The Motions process

Thirty seconds in which the man in the green suit is built alone on white, and the room behind him is tried in four colours before it settles.

The last frame of The Motions time-lapse: the finished painting as the film leaves it — What the film shows

A silent time-lapse, thirty seconds. It opens on the finished painting, then cuts back to a bare white page. A head and a mass of hair arrive first, floating with nothing under them, then the body beneath as a dark shape crossed by a single long diagonal line. The green suit is blocked in flat and refined over the next third, the raised hand and the cigarette among the last details, and for roughly half the film the figure stands alone on white with no ground at all. Only then does a background appear, and it does not stay: mid grey, then a paler grey, then deep blue, then dark red, each replacing the last under the same unchanged figure. The saxophone player is added during the grey stages as a flat black silhouette and is rendered up afterwards. In the final seconds the ground turns to the burnt orange the painting keeps, the smoke and the blurred figures behind the two men are added, and the signature goes on.

The first half of this film has no room in it. The man in the green suit is drawn, modelled and finished standing on bare white, and the place he is standing in does not exist yet. It is the same habit as the greyscale underpainting in Badlands. Settle the thing itself, completely, before anything around it gets a say.

Then watch the ground. It is mid grey, then pale grey, then deep blue, then dark red, then the burnt orange it keeps. The figure does not change through any of it. Four rooms were tried and rejected under a man who was already finished. The colour that makes the picture feel like a late set in a hot room was chosen last, and chosen against alternatives.

The blurred players behind the two men are the final addition, after the orange. The motion in the title goes in at the very end, on top of everything that was held still.

What it produced

The work →

Two men against a burning orange ground: one standing in a green suit holding a cigarette, one leaning back playing a saxophone, with blurred figures of other players smeared behind them

The Motions