I grew up on animated cartoons – my favourite was Crusader Rabbit and Rags the Tiger.

I thought I wanted to be an animator, working for an animation company making cartoons. But then I went to art school and discovered painting and sculpture. No comparison. Instead of being a cog in a factory it was possible to just follow your dream and create your own vision. All right, the paintings I was making didn’t move, but that was a small price to pay for the enormous freedom you had working in your own studio.

unity, diversity, sculpture, Randy Klein

Coincidentia oppositorum

Now, many years later, I am still fascinated by movement, and people often say that my sculptures are full of movement.

Even the static process of making a painting has a time based element in it. In one sense, a painting is nothing more than the record of all of the brushmarks made over time. Judge for yourself in this time lapse of a painting being created.

BrenchleyAnd then, after creating this little animation of the painting process, I continued thinking about movement, both going slow and fast, and put together a little film called ‘Going Slow’.

A while ago I came across ‘The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa while away on holiday. It was inspiring me to make some drawings, and all I had with me was my iPad. So I started to sketch on the pad. The phrase which started me drawing was the following –

‘The only reality is each man’s soul and everything – the exterior world and other people – is but an anaesthetic nightmare, like the result, in dreams, of a mental indigestion”. As I was drawing, I noticed that the app I was using was recording everything I drew. Eh voila! There was an animation. I then noticed that the iPad had an app called GarageBand on it – and I wrote some music to go with. I was sketching in film.

Interesting, I thought. So eventually I began to work film into my working process. Often I take photos to use as starting points for sketches and paintings. Now I used cine footage just as often. And whereas I still use a sketchbook, I find that the iPad offers the additional possibility, of breaking the drawing down and making it move in time.

shower, nude, naked, Randy Klein, animation, drawing

Taking Turns in the Shower

While in Italy this summer, I asked my wife Jenny to take some pictures of me while I was showering. And then I did the same while she was showering. A series of about 25 watercolour sketches followed. Then an equally long series of iPad drawings. The result was combined into a film, with a new soundtrack. It all seemed to add up to a very evocative feeling of taking a shower, on a very hot day after the beach. And here is the result, ‘Taking Turns in the Shower”.

A Film Sketchbook Part 1