Creating in Covid

Well, lots of free time for folks in the arts right now! So I’ve used the time to finish Henry, the stop motion film created by Elizabeth. It's about 15 minutes long, and it has taken eight years(!) from idea to completion.

Here's one of Elizabeth's very first test shots of Henry from 2012.

We are going to try to get it into a couple of film festivals before we release it on the internet. We're totally green at the festival thing, but figure we've got nothing to lose. After that we'll release it on the internet.

Elizabeth built all the puppets and sets, and did a lot of the shooting outdoors, which created some lighting/movement issues, but looks amazing. We can't wait for you to see it!

Shooting outside, 2018.

Comments

Making Fun

Funny : 1. intended to arouse laughter or amusement 2. suspiciously odd or curious I’ve made pictures since early childhood, and from the very beginning I delighted in making fun of everything. Premature exposure to Monty Python and the Holy Grail certainly nurtured the impulse. I tried so hard to be serious, but nature would out. In art school I did my best to be brooding and dark. Art history taught me that mankind’s greatest painting pretty much boiled down to two things: 1. Earnest religious scenes 2. Modern existential randomness. Painting was supposed to be deadly serious. Especially modern art - so VERY serious - but who wants to look at it, really? Of course there are geniuses that stand out and whose work I love, but as a whole, ugh. It’s cathartic (or profitable) for the artist, but man, so grim. When I graduated, my angst-y paintings had kind of run their course. There were only so many naked, monolithic, tortured, monochromatic men that one guy

Stop Motion

Animation : To fill with life. It is abundantly clear in my stop motion work that I have no formal training in animation. I come to stop motion by way of live puppetry, years and years of physically moving handmade figures of various sizes and kinds through actual (usually cramped) physical space. I can't physically handle the big puppets anymore but stop motion has become a happy alternative. In the late 70's when I began, puppetry was a very small niche on the sidelines of live theater and early television; I've enjoyed watching as the form has shifted and changed, becoming part of the visual vocabulary of the culture. I admire and appreciate the work of artists like Nick Park, Wes Anderson, and Tim Burton, and I look forward to each new film as it appears after years of painstaking work on the part of hundreds of amazing, artists, editors, and animators. The films they create, with their flawless natural movement and perfect miniature worlds, is astonishin

Words on the Page

Read : To examine or grasp the meaning of. Recently a friend asked us (to settle a bet) how many books we have in the house. A quick, rough count brought us to approximately 1200. That figure doesn't tell the whole story. I'm known at the library for wearing out my card. We don't buy a book and put it on the shelf here until we've already read it and know that we either want to share it, reference it, or read it again; the books on our shelves are well-worn and seldom gather dust. Reading is ubiquitous in the life of our family; we read alone and together, silently and aloud, on the porch, at lunch, in bed. It's not unusual for us to spend an evening in the living room working on various projects while one of us reads out loud. One of our boys used to take a book and a chair out to the coop and read with the chickens and the ducks in the run. For me, reading and writing are closely related. I'm a reader who writes; those two activities have si

Living Life With Art

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