(upbeat jazz music) - I really prefer to paint on site.

The weather gets into the painting somehow.

The wind gets into the painting somehow.

Smells of the air get into the painting somehow.

It's of a certain moment, it's a certain place, pure open.

All that stuff gets into the paintings.

(upbeat jazz music) I do no planning.

But I love the idea that at any moment the world will present itself to you in the most beautiful way you could ever imagine.

And everything seems to be in the right place and everything looks like it was put together by some mad genius.

I was a kind of a purist for a long time and I thought it has to be from observation, it has to be a unmediated, observational artifact, whether it's a portrait or it was a landscape.

I've gotten to realize that the studio is where you really finish the paintings, make paintings from paintings sometimes.

(upbeat jazz music) I feel like I won the lottery moving to Portland, because it's so beautiful.

The landscape is so diverse, and I've only explored this much of Oregon too and I feel like it's been more than I can handle.

So I don't lack for subjects.

(calm jazz music) I discovered Astoria purely by accident.

It was a friend from college came out to visit.

We just headed west and wound up in Astoria.

I kind of made a mental note, I got to come back here.

(birds squawking) My brother died with brain cancer when he was my age now.

I took a week off and just went to Astoria because I needed to just be by myself.

And Astoria was just kind of a hunch, 'cause I had this positive memory of it.

So it was a very healing week.

That first week that I spent in Astoria, a lot of time driving around, scoping out locations.

(calm jazz music) One is high up looking out over an empty field.

So the horizon's always going to be high, and all the planes are parallel to you, which to me is Cubism.

(laughs) Astoria is a Cubist town.

It's a working class, scrappy Cubist town.

(birds squawking) I don't know anybody in Astoria.

I still don't know anybody in Astoria.

I go there all the time.

I go there to paint.

I don't socialize.

I have no contact with that city in any other way.

(water swishing) It's a purely visual love affair.

(projector whirring) I remember the moment exactly.

I went out for dinner with a friend, and there was this little, like a photo frame that has rotating images in it like an album, but it's a still frame.

And I thought, what if you made a drawing actual size and you just loaded the drawings in a sequence?

Then you'd have a little story frame that would tell a story.

And so I got one of those and I made a little film.

It could only take so many images, so that was the constraint.

That was my first animated film, "Ghost."

(mysterious music) Then I got really into it.

My second film, "The Immortal Head," which is about the Weimar period transitioning into the Nazi period.

Kind of love story, love-horror story.

(brooding music) I won Best Animated Film in Los Angeles at the Independent Filmmakers Showcase.

That was a huge boost.

I was shocked.

I thought it was a mistake.

(calm string music) The camera I use is a Nikon SLR.

It's nothing special.

The program I make them in is iMovie.

The images are all hand-drawn.

Everything's handmade.

So eraser crumbs, smudges, that's good.

Paper textures, all good.

(solemn string music) I don't write a script.

I trust that the script will reveal itself as I go.

It's not an art of the motion picture.

It's an art of the still image.

(solemn string music) (music fades) That's why I call it the Kino graphic novel.

It's like early cinema and the graphic novel together.

(mysterious music) Then I started to make an adaptation of "Dracula."

And then one of my students said, "You know, you got to make that movie.

It's the greatest love story ever."

And I thought, hmm, "Dracula," love story?

And then I realized it actually is a great love story, but it's not the one you think.

(ominous music) So I thought I have something new to add to this story.

I saw it as a film about a marriage that was possessed by a demon.

And I think that's an interesting reading of it, and it's a more of a psychological reading of "Dracula."

So my vampire hunter is an analyst, psychoanalyst.

But it's a very faithful adaptation in every other sense.

Films are, to me, kind of mysterious.

I think they're almost like raw psychic material in a certain way.

I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but I feel like they're very real to me.

(laughs) (calm jazz music) A painting should be like a silent film.

Because there is, even in a painting of somebody sitting at a table and reading a book, there is a kind of an implication of a story, or at least an invitation to one.

(calm jazz music) I worked with this model for about 20 years.

To paint another human being or to draw another human being is a kind of a sacred thing, I think.

To see the other is a sacred thing.

(calm jazz music) I made a series of paintings for a show I had called "Look Out."

They were all called the ruckenfigur in art history, which is looking at the back, German word, ruckenfigur, the back of a figure looking out.

I like that format because the figure stands in relation to the landscape the way we stand in relation to the painting.

So the figure is both in the landscape and outside of it.

And because the figure has their back to us, they are also outside of us.

So there is a sense of separation that's built into that format that seemed to speak very powerfully for me to the sense of separation many people felt during the pandemic.

So I thought that these backs looking at the world were kind of the emblem of what a lot of us were feeling at that time, to be part of and not part of, to be isolated and yet wanting to be, you know, in a space where other people might be.

(melancholy elegant music) My latest show at Augen Gallery is called "Saudade."

It's a Portuguese word that means a longing for something that may never come back.

It's not the same as nostalgia.

(melancholy elegant music) Sort of an idea of loss and melancholy, and the joy you take in the fragility of every moment, is kind of what I think that saudade.

And come past the past, the fleeting nature of life and the expectation that things might turn out better.

(melancholy elegant music) That makes every moment of life in some ways more precious, more scary, and in its own way more beautiful because it's fleeting.

(music fades) (birds squawking) If one really pays attention to how you see things and how you experience things, that will tell you how to do the art, how to communicate it.

(bright music) The only thing we ever have to offer as artists is us.

My aspirational ideal is to paint from the point of view of love.

I love Astoria.

I love my model.

That's a world.

It's enough of a world for me.

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