Fine Art animation now

The Oriel Davies Gallery in Cardiff has been hosting a series of exhibitions and events to celebrate contemporary animation as being at the forefront of artistic and creative innovation. The gallery is showcasing a wide range of approaches to what is essentially moving drawing and after coming back from Berlin after seeing the large William Kentridge exhibition, I do feel that animation is one of today's key areas of drawing practice. Parts & Labour, which is part of Move It, explores animation as something that is ‘made’ – whether physically, digitally, or both. The introduction of the animated gif allows any simple set of images to be inserted into places where previously you would have put a still photographic image. Gifs allow you to use very little computer memory to animate a series of stills, this means you can drop these animations into a wide range of other programs. This trick when working with them is to think about circular visual narratives.

Dave Peel: Ice-cream

Dave Peel is an ex LCA student who went to Goldsmiths and he is making some very interesting animated gifs.

Dave Peel: animated gif

What Dave is doing is tapping into a very different aesthetic to the one we normally associate with drawing. His work is really an extension of collage, everything now of course generated directly on a computer, scissors and cut paper, now a distant ancestor. 

Of course you don't need new technology to make animation work. William Kentridge is a wonderful example of an artist using traditional drawing techniques to create animations. 

William Kentridge

Francis Alys has used traditional animation techniques to reflect on the interrelationships between rich and poor in modern city life. 

Francis Alys

Len Lye

There is a long history of fine artists using animation to get their ideas across, perhaps the most well known early pioneer was Len Lye. 

Mark Leckey

Mark Leckey was a recent Turner Prize winner with 'Made in heaven' a 3D animated recreation of a work by Jeff Koons.  Leckey uses his own room as a background for the animation, suggesting that the public profile of this very famous and very expensive work has been made very private, but then of course it is sent back out into public exhibition again. The work suggests that nothing is actually private, the reflective surfaces of Koons work perhaps acting as some sort of surveillance, in this case giving us 360 degree views of Leckey's flat.  

Some other artists using a range of animation techniques that you might find interesting.

Inger Lise Hansen House An animation of still images, exploring the breakdown of a house.

David Theobald Walking Holiday inGrindewald, An interesting take on the relationship between still life and landscape imagery, plus a range of his approaches to different genres and stereotypes.

Jordan Baseman Nasty Piece of Stuff, a speeded up photomontage, expressing the speed and energy of the city.

Katie Goodwin In Between Inception Animated images made from cuttings made from waste found footage from the 'cutting room floor' of Christopher Nolan's ‘Inception’. A more conceptual piece that references abstract animation and the process of film making itself.

Chris Shepherd World Stare OutCompetition, A drawn animation playing with the conventions of the genre. In this case the lack of animation reflects the fact that the protagonists are meant to remain still.

Lois Rowe and Patrick Rowan Filter, A montage and complex cutting sequence that reflects upon the repetitive nature of factory work in Asia.

Tadasu Takamine God Bless America, Traditional ‘claymation’ animation techniques laid over live footage to create a disorientated, disjointed commentary on the US.

James Lowne Our Relationships WillBecome Radiant, A meditation on nature using crude 3D animation techniques.

Jan Švankmajer is always worth looking at. Faust, Alice, Flora, and Food.

And everyone should be aware of the Quay Brothers. Švankmajer and the Quay Brothers carry on the Surrealist tradition into animation.
The easy accessibility and use of 3D modelling software and other computer based tools means that more and more artists are turning to this area to output their work and as drawing students working in the 21st century, you ought to consider the possibilities this area of work offers. 

Perhaps the real issue about using animation is the fact that the images move. We are hard wired to take an interest in movement, just watch how a very young baby can be captivated by an animation sequence. I have used very basic animation techniques myself to make animated gifs, and these have allowed me to deal with condensed allegorical narratives, in this case the stupidity of shifting your own mess onto others, they will just throw it straight back at you.

The boundaries between different types of practice are constantly shifting and Rachel Goodyear, an artist who made her reputation through drawing is now working in animation and performance. See:  
Goodyear uses animation in a variety of ways, sometimes she puts her work into photoframes as in Girl with a bird in her mouth, and at other times she uses back projection.

Rachael Goodyear: Dancing Devils (Back projection)

Animation is not just about how to animate, it is also about the physical presence of the work in the space where it is encountered. It may be projected, on screen, sent to mobile phones, seen on a bank of monitors inserted into an installation or inserted into a cinema pre-main feature slot. Whatever the realisation, it will be as important to test this out as it would be to test out the qualities of the animation itself.

See also:

Earlier post on drawing and film.

Video games as an art form

Computer animation

http://www.moveit.org.uk

http://www.animateprojects.org/films/by_date/2016/pig

https://hinemizushima.com/video-lake-monsters-music-by-they-might-be-giants