Temporalis: Time Passes. Paint on Glass and Animation Installation

Many years ago, I was introduced to William Kentridge and his gorgeous animated drawings. I began to wonder what would happen if paint was used instead of charcoal. It took me almost a decade to try it and find out for myself. I did some research and had some recommendations by teachers. Among others, I discovered Alexander Petrov, Caroline Leaf and my personal favorite, Carine Khalife.

Although not exclusively, paint on glass is commonly done on a light box, which means that the colors act differently than usual painting. The light shines through the paint from behind, so the value is controlled by opacity and thickness rather than adding white. I began by using oil paint, since that is where my experience lies. Oil paint does dry comparatively quickly using this method, even though I mixed it with petroleum jelly to slow the drying process and thinned the paint with vegetable oil. The drawback is that I only have a day or two to work on something, and once it dries, I can't work on it anymore. However oil has certain properties that acrylic and watercolor do not. Also, once the image is dry I can frame and potentially sell the final frame of each scene as a physical painting. Here are a couple quick experiments:

During the summer, I took a class called "Boundary Crossings: Cyber Folklore", an animated arts installation class through PNCA. Oil paint was not an option, as I was using the expensive equipment in the animation lab, so I decided to try watercolor. Watercolor has a few benefits using this method. The dry parts can be drawn into with water and repainted. Also, if glycerin is mixed into the paint it hardly dries at all, though the glycerin greatly affects the texture of the paint and makes it harder to control.

I also used this project as a way to explore something I think a lot about: Disaster, war, climate change and societal collapse. I was thinking about how we take for granted the world that we experience and how things may change at any time. I was riding my bike to class every morning through the lovely idyllic Portland, Oregon on beautiful summer days, and I thought about how one day, all of what I was seeing and experiencing may be gone, and what replaces it may not be so idyllic. I used Google Street View to capture 3 iconic views of portland, and then painted them as though they had been bombed. I used only a few colors so that the series of 3 animations would relate to each other.

To make this animation, I hinged two pieces of glass and attached them to a light box which was taped and wedged down under the camera so that it wouldn't move. The dusty wind was created by brushing a layer of wet paint a keyframe at a time across the back of the top piece of glass. The sky was painted on the back of the bottom piece of glass, the scenery on the front of that, and the movement on the front of the top piece. This created depth and layering and allowed me to move parts of the image without touching other parts.

 I failed to keep it still on the first one I did, which is why the Burnside Bridge scene appears to wiggle. I decided it looked like a camera blowing in the wind, which inspired an idea I didn't follow through on which was to install video monitors and create a bunker for my installation, equipped with video monitors and the sound of radio, a running generator, wind and one lonely voice crackling in on a radio scanner. The idea was good, but so much of the beauty of the painting was lost on a monitor, so I opted for stripping down the concept to a minimal and poetic approach and back projected the animations on to strips of vellum hung with invisible thread, removed all the props, and put the sound on large auditorium speakers for a full range which were placed behind the viewer and echoed through the storage closet. I can't deny that there was a touch of black humor in the project, painting the iconic "Portland, Oregon" sign fallen among the rubble was as much tongue in cheek as it was serious.

I plan to continue this animation process, perhaps in conjunction with my continued learning process with stop motion and claymation. I also plan to continue the theme of societal collapse and disaster. This theme is a contemporary mythology that echoes cultures across the globe and through time. Everyone on the planet is descended from the 3000-10,000 individual humans that survived the Toba super volcano eruption that happened about 75,000 years ago. Perhaps the memory of that worldwide catastrophe has been imprinted on us. Apocalypse is in our genes.