Animated portraiture.

In considering ways of animating my portraits, I also searched for other artists who work with the combination of these two elements. One artist whose work distinctly connects animation and film is Jeff Scher. A New-York based film maker, animator and painter, Scher makes vibrant animations by projecting a short section of film, slide by slide onto paper, then colouring in the image. Each slide is done in contrasting styles, creating a hand spun, psychotically vibrant effect.

In 2004 he made an animated portrait of Susan Shin, which appears to have been the start of a series, as more people soon commissioned him to do their own. This, however, was openly influenced by the work of Warhol, with the main difference between it and the ‘screen tests’ being Scher’s further processing of the filmed face into animation. Unlike other animated portraits, Scher’s portrait gives the eerie impression of being a single drawing copied and repeated in contrasting styles and colours over multiple frames which then raises its head before falling back into the same still position. The movement is so natural and fluid that the filmic reference shows through in a similar way that many paintings made from photos have a distinctive look of flatness.



For the last four years, Australian artist Julia Holden has also explored the connection between painting and animation. Through such animations as Muse (above) and Painter she looks at how faces are made up or put on to present to the world. These constitute hundreds of paintings that are recorded with a digital camera before being wiped off the board and another image painted on.

Compared with the number of animated self-portraits in existence, the number of artists whose practice gives a prominent place to the animated portrait of other people appears to be few (21). However, to add to Holden and Scher is the work of Julian Opie. Based on manipulation of his digital paintings, his animated portraits are a direct contrast to theirs. The animations are simple, presented in looping LED displays and generally come in two types. Many consist of figures side on, shown walking, while the rest are generally front-on with either the head or more of the body being depicted and small parts of the picture moving. The sheer number of named portraits produced by Opie could be seen as a community, a mass of beautiful middle-class individuals who are only distinct from each other by the variations in hair or dress.