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The painter – Mark Rubbo

“The painter” a poem by Dobby Gibson, animated by Mark Rubbo. It smells like winter and butter, and wears colour reflections. That’s why we have chosen it to celebrate Christmas with you.

A painter decides to quit painting forever. He leaves home, runs away from a dangerously inspiring smell of bread the woman is preparing and drives under the snow as fast as he can manage. During the journey, he stubbornly avoids noticing all the beauty that surrounds him. He prolongs the scape. He even tries to flee the electric images of sleep. When he returns home, the smell, the warmth, the stillness of his most beloved things sway him. He looks out the kitchen window how the tire tracks he had left in the snow disappear, until there’s no trace of his day. Until the intention of quitting painting forever fades away.

This is a touching videopoem that combines 3D figurative art, 2D colour and shape abstract animation, text animation, reciting and music. The contrast between a black and white world and the explosion of colours that seems to emerge from the protagonist is remarkable. It’s definitely a beautiful way to illustrate how the eyes of a painter see reality. Or maybe even a good graphic interpretation of the mechanisms of perception: everything is colourless, what our eyes interpret as colour are variations on the intensity and tone of light. We are the ones who paint reflections.

“The painter” was created thanks to Motionpoems, an American organization that connects publishing houses, writers and filmmakers.  They aim to create videopoems with a marketing intention, which are uploaded regularly to the web and classified into seasons. For our part, this will be the last videopoem of 2015. We will come back in January with the best videopoetry!