Artist Initiative Update!

photo by Jaffa Aharonov

In March 2016, I received the MN State Arts Board Artist Initiative grant to fund work on a new animation, tentatively titled “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” a reference to Oppenheimer's (aka the creator of the atom bomb) quoting of the Bhagavad Gita when he saw the first atom bomb test. This work has been a long time coming - I've been making work about living in a nuclear world for many years now, including starting work on what would become the seed of this project in 2012 as an artist-in-residence at the New York Mills Regional Arts Center. What's truly the most exciting for me about this grant is that it allows me to pay the wonderful Kathy McTavish to compose the soundtrack for this piece. I can't even describe in words how excited I am about this. 

I present to you today the first 140 frames of this new batch of work. It's a rough cut - still need to figure out the ins and outs of the new software I'm using (Dragonframe, in case you care), but it's really gratifying to see the images move and take shape. 

My goal is to make a 7 minute animation. This may seem feeble, but that is going to look like approximately 2,500 different paintings, which takes a lot of work. It's taken me the last month to do these 140. So this is no small task. Am I daunted? A little. But I will persevere. Cuz it doesn't paint itself.​ Feel free to send encouragement!

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