Project 8 WilliamKentridge

William Kentridge

Anything is possible

            William Kentridge was a Jewish South African painter.  His work was very different when compared to other artist.  Not only because he turns his art into animations, but the amount of time he puts into making a short clip is very long.   This is because William decides to draw one scene then erase or alter it for the next scene.  This process takes hours upon hours to create the final animation, but William is always satisfied with the outcomes.

His choice in materials is also very simple, but the amount of scenes he creates is what makes his work stand out.  In most of his drawings he uses charcoal with the exception of a few colored pastels here and there.  He makes most of the scenery in his drawings very dull or black then adds just a touch of maybe blue or red to add a little color. 

            


          To make his animations a little more interesting William Kentridge puts music into his animations that we see in the Art 21 Film.  He chooses opera in many cases or just a classical piano playing through out his animations.  He states that u can get lost in the music with internal conflicts and other “ terrors of Hierarchy”.  I actually like his style of work because it is very original and knowing how much time was put behind each animation amazes me. 
         One of his pieces that i did enjoy was the animation of the lady that gets blown away.  To create this affect William added wind and recorded the circular motion it moved paper on his work bench.  Then he drew the animation in charcoal adding this wind affect resulting in the figure of the animation to seem like she was blown away into leaves by the wind.
        The only thing I have a problem with is that you can't really hang his artwork up because he put them into animations.  Yea you could put one of his scenes up on the wall, but whats the good of making an animation.  It just seems way too time consuming and not worth the outcome. However, watching the time and effort he puts into each animation makes me respect him because its not easy to be that patient with good results every time.