Rebirth

I really like Basquiat’s skull paintings.As I was looking for inspiration, I found several angles in his skull paintings .So I immediately had the idea of animating them as spinning skulls.

As soon as the idea was established, I collected a lot of Basquiat’s head paintings and studied his primitive and barbaric way of painting. I think Basquiat’s painting style is very expressive, which is also a rejection of traditional art forms.I have to say that getting the smooth rotation of the skull is a very difficult task, at least for me. Because I wanted to imitate Basquiat’s painting style, but also to take into account the different angles of the human skull as it rotates. It took me about two weeks, and I made about 300 pictures on Photoshop with a hand-painted board. I think it’s very difficult to master Basquiat’s style of painting, because it sometimes feels like you’re fiddling or doodling. I sometimes feel the same way when I look at this work.

When I was halfway through the skull, I wanted to get this piece to 2-3 minutes. I wanted to add more elements to express my memory for Basquiat. Since Basquiat died young, I wanted to make the creative point of the whole work rebirth. When people think of rebirth, they think of a story of an object or a person rising up after a setback or failure. As far as I’m concerned, children and jellyfish are things that keep growing. Even if they encounter difficulties and setbacks, they will eventually thrive in a healthy environment. This is in line with the spirit of equality and fraternity advocated by Basquiat, so I continue to depict the growth process of jellyfish and children with Basquiat’s painting style in my work. For example, the process of the human being in the video being transformed from a cell into a human form and falling down is a process of human growth. The most difficult problem in painting is how to make smooth and creative transitions, such as from skull to fish or fish to jellyfish. I inquired a lot of similar animation works and 3D works, and finally determined the current transition mode. That is, the subject matter of the previous act gradually dispersing and converging to form the subject matter of the next act.