Karlskirche

Today we noticed that the Karlskirche dome is actually an elongated elipsoid.

Hens

There's one thing I can do pretty well and it's drawing chickens.
This afternoon I've been gleefully animating them on the brink of death.
Now I think about it there's an exploding chicken in The Emperor, and a throttled chicken in Sawney Beane too. What does it mean?





























There's no need to answer.

Leopoldsberg and another Flugzeug

I'm animating loads of animals on one sheet of Somerset Satin this morning, there are 11 seconds and 8 creatures so far, I've had to stop because the light's a bit hot, I'm running out of red and I havn't decided what to do with them all next. They've all shot off scene left and I've no idea what they were running away from or if they're still going.
No storyboard then.

I'll just go into the kitchen and see if an idea comes..

Here are two pictures from the weekend, one from Leopoldsberg and another of our newest kite flying outside our front door, where it all happens.

Market and Kaisergruft

Robert Breer

We visited the Secession museum to see The Death of the Audience curated by Pierre Bal-Blanc. The exhibition was a little bit mixed but full of beans and in a very good space, we found some Robert Breer pieces dotted around, they took the form of two ordinary looking sponge squares and a golden shiny piece of paper, we discovered that they were moving very slowly around on motorized wheels. On the same vein but from an earlier Breer era was a drawing for a proposed conference centre that roamed around it's site so that the delegates would exit the conference in a different environment.

Wiener Riesenrad

Last weekend we visited the Prater and started with a sedate revolution of the famous Riesenrad.

Electric storm Electric Avenue

Last night there was a dramatic storm in Vienna, it arrived very quickly and there was a lot of rain, it's cleared the air thanks goodness.

Red Riding Hood

I've been animating on the theme of Red Riding Hood and wood cutters, whilst simultaneously listening to this excerpt of Lady Chatterly's Lover read by a freshly showered Dominic West from The Wire. It's very Carte Noire and I feel a bit sheepish for being gullible enough to listen all the way to the end. The Katharine Mansfield story is better.

Woolly but not woolly

There's a great new DVD of Vera Neubauer's work published by Tricky Women. It gives a proper overview of her amazing animated work, which is often made of wool but isn't woolly in the least. The films which span thirty years, are full of subversive surprises and passionate moments, including a truly beautiful fierce and woolly embrace between Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother. Her animate! film Hooked documents her journey through Latin America, knitting and finding women who knit and crochet and also looking for a little doll. It sounded to me like a strange quest, but in Vera's hands it makes a very compelling ten minute film. I've still got two films to watch so I might add some more to this post later (but then again it's awfully hot..)

My experiments

I'm still drawing foxes and now some crows and hens have joined in. I'm warming up slowly, I'm experimenting with the traces that are left behind, I've even been trying out some animated pans and zooms.
Oh yes.

Animators in Wien

On balmy friday night I went out for a drink to Top Kino with Maya and Daniel Suljic, a talented animator who lives here in Vienna. It was really nice to talk about the animation, paper, ink, and festivals. Daniel uses oil on glass and also improvises within his shots, for his film The Cake he even worked with another animator, taking half the shot each, which is a uniquely dynamic way of working, especially since his characters in that film are often in conflict. Fantastic stuff.

MAK

My pact worked, because it was so rainy we spent the day in the Museum for Applied Arts, it was full of treasure and we had a good lunch too.

...Bathed in sweat, Elizabeth awoke. In desperation she cried aloud: "I must be cool in Vienna tomorrow, even if the devil makes me!""














I've sold my soul and at last there's some sweet relief from the heat.
(sorry English guys in the pissing rain)

Old friends

I've put the lucky bathroom tile to one side and I'm doing some experiments with somerset satin and watercolours. The Old Man was just blue ink and so it's good to be back to full colour.

St Stephen's Cathedral, Vienna

...Bathed in sweat, the knight awoke. In desperation he cried aloud: "I must be in Vienna tomorrow, even if the devil takes me!"
Instantly the Evil One, astride a feathered mount, appeared and spoke: "This rooster will carry us to Vienna, but in return I must have your soul!"













(I'm not sure that a rooster would be able to fly all the way from Constantinople to Vienna?)

Family life and work

I've been lucky enough to have had a few residencies before but never with a family. I would argue that it's more productive to have the whole family here than not, because pining and moping takes up a whole lot of time. We usually use the day for exploring and then it's bed at 6.30 (we have to work hard to block out the balmy evening and the sound of Austrian children having fun outside) a large coffee and we get on with some work at either end of the very long studio. Last night I managed to animate ten whole seconds, they were slightly sloppy whole seconds but if it moves I'm counting it. I hav'nt exactly nailed down an idea yet, so my tactic is to keep my squirrel hair brush busy and something will come along. Anyone else employ this method?

All around in my city

I was on my own with the children for a few days, we were merrily occupied playing Top Gear Top Trumps, going to the swings and seeing how many kugels of ice cream we could order to go on one cornetto. We bought a new book for the evenings Rundherum in meiner Stadt by Ali Mitgutsch from 1968, which is splendid because it depicts scenes of children playing in snow and parks and in the street but also (without being sinister) shows people fighting, being angry, drinking and being lecherous too. Although obviously to a lesser degree!


















I wonder if Hazel has got this one?

Cardinal and Nun

Yesterday we saw an exhibition of Egon Schiele's work at the Leopold Museum. This Cardinal and Nun enjoying an illicit moment was so startling: the pyramid of red and their praying hands and the nun being so like the background. I confess I havn't even thought once about Schiele since my A levels, which is a long time ago and which is lazy.

A lucky meeting

This afternoon the air was full of thunder and it was wet, so instead of walking around slowly I sprinted and even jumped over a few puddles. Coming back through Electric Avenue in the Quartier 21 I saw a small installation. Lots of little drawings and a monitor. It was a very beautiful animation by Maya Yonesho called Daumenreise, I think it was number 6: Kyoto Mix. She had made plenty of small drawings which were filmed one by one in the centre of the frame of a journey from a to b or east to west. Just as I was leaving I noticed that she was sitting there near the work, so I was able to talk to her. She showed me some of the highlights of her Vienna Daumenreise and I shall make it my business to seek some of them out, especially the cake with lots of layers including chocolate and cherry. Maya is also here until August so I look forward to chatting again.

Revving up

My watercolours have been dusty for almost ten months, so I have a job getting my animating brain and arm working again. I've been trying to draw anything that I can see, george and poppy, trams, half waffles (see below), buildings, other people on their way and anything I can think of: wild boars, foxes, dead people.

On the exploring front we have had a helping hand from two very kind Vienna residents, and so now we know where the market is and how to enjoy a Viennese coffee. I've been to MUMOK to see a Cy Twombly exhibition, and we have visited the Danube. Here is the view out of our window, we are right in the middle of everything.

We've arrived!

Here is our very good looking home and studio in the Museusmquartier where we will be doing the artist's residency for two months (thanks to Tricky Women). It's as humid as Shanghai so we are slow as snails. Yesterday we went on a tram and had an ice cream and I did some origami.

Don's mum must be proud.

Don Hertzfeldt's event took place last night and was good and it really was busy. How in sweet jesus does he do that? When I think of other really good animators I think it would be hard to fill Cinema 1 in the Curzon. I think it might be because his work shines out on the internet, he has a very clear graphic style and the writing is really funny and a little bit dark, plus it works if you watch ten seconds of it, and holds up over 70 minutes too. He did say in the Q&A that he wasn't especially into people watching the films on the web and it's well-known that he works on film because he prefers to present it in a theatrical setting but I think the cinema was full of people who had got into the work online.

Anyway, one of my favourite moments in his new film I'm so proud of you, was when Bill was standing at a bus stop and a man operating a leaf blower comes by. He lingers for a long time blowing a leaf that's stuck on the pavement, and the blower is quite noisy and knowing what we know about Bill's fragile state of mind, it becomes unbearable tense but funny all at once. Don did talk about those kinds of moments in his films taking a long time to get right and eventually being down to a few frames here and there. It was evident that he really relished the making of the films and that he was doing just exactly what he wanted with his life. Hooray to that!
Here's a blurry picture:

The lights are on...

The studio is mine once more! I don't get to work in there yet but having a little space of my own brings much joy and sanity. Presently I'm gathering up my best squirrel hair brushes and bubble wrapping the lucky tile that I used in The Old, Old, Very Old Man because we are all getting ready to go to Vienna for two months to do the Tricky Women residency that the film won in 2008. It's very exciting. I'll be updating my blog from the studio there.

Thinking big - almost as big as Bill Brand's Masstransiscope

A really lovely artist called Emily Tracy lives nearby and one day we hope to make something big and splendid together. Musing on the possibilities and after a bit of to and fro and help from a friend we managed to come up with what we thought was a perfect and original concept. We would make an enormous stationary zoetrope that became animated when one travelled past on a train, we even found the perfect spot just coming out of Liverpool Street.. but then we found Bill Brand's Masstransiscope.

























It's good isn't it? Maybe Liverpool Street could still do with a Masstransiscope..

Don Hertzfeldt's Bitter Films















The extraordinarily popular Don Hertzfeldt is coming to London as part of a 20 city worldwide sold-out tour. Wow that's truly something for an animator. Wendy and I have got tickets to go to the Curzon Soho at the end of this month. I think I posted about his bitter films blog a few years ago, I really enjoy reading his lower cap musings, it seems like he's always busy on an animation day and night, infact he's only ever worked as an animator, and that is hard work. This image from his film 'rejected' always makes me laugh through my nose straight away.

Mentoring

I'm mentoring an animator/graphic artist called Magda Boreysza. She's doing her MA at the Screen Academy in Edinburgh. As you can see from her blog Fox and Comet working with her gives me a lot to think about, she publishes her own zines (Toasty Cats) with eerie, intricate but also funny drawings in them, she also illustrates, animates and is starting to think about printmaking too. I'm looking forward to seeing what she gets up to when she graduates this year.

Thoughts about Clay


















This weekend is Animate the World again at the Barbican Centre. I'm going to be leading workshops in clay, the handling and modelling of which doesn't come naturally to me, so I've been working hard to get to grips with it.
Below is 'Fun in a Bakery Shop', the first clay animation, made by Edwin S. Porter in 1902.







I've been looking at Mio Mao by Francesco Misseri which was first made in 1979 and has been revivied and continued by the Misseri Studios, it can be seen on Milkshake on Channel 5 and Youtube. I hadn't realised that Misseri also worked in paper (QuaqQuao) and sand (A.E.I.O.U) with similarly elegant results. The work is extraordinarily skilled and of course looks effortless, never becoming crumpled and jaded. This is not something that can be said about my work(!) but I can very much relate to his fluid approach to the animation which has the feel of a recording of an encounter between person and the material with nothing else remaining.



I also came across The Amazing Mr Bickford, a video for Frank Zappa by Bruce Bickford in 1987. I managed to see an excerpt and pretty amazing it looks too. I'd very much like to see more and I'll hunt around for a DVD of it. I'd like to lean towards showing films using metamorphosis, to try and provide a tiny counterpoint to the Wallace and Gromit effect.

Print Triennial in Finland

This is a sneak preview of a printmaking project that I have been working on with three other artists. All four of us work were at one time European Pepinieres printmakers- in-residence at the Jyväskylän Graffiikan Paja in Finland. Anna Ruth has organised a lovely project in which we are all starting a small edition and sending one to each artist and so on, until everyone has intervened on each print, The twelve prints will be shown for the first time at the print triennial in Jyväskylä in June 2009.













This is a butterfly print that I made on Joy Gerrard's first image. It has gone to Anna Ruth in Finland and will visit Veronique La Perriere in Canada. I wonder what it will look like when it flies home to Finland again?