Babboo's Moving Pictures
by Noah Saterstrom
"Babboo's Moving Pictures" is a series of animated paintings made while artist-in-residence for Exploded View Microcinema in Tucson, AZ, December 2013. Though the ten paintings are static, each is embedded with painted motions that were captured using a stop animation application. An image is painted, then photographed, a segment painted out and repainted, rephotographed, painted out then repainted, rephotographed and so on, until an action is played out in the single painting. An animated painting may involve eighty such stages. The resulting frames are accompanied by spare sound effects and sequenced as a short animation.
In 2012, I made my first hand-drawn animation, a ten-minute narrative called "Wastrels Find a Home" (forthcoming) with writer Kate Bernheimer. That work was influenced by the cross-over painter/animator work of William Kentridge, and Amy Sillman, and others.
In 2013, during the first few months of my daughter's life, I spent many early mornings watching animations while she slept in my arms. I was especially captivated by the austere but playful modernism of Norman McLaren's Animated Motion shorts from the 1970s. "Babboo's Moving Pictures" is fractured and rhythmic, playing with simple moving vignettes edited into an almost musical composition.
Noah Saterstrom is a visual artist working in painting, drawing, video works, animations, and text/image collaborations. Recent painting exhibitions include Babboo's Moving Pictures (Exploded View, Tucson), Float Me Down the River (Carol Robinson Gallery, New Orleans), Soldiering (with Anne Waldman, UA Poetry Center), Collaborations (Warren Wilson College), Bunny Magic: 100 Works on Paper (Yardmeter Editions, Brooklyn), and Memory[Memory] (Lodginghouse Mission Homeless Shelter, Glasgow, Scotland). Saterstrom posts a new painting or drawing regularly on Noah's Work-a-Day Page and is founder of the online arts journal Trickhouse.
Originally appeared in the online supplement to the Beyond Category issue 43.2 - 44.1