Interview with Matt Bollinger, Painter and Animator Behind Stop Motion/Painting Hybrid Short Film "Between the Days," a Beautiful Portrait of Routine, Unfulfillment, and Despair in Middle America

"Before Work" finished painting featured in Between the Days. Photo courtesy of Matt Bollinger. 

Often – far too often – we forget the true weight of our actions, our everyday decisions, ranging from those big to small. And, in forgetting, we forget ourselves – who we truly are, where we have been, what we have done, how we have gotten here, to this very place in this very moment. For we are nothing if not the sum total of all our decisions, our actions…even the most minute, even those – perhaps especially those – made in the thrumming humdrum of the everyday: the act of rising from our bed and reaching over to flick off the alarm resting on our bedside table, lighting a cigarette, collecting yesterday’s trash before moving on to more, equally menial tasks. Moments spent alone, in ostensible comfort – the comfort provided us by 21st century accoutrements so many of us have grown to take for granted. Whether we are aware of it or not, each of our actions leave a mark – if only the ghost of one. To forget that is to forget ourselves, and is veritably to forget time. For, to us, time – time in its very essence – is nothing if but a string of our actions. It is how we choose to spend it. In every second, conscious or unconscious.

Matt Bollinger’s 18-minute stop motion tour de force, Between the Days, is nothing if not a stark reminder – a wake up call – to this truth. It’s there in every frame, drawn poignantly – almost pointedly – which itself is an inevitable byproduct lent by the medium Bollinger used to bring to fruition his nightmarish take on the American Dream: acrylic and Flashe. Paint on canvas.

"First Light" finished painting featured in Between the Days. Photo courtesy of Matt Bollinger.

For every frame of the film is, itself, one of Bollinger’s paintings, or variations on the same painting painted by hand between each frame. Yet is never is the same painting – it never can be – for, with each frame, the paintings that make up the film shift and evolve. One stroke upon another before the action depicted in each painting at its first appearance is something entirely...other. Something new. Yet part of each frame’s evolution is not only the new “position” of the subject, but – because the present action depicted is, ultimately, painted on the same canvas as the actions that came before it – each of the past variations leave a splotchy smudge where the old position of a subject was painted over, leaving an ever present reminder of the past, both of each painting and of our own. And, fittingly, each painting gets “messier” – more layers of paint build upon each other, providing a more complex image – the more decisions the characters depicted in it make.

"First Smoke" painting featured in Between the Days. Photo courtesy of Matt Bollinger.

This provides for us, the audience, the key to the film’s title – “Between the Days,” the mundane moments and choices that measure our lives between the particularly monumental – and the truth hidden therein. And it’s in that subtle-yet-ever-present reminder that the film’s message rings true, for Bollinger’s paintings – a prime example of “the-medium-is-the-message” – draw an inescapable parallel to our lives, a “medium” measured by time just as is film which itself lends the inevitability of our actions being a necessary ingredient of life. Like the spectral presence of an artist’s brush on a painting, our actions are the thing by which we are measured – measured in every second allotted to us in our lifespans, just as acrylic on canvas can be measured widthwise and lengthwise in that medium’s two dimensions. And just as Bollinger’s paintings evolve – forever becoming something anew across their runtime – our true identity cannot be defined by who we have been in the past, but only as who we are in the now, and who our actions lead ever lead us to become.

"Living Room, Day" finished painting featured in Between the Days. Photo courtesy of Matt Bollinger.

In our interview, Bollinger tells us about his initial foray and eventually plunge into the mediums of painting, film, and animation, and how his career eventually came to flourish. He also discusses the creative process and thought behind Between the Days and his sister film, Apartment 6F, both of which were created using a style quite unique to Bollinger – that of paintings being used as the primary subject and medium within a stop motion film, which he constantly develops on and modified over the course of an animation, a development on a style of that has been around since the earliest days of animation with films such as the 1906 film Humorous Phases of Funny Faces. He also describes his workflow, process, and gives us the juicy details of the layout of his studio. He also gives aspiring artists his advice on how to craft a lasting career. In summation, he tells us about what projects are next for him as well as what art he’s most recently been inspired by. You can read our interview below in full.

A.H. Uriah: Hello, Matt! Thank you so much for doing this interview! It’s a pleasure to have you here! To start, would you tell us a little bit about yourself and how your passion for painting and animation first began and has progressed to get you where you are today?

Matt Bollinger: Thank you for inviting me! While I was an undergrad at the Kansas City Art Institute, studying painting and creative writing, I saw a VHS transfer of a William Kentridge film. The self-evident process and the transformative result got me really excited. I made a short animation using his technique of drawing with charcoal, shooting the result, and changing the drawing again to create the impression of movement.

Storyboards for the Law and Order scene from the TV evening scene in Between the Days. Photo courtesy of Matt Bollinger.

Although I experimented with video for many years after that, it was never something I exhibited alongside my other work until 2015. Until then I made narrative paintings, drawings, collages, and books that I showed in New York, France, and elsewhere. My first film, The House on Weirdfield Street, evolved out of a zine project where I created a facsimile of a fictional notebook. When I drew with Sharpie in the notebook and turned the page, the mirror of the image had soaked through. I liked this effect both for how it looked and how it suggested time passing. Around this time I saw a Jake Fried animation on Vimeo and thought he had invented an interesting approach to the Kentridge technique that looked distinctly his own. With his work as a springboard, I decided to animate a notebook using ballpoint pen, Sharpie, and White-Out.


A.H.: How did the idea and realization of Between the Days begin and evolve?

MB: Between the Days grew out of a few different paintings. In the exhibition I did prior to this project, I painted a large diptych, Independence I & II, that depicted my mother’s apartment where she lived alone at the start of her career and where she was living when she met my father. I researched the space, furniture, and objects based on an interview and subsequent conversations I had with my mother. After that show I painted an image of a basement weight room. I wrote the character of the son from Between the Days based on the guy I imagined would inhabit the space in Weight Room. When writing the loose outline for the film, I combined that character with a fictional mother and placed them in a home that resembled my parent’s house when I was growing up (although we didn’t have a basement).

"James' Weight Room" finished painting featured in Between the Days. Photo courtesy of Matt Bollinger.

Because the process of making an animation is so involved, I tend to write and begin planning and storyboarding the next project while the current work is in progress. When I was painting and shooting Apartment 6F, I would take breaks to write and research for Between the Days. Immediately after I finished 6F, I stretched the canvased for Days and started working.



A.H.: From both a thematic and technical standpoint, what were you most interested in exploring with Between the Days? Can you tell us about how you went about doing so, both in regards to the thematic and aesthetic?

MB: I wanted to tell the story of two people stuck in their daily routines. At the same time, I had the idea that the characters would go about their business, and I might stay in the house and see something hinting at transformation. This could happen with a movement of light on the wall, a freight train passing, or a screensaver on a computer. A lot of the animation has to do with work. The mother has her job, the son his weight lifting, and I’m there laboring to make the film. The way that I animate always reveals the painting process. Figures don’t move effortlessly but instead push through a viscous reality. I’m fascinated by the way that time becomes spatial in animation (a character moves an 1/8th of an inch and that equals 1/12th of a second). The visual language I use reveals that spatial dimension of time because of the trails the characters and objects leave behind.

"Living Room, Night" finished painting featured in Between the Days. Photo courtesy of Matt Bollinger.

Apartment 6F was the first animation I made with paint. The canvases were all small, 9 x 12 inches, so they could fit on a copy-stand. I shifted materials initially to make the animation more like my paintings and to work in color. At the same time I didn’t want to lose the ease and immediacy of working in black and white. To strike the balance, I limited my palette and scale. I only used black, white, umber, and Venetian red to make the film. I quickly found that paint’s fluidity opened up possibilities that hadn’t been there when I animated with drawing.

For Between the Days I used canvases in a wide range of sizes and a full palette. The framing of the small works corresponded to the framing of the shot. With the large canvases I could shoot close-ups directly on the wider views. The result was that the paintings looked different at the end of the process than they do in the film. I taped off the close-up shots to create hard-edged interruptions to the space. The light shifts as does the focus. In Carolyn’s Office, the painting has her hands left behind, disconnected, performing their tasks. This was a second way that the paintings showed the passage of time even though they were still.

"Carolyn's Office" finished painting featured in Between the Days. Photo courtesy of Matt Bollinger.

A.H.: Can you describe for us your workflow and process? What do your studio, tools, and setup look like?

MB: Everything I do, paintings, sculptures, and animations, all come out of the sketchbook. I make lots of drawings—storyboards, studies of the objects and environments from life or photographs, character studies. I never look at photographs when I’m painting or animating. Everything needs to be drawn first so that I can internalize and know the things I want to include in my work. I did this long before beginning to work in animation. This three dimensional understanding of the objects and figures helps with the narrative aspect of the work and is essential to knowing how to make something move.

I made Apartment 6F and Between the Days while at an artist residency, the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in Brooklyn. My studio was a big open space with one wall of windows that I would black out when animating and leave uncovered for the natural light when developing the paintings. My studio is set up for painting with canvases hung on the wall and a rolling table full of paints and brushes. I work with the camera on a tripod or a copy stand depending on the size of the canvas. With Between the Days, I switched to using Dragonframe to capture my footage, which made my life easier. Then I edit in Adobe Premiere. Once I have a more or less finished edit, I write the music and record the audio. After the residency ended, I moved upstate with my wife. I renovated the barn on the property and now that’s my studio.

Matt Bollinger's set for shooting the "James' Weight Room" scene in Between the Days. Photo courtesy of Matt Bollinger.

A.H.: How do you mentally get into a place where you can simply paint and animate?

MB: I’m always there.

A.H.: What visual references – paintings, films, photography – inspired the aesthetic of Between the Days? Do you consciously draw from your inspirations as you paint?

MB: I look at a lot of art, read a lot, and watch a lot of films, but I generally don’t bring that stuff into the studio as a reference. With this project I was probably thinking about the sprawled spaces in Dawn Clements’ drawings, the fragmenting in George Braque’s late interiors, the muscular figuration in David Park’s work. More directly I was thinking of the slow pace in the films of Tarkovsky and Kelly Reichardt. The factory shots were inspired by the Lumiere Brother’s films and Sharon Lockhart’s Lunch Break.

Matt Bollinger's sketches fleshing out the paintings on the wall in the evening scene in Between the Days. Photo courtesy of Matt Bollinger.

A.H.: Do you have any advice for aspiring painters and animators? What do you wish you had known when you were first starting out?
MB: One of the things I love about animation is how it makes filmmaking possible without a crew or much money. I teach full time and sometimes encounter students who want to make a film but think that it needs to look just like features coming out of big studios. I encourage them to make work with what’s around them. The problem-solving that goes into not being able to make things the way you’ve seen before can lead to unexpected invention. Something much more distinctly personal can emerge.

When I was in school, I was a bit stuck in categories of medium. Painting was always the goal for me. It might have been helpful for someone to tell me to get over it. Someone probably did. I can be very stubborn.

Matt Bollinger's sketches fleshing out the design of the character of "The Mother" in Between the Days. Photo courtesy of Matt Bollinger.

A.H.: So where do you see yourself going from here? What’s next for you?

MB: I’m in the middle of a new film project that includes paintings on canvas, watercolors on Duralar, and sculptures. The animation takes place in a house where the characters are understood only through their rooms and objects—a married couple and their daughter. A portion of the narrative is a science fiction story written by the man and based on research the woman was engaged in. Eventually it’ll be my next show.

Matt Bollinger's sketches fleshing out the house and a poster seen in the house in Between the Days. Photo courtesy of Matt Bollinger.

A.H.: Lastly, what art – and I’m going to leave this open-ended for interpretation – have you been inspired by lately, and why?

MB: A little over 8 months ago, my daughter was born. She has certainly reshaped my thinking about many things. I’ve also been looking at images in books, online, and seeing art when I can make it to the city. I’ve been reading a lot and watching movies on my computer. I’m still thinking about Tarkovsky and Reichardt. I watch lots of horror movies of varying quality (I tend to have movies playing while I draw). I’ve been looking at paintings by Catherine Murphy, Tal R, Brandi Twilley, Biala, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Braque, Picasso (circa 1928), David Byrd, Kerry James Marshall, 15th Century German sculpture, and Berber rugs. I’ve recently read Awayland by Ramona Ausubel, The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, Universal Harvester by John Darnielle, and Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan.

Matt Bollinger in the midst of animating. Source: Instagram.

You can learn more about Matt Bollinger and you can explore more of his exceptional work by visiting his website, Instagram, Facebook, and Vimeo.

To read more about Between the Days as it was presented in the Zürcher Gallery in New York City for a spell last year, you can read reviews of the exhibition penned by Art In America Magazine, Hyperallergic, and the press release on the Zürcher Gallery’s website.

You can stay tuned for upcoming interviews and articles by subscribing to Stop Motion Geek via the “subscribe” button at the top right corner of our homepage, or by following us on our Facebook @StopMotionGeek. You can also stay up-to-date with the blog by following us on our Instagram @stop.motion.geek.blog.

You can watch Between the Days by going here and you can watch Apartment 6F by going here.