that felt creatively fulfilling. But the tools were the same, cameras and lenses and the same editing software he'd later use for his art, so the experience was relevant even when it wasn't rewarding. He spent five years building up enough support through his art practice to finally make the leap. He went full-time in January.

Daniel figured out early that you can't make a great film by yourself. He's creatively introverted in the specific sense that he can't easily articulate what he's thinking and feeling to a team. Photography solved that. He can build an entire image from five or six composited photographs, use himself as the subject, and work at a speed that matches his creative cadence. With film, the idea starts to atrophy before you can finish. With a photograph, you can execute before the self-doubt seeps in.

His process is accumulation followed by collision. He keeps his camera within arm's reach at all times and photographs anything that catches his eye, cataloging it all onto hard drives organized by category. After five years he has thousands of blue skies, buildings, birds, textures. He waits for something in his life to match something he's been collecting, and then he builds.

The guiding principle comes from Hitchcock: make the most interesting thing not be shown. Daniel wants people to look at his work and wonder what happened just before the frame, or what's about to happen just after. A wall exists so you'll think about what's on the other side of it. He describes his images as the most interesting snapshot pulled from a loopable vignette playing in his head, the frozen frame from a film that doesn't exist.

"I want people to see it and think, 'What the fuck happened just before this?'" he says. "Or, 'Where is this going?'"

His minimalism follows the same logic. He builds a composition, steps back, and strips it down. A great composition is not about what you add but what you take away, and he treats the ability to pare back as a form of confidence. The fewer elements you need to tell the story, the more you trust what's already there. The film grain and bloom he layers on top serve as what he calls "wrapping paper of realism," an aesthetic borrowed from analog photography that creates suspension of disbelief. If it looks like it was shot on film, people are more willing to believe they're seeing something that actually happened rather than a digital composite stitched together on a laptop.

Most of Daniel's characters have something obscuring their face, which started practically (he uses himself as the subject and doesn't want the work to be about his identity) and became something more principled over time. Mr. Blue Sky has an emoji for a head, a commentary on digital communication that Daniel says he's outgrowing because it's almost too easy, you're literally showing people exactly what the emotion is. The Devil appears as a playful, silly figure rather than a menacing one, which some people love and some people refuse to engage with entirely.

Then there's Bag Boy: red jumpsuit, paper bag over his head, born from the impulse to be noticed and invisible at the same time. Daniel is currently making a series of five bronze sculptures of the character, a project that grew from a friendship with his collector Scott Kominers and a shared understanding of what the character represents.

"The heaviest thing that I carry is the version of myself that I pretend to be," Daniel says. That line echoes through every appearance of Bag Boy, this idea that concealing your identity protects you but also weighs you down, that the mask costs more than whatever it's hiding.

Blue Skies Forever started as a collection and became a tagline. It's the phrase Daniel has settled into as the thing that ties his work together, the clear sky that recurs in nearly every image, both literal backdrop and emotional temperature.

Now it's also a film. He's been working on it for a year, his first real return to the medium he trained in, and it's been the most challenging artwork he's ever made. Compositing a still photograph means assembling five to ten images into one. Compositing video means doing that process twenty-four times per second. He describes the experience as a whirlwind that oscillated between hating the project and believing he was onto something.

The cheat code turned out to be the camera his dad handed him twenty years ago. The MiniDV format's imperfection, its huge pixel chunks and soft digital noise, is far more forgiving for compositing than modern high-resolution footage where every seam shows. And it happens to carry the nostalgic warmth of a generation's home movies, which is exactly the feeling Daniel wants.

"There's this trend that I think is gonna continue," he says about the resurgence of older formats. "Tech has gotten so far that it's taken away the fun. The more barriers there are from start to finish, the more room for your own style to flourish."

The film moves his characters and symbols into the fluid, visceral medium he originally trained for. The filmmaker who realized he worked best alone, who spent a decade in commercial production waiting for the right moment, who found that still photography let him freeze the most interesting frame from movies playing in his head, is circling back to where he started. Same camera. Same impulse. Different person holding it.

Supporters who've mattered: Scott Kominers, a collector and friend whose passion for supporting where Daniel's ideas are going led to the Bag Boy sculpture commission. @batzdu, who has collected extensively and whose own work makes Daniel a better artist. And @musicalnetta who became a fast friend at Daniel's first Marfa trip and whose advocacy has been comprehensive and tireless.

Artists inspiring him lately: @VinnieHager, one of his best friends, who keeps him accountable to showing up daily. @nicedayJules, who is always several steps ahead and challenges Daniel to push further. And @allseeingseneca, whose leap from her known work into glass sculpture at Zero Ten has been empowering to watch.

If you think Daniel's work is sunshine and rainbows, he'd ask you to look again through a more cynical lens. There's something muddier and more complicated underneath all that blue sky.

For future Weekly Dose episodes, @danielkoeth recommends @skominer,@AP0LL_0, and @Dalos. Daniel Koeth was recommended by Vinnie Hager.