There is something I have been thinking about lately, something that is both personal and, perhaps, symptomatic of the way we look at images today.
I sometimes feel that the language I have chosen to dedicate my life to — drawing, painting, the handmade image, the slow construction of an artwork — is increasingly overlooked in favour of images that are immediate, photographic, moving and easily consumed.
I notice it even in the most intimate places.
A simple selfie of mine can receive more attention on social media than an elaborated self-portrait: an image in which I have tried to translate something psychological, symbolic or existential, an image that has taken time to conceive, draw and construct.
The selfie is immediately readable.
The self-portrait asks for a moment of attention.
Perhaps this is part of the problem.
We live surrounded by images, but we are not necessarily surrounded by looking.
The selfie and the self-portrait
I don’t consider the selfie an enemy of art. Photography has its own extraordinary history, and the photographic self-portrait can be a profound artistic language.
What interests me is something else: the different kind of attention that images seem to receive.
A photograph of a face is immediately accessible. It resembles the world we already know.
A drawn face, however, is not simply an image of someone.
It is a record of a relationship between the artist and the subject.
Every line contains a decision.
Every alteration of proportion, every erasure, every hesitation, every exaggeration becomes part of the meaning.
When I draw a self-portrait, I am not simply asking:
“What do I look like?”
I am asking:
“What does it feel like to inhabit this body, this face, this moment?”
For me, the self-portrait has always been closer to a form of visual journaling than to vanity.
It is a way of looking inward through the act of looking outward.
And perhaps this is why I sometimes find it strange that the apparently spontaneous image can attract more attention than the image into which an artist has poured hours of observation, thought and transformation.
The disappearance of the hand
There is another reason why this concerns me.
Photography and digital video can make the making of an image almost invisible.
We see the final result, but not necessarily the physical and mental process that produced it.
With drawing, the hand remains visible.
The line tells us that someone was there.
Painting reveals its own construction: the accumulation of gestures, layers, corrections, colours, textures.
Even when the surface appears simple, the history of its making is embedded within it.
Perhaps this is one reason why I continue to be so attached to painting.
For me, painting is not simply a technique.
It is a way of thinking through matter.
And I have gradually realised that I don’t necessarily stop painting when I stop using paint.
I can paint with thread.
I can paint with fabric.
I can paint with paper.
I can paint through embroidery.
I can even paint with three-dimensional forms.
My fiber sculptures, for example, can be understood as a kind of painting that has left the surface of the canvas and entered space.
The image becomes volume.
The line becomes thread.
The colour becomes material.
The canvas becomes an entire body.
This is why I don’t see my different practices as separate worlds.
They are different manifestations of the same impulse: to construct an image.
Why animation feels so natural to me
Perhaps this is also why I am much more attracted to animation than to conventional video.
The distinction is important to me.
When I make animation, I don’t simply record movement.
I construct movement.
I draw it.
I imagine it.
I alter it.
I repeat it.
I transform one frame into another.
I make something move that did not exist before.
In this sense, animation feels to me like an extension of painting rather than a departure from it.
A film camera records reality unfolding in front of it.
Animation can create a reality that never existed.
Every frame can become a brushstroke.
Every transition can become a transformation of form.
The movement itself can be painted.
This is why, even when I work from video, I often feel the need to transform the footage until the original image becomes almost unrecognisable — until it passes through my visual language and becomes something else.
And yet, when I can choose, I prefer to draw the movement from the beginning, frame by frame.
It is an incredibly slow process.
And perhaps precisely because it is slow, it is increasingly meaningful to me.
The invisible labour of animation
One of the things that saddens me is how easily the labour behind animation can disappear.
A few seconds of animation can represent hours, days or weeks of work.
A movement that appears effortless on screen may have required hundreds of individual drawings, corrections, tests and decisions.
The viewer sees:
movement.
The animator sees:
all the images that had to exist in order for that movement to become possible.
This is particularly true when animation is handmade or created frame by frame.
The final image hides the labour that produced it.
Perhaps this is one of the paradoxes of animation: the more fluid the movement appears, the more invisible the work behind it can become.
Why do so many visual artists choose video?
I sometimes wonder about the contemporary art world’s preference for video over animation.
Of course, video has extraordinary possibilities. It can document performance, time, bodies, environments and real events. It can create complex narratives and immersive experiences.
But I find it interesting that artists who originally trained in painting or other traditional visual disciplines so often turn toward video while animation remains comparatively less common within contemporary visual art.
Perhaps video has become a more accepted contemporary language.
It is immediately associated with time, technology, moving image and contemporary practice.
Animation, on the other hand, is still too often placed into categories such as illustration, cinema, children’s entertainment or commercial production.
And yet animation can be deeply conceptual, experimental and painterly.
It can question perception, memory, identity, embodiment and reality just as profoundly as any other artistic medium.
For me, animation is not an escape from painting.
It is painting liberated from the static frame.
Painting does not have to remain still
This may ultimately be what I am trying to understand in my own practice.
I don’t want to abandon painting in order to move into the contemporary language of moving images.
I want to take painting with me.
I want to see what happens when a painted image moves.
What happens when a drawing breathes.
When a thread becomes a line and the line begins to transform.
When a sculpture becomes a painting in space.
When colour becomes movement.
When one frame becomes another through a process that resembles metamorphosis.
This is perhaps why the concept of transformation has remained so important throughout my work.
I am not interested in changing medium simply for the sake of changing medium.
I am interested in discovering what the same artistic thought becomes when its material body changes.
Slow images in a fast world
Perhaps what I am mourning is not simply the fact that drawing receives less attention than photography, or animation less attention than video.
Perhaps I am mourning the loss of patience.
We have become accustomed to images that arrive immediately.
Swipe.
Look.
React.
Move on.
But drawing asks us to stay.
Painting asks us to stay.
Animation, especially frame-by-frame animation, asks both the artist and the viewer to understand that movement is made from stillness.
One image.
Then another.
Then another.
A sequence of small differences becomes life.
There is something profoundly human in this.
Because perhaps this is how transformation actually happens.
Not all at once.
But through innumerable almost invisible changes.
I still choose the painted image
So I don’t want to stop painting.
I don’t want to make my work more photographic simply because photography is easier to recognise.
I don’t want to make a video simply because moving images are more immediately accessible.
And I don’t want to abandon the slowness of drawing because a quick image receives more attention.
I want to continue following the language that feels truthful to me.
Sometimes that language is paint.
Sometimes it is pencil.
Sometimes it is thread.
Sometimes it is fabric, paper or sculpture.
Sometimes it becomes animation.
But underneath all of them, there is still the same impulse:
to make an image with my own hands, to transform what I see into what I imagine, and to give visible form to something that did not exist before.
Perhaps this is what painting means to me now.
Not necessarily a canvas.
Not necessarily a brush.
But an act of transformation.
A way of thinking through the hand.
And perhaps, in a world increasingly fascinated by images that are instant, photographic and endlessly reproducible, there is still something quietly radical about making an image slowly.
Frame by frame.
Stitch by stitch.
Line by line.
Layer by layer.
Until the image begins to breathe.
And perhaps, after all, painting has never really disappeared. It has simply learned how to move.