The Making of Flux
My interest to make moving images came from watching films as a child, especially the Canadian animated films. In 1978 at art school I took part in a film making workshop using the simple process of drawing and redrawing on a single sheet of thick paper with several students. This led me to interpret a piece of choral music by Bach with over 4,000 drawings and paintings.
Being awarded the Dobell Prize for Drawing in 2007 allowed to me to focus full time on a series of drawings based on the river and oyster farms where I lived. I had studied Chinese calligraphy and wanted to distill an essence of it with my drawing of water. But to expand the dynamics of line which fascinated me in Chinese calligraphy I decided to return to film in 2009.
I began studies for Flux with charcoal on paper. This resulted in both camera and computer quickly being covered in charcoal dust. I switched to oil, trialling bits of found objects, bristle and fur brushes, rubber balls and thongs to make a range of textures. The first year involved learning about computers and trialling mediums and ideas. The second year was taken with drawing and editing more than a thousand images.
A typical Flux day involved working in a dark, spot lit studio – very disconnected from the outside world. Each drawing was photographed on a stills camera, automatically stored on computer then edited into a moving sequence on a computer.
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