Deconstructing Animation with Digital by Stephen Tompkins

My new works focus less on actual painting and more on animation and digitally constructed imagery which involve a process of deconstructing numerous drawings and parts of drawings by using digital means. While I’m a huge fan of old school cartoons and appreciate the hand-drawn qualities of using a light-table and I love the intensity and tone and hand-painted colors of Looney Tunes for example, I also think that one nowadays can achieve some interesting effects with current technology. I’m experimenting with a combination of hand-drawn elements that I scan and assemble using digital means and I’m really excited about this direction because it allows me more ways to rapidly alter imagery and color. I feel that most of the work I’ve done over the past years has been a successive lead up to ultimately get my imagery moving as animation. Some of my first animations like ‘Blackout/Memoir Invisible Voyage’ which exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego was an early experiment in a sort of localized stream-of-consciousness trip, a way my work could basically look and unfold in film. It was really just the beginning as far as what I’m aiming at now with the new animation I’m working on. My work will continue to inhabit a very subjective cartoon world or fantasy and the feel will be entirely related to the work I’ve created over the years. For example, my new animated short film involves more of an environment like a traditional cartoon and a loose narrative structure with hallucinogenic characters and formations. The new work ‘Necromancy in the Age of Circuitry’ is a strange title, but it evokes the polarity of flesh versus the proliferation of machines. I’m working at the idea of reviving the emotive aspects of old school cartoons (i.e. the elasticity and zaniness) with a very post-modern hallucinogenic/dreamlike effect.