Michael Burton

Sometime in the mid 1980's, when I was about eight or nine, I was in my parent's sunroom

with the family's Super Eight camera trying to make a stop motion animation of my He-Man figures

and their castle. The camera was positioned precariously on a tabletop tripod when it fell over and

broke. I didn't make another stop motion animation for twenty-two years.

I didn't get in any trouble. I just became interested in other things like painting. Whether

with paint or with camera I wanted to create places like those I had imagined while playing as a

child. As I grew these places became an escape from the typical drama of a young teen. However,

as I matured, I found painting was still a way for me to feel transported.

I want people to feel transported when they see my work. I hope they understand the

work to be a portal to my imagination. There they might see idiosyncratic situations, current

events or ideas about the human condition in the surreal context of moving paint. My work is

about seeing things in a different way.

The places I paint are imagined or derived from photos, memory, and the Internet. I take

this visual information and change it to suit my needs. The process of painting and image collecting

is a way to generate narratives. Through this exploration I have rediscovered my love for making

short animations.

I use a stop motion process I call Paintamation for animating. In this process scenes and

sequences are created by painting on a surface, a digital photo is taken, an adjustment is made to the

painting and another photo is taken. After several thousand images are shot, edited, and sound is

added, the Paintamation is completed.

Similar to when I was a kid, my narratives continually evolve as a stream of consciousness.

The narratives are loosely storyboarded and develop through a sort of call and response approach.

The result unfolds through the process of painting, editing and generally living with the work for

three months to a year.