112. Anywhere

How we make art. At borrowed desks, with shoeboxes, beneath flowers. In closing, single gloves.

Animating, like a lot of art-making, can be a lonely affair.

Specialization, preferences, and equipment you think you need to do the work you want to do, accrue with years and experience. Homing in is great, but there’s a danger of it leading to fixation and rigidity. This in turn can lead to complacency, blindness.

I’m paranoid about this, and am trying to be more at ease working away from the comforts of my home.

So when a desk in Brooklyn came up for grabs in a studio with three other artists, it felt timely. It turns out that they’re all animators, and at least two of them teach.

They may also be socialists…

The space is small, warm, and oozes whimsy. Artifacts feel talismanic.

Because we’ve followed each other on social media for a while and NYC’s experimental animation scene is smallish, the space already feels homey. Each person has a wall, and I’m at the back one with the yellow blossom. Work by Amanda Bonaiuto, whom I’m subletting from, linger on the walls like protective charms.

Surrounded by strange art and ephemera, sitting in another artist’s chair, borrowing her equipment under the sun of that flower, I feel infused with magical powers. At least, good vibes.

It’s a treat to work with a real DSLR; I’m tempted to iterate on my home setup again.

Being productive away from home convinces me that I really can animate from anywhere, with as little as a phone and a shoebox:

I recently tried this while at my Mom’s place in California and it worked great.

I may need even less:

Pocket-sized and less conspicuous for cafes or planes.

Final images would need to be reshot with consistent lighting and registration, but to animate, to shoot initial drawings and make sense of movement, I don’t need high fidelity or consistent anything.

Paper sketches

I also keep an updated digital board of sketches for constant access to references:

Digital copies

I had my first full studio day last week.

Two other artists were there that day. After a little chitchat, we each fell into our respective zones. A companionable silence settled, broken only the intermittent joke or snack time (one of them had brought cookies). I drank seltzers from a well-stocked mini-fridge, plucked chocolates from a tiny shelf, warmed tea water in a little microwave that could very well be from the 80’s. A gentle gravity always returned me to my desk in an organic way. Work got done!

It was a dream.

That afternoon I started working on a new sequence. I’ve been chipping away at it since:

It was a good day.

Provisions

Day after the Party. Fun animated short via RCA Animation Films (shuffle mode is rad).

Knight of the Seven Kingdoms on HBO. Yes, I’m a GOT fan. Not everyone’s cup o tea, but definitely my pint of ale.

Five Frames with Annapurna Kumar at Smear Frame Podcast by Sam Gurry of the hilarious 24memespersecond. Fantastic debut episode.

Rachel Cusk reads Marguerite Duras. Two of my favourite writers, together at last.

The Interview: Gisèle Pelicot. The darkness of us is terrifying.

In closing, the single glove

I walk a lot. I love walking, rain or shine, covering 2 to 3 miles a day, 365 days a week. I walk for errands, I walk to think, I walk while I take calls. In the summer, I often walk back to Harlem from the West Village after dinner with friends; that’s about 7 miles.

One peculiarity about walking in Manhattan is the volume of unexpected street detritus. Gloves, in particular. Every walk, I see at least one. The strangest thing is that they are all single gloves. Some are knit, or trimmed with faux-fur. Some are bright red. Some are neoprene, running, or gardening gloves. Some say, be cool, others channel Edward Gorey. There’s the odd mitten mixed in there now and again.

What does this mean?

Does this only happen in New York City?

In Fargo, Season 1, Deputy Molly Solverson tells Lester Nygaard—a man whose lies may be catching up with him—a parable about a single glove:

There was a fella once, running for a train. And he's carrying a pair of gloves, this man. He drops a glove on the platform, but he doesn't notice. And then later on, inside the train, he's sitting by the window and he realizes that he's just got this one glove left. But the train's already started pulling out of the station, right? So what does he do? He opens the window and he drops the other glove onto the platform.

Unlike the fella on the train, these owners probably didn’t realize their loss until much later, when altruism (or just picking the fallen one back up) couldn’t come into play.

Perhaps even more so because of this, I find myself beseiged with questions, wondering about circumstances, owners, the other of the pairs. How something like a glove in winter—which a person presumably dons, one after its other, immediately upon exiting the car, the restaurant, or the train station—could end up, alone, on the sidewalk.

Whatever the backstories, it feels kind of poetic, this aggregation of single lost gloves. In a city where solitude and anonymity are unavoidable, where dining alone is routine, where the kindness of strangers abides, such an accumulation speaks to a kind of togetherness, too.

Until next time.