Divertimento No.3 ‘Brushwork’
Clive Walley, 1992
"I was determined (all by myself!) to save painting from it’s eclipse by TV, cinema and commercial graphics [...] it had to show wet paint still active and open to change on the screen if it was to do this. The problem was obvious, obviously. Stop frame animation, is very stop and go, and yet was the only way to make clear what I meant the paint to do. You can throw it around, (very popular nowadays in slo-mo). You can run it down slopes, [...]but you can’t really make it seem intentional, like paint is under the hand of a painter. For that I had to cut the darling “process” up into little bits and get over it."
Clive Walley in a 2015 interview with Edwin Rostron https://clivewalley.uk/film-work/
The obvious problem Welsh artist Clive Walley mentions is at the heart of understanding how stopmotion animation works, and every first-time filmmaker must face it. Stop motion is not motion at all, after all, but the illusion thereof, a reconstruction of a fragmented movement which must begin with the deconstruction of our perception of that movement. We have to sit down and imagine the effect we want to achieve, and then imagine it again, chopped up into 24 frames per second.
Fluid motion in animation is what impresses, perhaps because achieving fluidity with constant pauses is very difficult. The old joke is that animators get paid by the second, only they may take hours or days to create a single second of footage. How can that be married with the fluid, free motion of a painter working close to the abstract?
We've all seen hypnotising timelapses from digital devices, where the hand and tool are invisible and only the strokes they make remain. To create that effect in traditional media means that instead of simply painting as they normally would, the artist has to pause and consider each mark they make on the canvas as part of a sequence. There was, indeed, a lot for Clive Walley to 'get over'.
His short films put painting first in a remarkably avid attempt to communicate the process to an audience who may have never held a paintbrush.
"[...] I was interested in imaging the process of painting rather than the results, because in much analysis of modern painting process is a key idea. The problem is that people who are not painters have no feeling for what 'process' might contribute to the meaning of a painting, so Brushwork was an attempt to use the extra dimension of time in a moving image to emphasise it."
Clive Walley quoted in Art in Motion, Animation Aesthetics by Maureen Furniss.
The Divertimento series is created in pure stop-motion, with no digital interference or enhancement. Oil paint- a favourite among animators due to how long it remains wet- is applied to panes of glass layered on top of each other, filling with images as the camera zooms out, creating an infinity effect.
Clive Walley's rig, as featured on https://clivewalley.uk/
The 'Brushwork' film starts with an easel that is instantaneously transported onto the rig- to the viewer, it may appear as if they were transported into the artist's subconscious, to ride that nearly imperceptible moment between inspiration and canvas, where the paint seems to apply itself, following an unspoken idea to its visual conclusion.
Finally, the original canvas reappears, and the last brushstroke is wiped clean. We have seen painting happen, yet nothing has been painted. There is no image, no evidence, except the film itself. And though we may not take that final, static frame and hang it on our wall, we may return at will to any point of the animation and relive the process. This is something a completed painting does not allow.
This kind of stop motion created directly under the camera, where each frame is destroyed by the creation of the next and no repetition is possible is sometimes called modified-base animation, as in contrast to cel style animation where many images are drawn and substituted to create the effect of motion, this technique requires a single base image which is modified constantly as shooting progresses.