Where do ideas come from (again)

willow pattern...mount fuji

Sometimes ideas just come, but sometimes you have to rummage about for them. Sometimes I envy people who see a beautiful landscape and paint it because 'wow!', but animation doesn't really work like that....so...I'm looking for a pair of willow-pattern earrings to replace some I lost, and found these worn fragments somewhere in the depths of ebay(?). They were the 'wow!' The story developed from china plates, from the idea that Willow Pattern tells a whole story and represents a whole world with a different culture, time, and geography. Then, as I had failed to plan the story got stuck in scones and cake, (possibly hungry??) So I started thinking about a resolution I had made to try to make art that had some kind of purpose. Not like a teapot, more like a Banksy. All Art as Propaganda. The story developed organically (artspeak for saying I wondered around blundering into ideas and discarding or adapting them on something of a well-informed whim) with ideas about climate change and world destruction. Those came from playing in a samba band associated with Extinction Rebellion, and from living for the past 3 years in the middle of hideous and large-scale roadworks on the M1. This was when the polar bear mugs (not traditional willow pattern) were introduced. The title came last...when I had worked out what the point of it all was...something Id seen on a placard at a demo (There is no) Planet B.
Obviously, I was never cut out to work in an animation house where planning is absolutely vital. But the process, the figuring it out as you go...that's the challenge and the fun part. Although drawing scones is also fun.

New Year Resolution part 2...Pen

Pen -  a tiny animation

Tidying the hard-drive, finding a failed submission for an E4 channel ident...instead of binning it I decided to re-examine, recycle, and start from an existing sequence to see where
the animation would go. Approaching it as I would walking, and increasingly, drawing. Having fun. It went into images of cages, surveillance, midgies and scary birds.





Sometimes you have to let the story tell itself, and not try too hard to impose a meaning, a moral, a reason. They come.

joining too many dots...

In between making glass doodads and mending broken stained glass window panels and building a madly ambitious glass-and-wood sculpture for the garden, and gardening... attempt ludicrously ambitious film ideas and get bogged down for days on end animating waving grasses because I saw some on the clifftops on a walk and thought what fabulous textures, and how they looked like the waves on the sea and how a boat might sail through them...and how that reminded me of an opera I saw based on Where the Wild Things Were, (the night Max wore his wolf suit and sailed out of the bedroom in a wooden dinghy)...and how I could knit a wolf suit, or maybe just a suit, in fact (pause to clear out sideboard and throw out dozens of old video tapes) I could perhaps knit one out of the videotape, (pause to contemplate recycled arts, the politics, the aesthetics, the fun factor of recycling as an art/craft mash-up)...and then thinking how that would disguise the form of the human underneath, perhaps enough to confuse the viewer as to the human's gender...and then reconnect with an older idea about wrapping a human in - something...bandages, paper and string?...so you could try to read it as a human but not as a man or woman... (and simultaneously, neither as black or white)

Miki Z modelling kitchen roll by Lidl

and finally, spending a mad but fun afternoon wrapping a friend in kitchen roll and taking photos for reference for an animation...that will have nothing whatever to do with waving grasses or boats or Rooks that suddenly take off, shouting from a fence post, buried neck-deep in meadow flowers...
and then going in to the new show at Baltic 39 and looking at a collage of a giraffe and thinking how Id like to keep it simple, no frothing textured fronds at all but blocks of joyful colour and sturdy solid lines and a suggestion of tree, grass, bird not a Samuel Palmer etching and then Oh how about a NARRATIVE in all of this and then
...breathe...
just do the drawings and stop trying to join ALL the dots. Some ideas will flow. Others will flow away - let it unfold as it will. Try not to get distracted by all the shiny toys. Try to strike a balance between what is "beautiful" and brings you "joy"/ and what is rich with meaning and brings you questions. And what is fun.

shameful abandonment of blog

Once upon a time, working in France as an au pair, I was worried about not making art for a whole 6 months. Would I still be an artist? Would I forget how to do it? Would the ideas dry up without an outlet and then not flow again, like a dammed stream finding a new course...
Now, without the pressure to produce REF-able outputs and get them listed by a stupidly tight deadline, continuing to produce outputs - or as I like to consider it, to make art - is not slowing down...but the pressure to conform to a particular way of working, reflecting, surrounding the work in a specific language of interpretation and contextualisation is now relaxed. Going back to making art for the sake of it, the joy of it, still finding it the main reason for getting out of bed in the morning, not tied to a timetable or agenda; the only difference is I feel more free to experiment. BUT - I don't feel compelled to write up the experiments.

hills...gardening...shed...inspiration...linoprint

On the other hand, writing up is the reflective process that ensures we that learn something from those experiments and identify a useful place to explore and experiment next...rather than wandering self-indulgently in ever-decreasing blobby circles.
SO - why have I shamefully abandoned this blog? Because the garden needs me, to dig and weed and help it grow radish, spinach and courgettes. (developing muscles, the joy of tiredness caused by digging up and planting) Because the hills need me, to appreciate their beauty and peacefulness, (the joy of quietness, beauty, challenging gradients), because I did some commissions (stained glass, picture book, illustrations) and because actually making art is the most fun you can have, most of the time. So, I am trying to get a balance between physical exercise , thinking, creating and finding time for socialising, collaborating, learning.. Lord, Im even thinking of taking up running. So many ways to be happy...busy...so little time... So - apologies to my Reader for abandoning you, and to my academic hind-brain for leaving you to reflect by yourself. I will try harder.

Between

Somewhere in the borderlands between farting about, playing, creative play and robust experimentation...somewhere in that liminal space which exists between worlds, and beyond the relentless call of emails, messages, and ooh I wonder if anyone has fitbits on special offer right now...
Somewhere in the space we desperately hope is neither this nor that, and so uniquely able to observe and learn from both the thisses and the thats...
Somewhere between serious artistic endeavour I hope will result in a useful product, and the joys and frustrations of the process for its own sake... between the joy of freeedom and the self-censorship that tuts "you are just wasting time"...seems to be where I live right now. Computing colleagues used to speak of "creeping featurism" - of the phenomenon of digital things never being finished because they were to easy to endlessly reproduce, tweak, to create different versions ... Self-imposed deadlines help, because shortness of time lessens the fart-about factor - correspondingly then, there is a danger that more time to invest in the art process simply results in more Faffing.
Currently, I am running 3 projects with a curious hierarchy. Animation with a capital A is an experiment in an animation driven not by narrative but by purely visual developments, events following other events on the basis of morphing shapes and what they suggest. Im counting the ways that could go wrong. Narrative is so fundamental, not just to my work but to human interpretation. Plus, new software which works differently, has to be re-learnt and is much less forgiving...Thanks for reminding me why my daily artwork environment is full of obsolescent and unsupported antiquities, at least a decade out of date but still my go-to tools like an ancient and almost hairless paintbrush that is perfect for scrubbing in texture...
Making animations with a lower-case a is a series of weekly animations for posting on social media. It's not self-consciously art, it's entertainment... into which I suppose friends and friends-of can read meaningfulness - or not.
The third which is perhaps art, or perhaps craft, but chiefly Fun with a capital F is not animation at all but making jolly things which will have some kind of a life, actually be seen and bring (in some tiny way) happiness to those who engage with them. A pair of wings for a costume hat, some glass bunting for the front window which the neighbours have remarked on, photoshopping...for so many occasions.

moving between liminalities via a Foucauldian lacuna

Sometimes the three can overlap...sometimes the fun leaks out and into other things... and the ideas can jump from one to another, if we do not allow ourselves to put fences round them, but let the borderlands overlap and cross-pollinate.

 I'm thinking I will make a map of these borderlands, of the areas where quicksands and bogs threaten the unwary, of the mountains that offer the best view on a clear day, and the citycentres full of excitement, diversion; and the chance to compare notes with other travellers over a pint or two of creative metaphor. Of paths less travelled by, of where be dragons, and where best to start your recherche for temps perdu. Although perhaps the point is that liminal spaces cannot be mapped - but that's no reason not to try.

Animation as a social activity

Part 4 of shakespearean woman - Lady Macbeth on the analyst's couch - has won a wee prize at the Shakespeare Film Festival, Yay! Hopefully I will be down in Stratford for the shortshorts night...And the Nice People at Out in the Garden have recorded another voicetrack for part 6 which is now complete. Whither next? Oh, well experiments in new "theme tunes" are being conducted with friend and colleague Mike Kirkup; new "Elizabethan style" music on guitar and harpsichord (did they HAVE harpsichords in Elizabethan times?)...and also some incidental music of the old cinema school; a possible model for many future shorts. And the NP@OITG are considering the possibility of devising new stories for short shorts collaboratively, improvising screenplays instead of plays. Suddenly animation has become a very social activity. ...which means it all takes longer.



Meanwhile, I have been playing about with stained glass and driftwood, and making things. (possibly badgers) This has also involved walking on the beach. Is it art? is it craft? is it important? Well it's fun, and as I recall from the Sculpture School graffiti of the late 70s "Art can be Fun. Fun can be Art". And it provides achievable (with some language and personal injury) challenges. Plus getting feedback is nice. and making things can be a social activity.

After artschool, after various group studios and the PhD forum (Northumbria) and the late lamented School of Arts & Media (Teesside), there needs to be a new art community...but this is not always easy to find. Will they want me - am I cool enough (should I have a handbag made of an old Dulux tin? are my earrings making a statement?) Is this a scary clique who regard me as competition - or is that all in my head? How do I get beyond smalltalk and make meaningful connections? Exploring the spaces between disciplines, and the overlaps, remembering to look for creative energy everywhere...and Its just possible I have re-acquired a community of practice.

Comix!

The next big adventure came rather sooner than I planned - the adaptation of one of the tiny Shakespeare animations into a comic. The whole story.

 Interesting how you can get away with a certain amount of disconnect in an animation - two parallel strands of story that you switch between...even in a very short short; but that this immediately becomes confusing in a comic strip. You almost feel as though you want to put dirty great arrows on to say - look this bit follows this line of thought. Then you realise a more grown-up way to do this would be by mirroring some aspects of the visual. Pose, face...easy(?) when you can cut and paste. And then you are forcibly reminded that whilst in a storyboard every frame is exactly the same size and aspect ratio, that is a VERY dull way to compose a cartoon strip. But...those are the drawings you have to work with.
Actually, strip cartoons and old fashioned comics often use a standard size/shape, but have Batman Marvel forever spoilt that by leading us to expect dynamic, different-sized, non-rectangular...? Ooh wait, this goes with my earlier ideas about changing sizes and shapes of screen in a movie...There's probably a really nice piece of software that helps with the creation, measuring, balancing of different frames; but I probably wouldn't use it!
So now I get to re-read my favourite comic books, Fun Home (Alison Bechdel) and Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi), plus anything by Scott McCloud - this time looking at the shape of the boxes. And so many different ways to explore this particular range of adaptation...

it's that time again...

Happy Christmas... I always make my own cards, and I always make a christmas animation. why? because it's FUN. Because home-made gifts are the best in almost every case; they come with more love, more thought, and an investment of time which is most of my friends' most precious commodity. Mine too.
12 days of Christmas from Fin McMorran on Vimeo.