A cell from Karen Aqua’s Nine Lives

Our fourth Living on the Earth Award nominee is animation artist Karen Aqua.

The first time I met Karen, she was presenting a screening of her films up to that time, in January 1994 at Kalani Honua Oceanside Retreat. The films, none longer than ten minutes, totalled about an hour of viewing, and over a decade of work. She was just about to begin what turned out ot be a long and successful work relationship with Sesame Street, for which she created many animated sections.

Karen shared that the stack of drawings needed for a ten minute animated film would fill a medium sized closet, stacked floor to ceiling. She explained that her work time is chiefly paid by grants, some to do animation and some to teach. She travels widely as artist in residence, but she works mostly in her studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Karen’s well-loved and well-used animation stand

Eleven years later, I visited Karen and saw her studio, with its animation stand and many framed animation cells on the wall. I asked a lot of questions.

Karen explained to me that the sound track for an animated film is created first, because it is much simpler to draw in synch with the music and/or script than it is to record the sound track to follow the drawings. She likes scripts to move along quickly, so that the animator doesn’t have to create extra seconds worth of art. How much art?

If the animation is of the highest, densest quality (say, a Disney cartoon), that’s 24 frames per second. But low tech animation is in vogue right now, particularly in television advertising, and that’s twelve frames per second.

If you want the drawings to flicker, you make three similar but different drawings and alternate them. Each drawing is based on the last one; the animation stand contains a light box so that the drawing underneath the one being drawn acts as a guide. The paper is prepunched with holes that match upright rods on the stand, so that each animation cell is perfectly aligned. The cells are digitized by scanning or photographing with a digital camera on a stand. Karen prefers the camera. So, even though the artwork is created by hand, the animation itself is put together in a computer program, rather than with film, as it was in decades past.

Ken Field and Karen Aqua 

Karen’s long and happy marriage to jazz saxophonist Ken Field has included a number of wonderful collaborations, including the film Ground Zero/Sacred Ground, a protest against the use of nuclear weapons danced for us by petroglyphs from an ancient Native American rock site.

Caper charts, hand-painted prayer flags, and notice of a sweat lodge (inipi) on the chalk board behind the kitchen at Lost Valley Educational Center

Subject: Re: Intentional communities

True enuf and I am trying my bejesus best to move into one of em..
Any one have a lead, suggestions, or otherwise help?
I have rent monthly income covered; I am not destitute
just clueless…
serious here.
love and thanks,
priscilla*****

Dear Priscilla and everybody,

Have you looked at the Fellowship for Intentional Communities website? They have a huge database of intentional communities all over the USA and in other parts of the world. They publish a guidebook every few years and they have a magazine that has “members wanted” ads in the back. Rural and urban communities, religious, art-centered, permaculture, all kinds. Check it out.

Blessings,

Alicia

Where else to find me on the web:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alicia_Bay_Laurel (a stub of a bio, so far)

https://soundcloud.com/alicia-bay-laurel Listen to some of my music, free.

https://www.allmusic.com/artist/alicia-bay-laurel-mn0000743517 (Allmusic.com critic Stanton Swihart’s music bio of me, plus links to his reviews of my first two albums)

http://www.diggers.org/homefree/hfh_12.html (my early days at Wheeler Ranch, as told by Bill Wheeler)

https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=Alicia+Bay+Laurel  A search for my name in the World Library Catalog

https://archive.org/details/AliciaBayLaurelAmericatheBlues Free download of my protest song, “America the Blues”

Creek garden at Lost Valley Educational Center, Dexter, Oregon

Revolutions come in odd packages. Tonight I read an article on Truthout.org about the missionary zeal of a farmer who raises animals as food for sale in a community supported agriculture system in Virginia. His clients don’t sound at all bohemian, but they speak earnestly of making a difference by buying their food from a local farmer who uses sustainable farming methods rather than buying from multi-national corporations, particularly Wal-Mart. The farmer sees his CSA as part of an international movement to take back the production of food from big industrial agriculture.

Considering massive moves on the part of chemical giant Monsanto to control agriculture worldwide, this is good news indeed. I recommend a film The Future of Food, by Deborah Koons Garcia, and a book, Seeds of Deception, by Jeffrey M. Smith, for well-presented information on the genetic engineering of crops.

CSA farms are often easy to find if you live in a rural community. During my years on Maui I subscribed to two of them. In cities, small farms offering subscriptions may be hours away, and farmers’ markets are the next best thing. The farmers pride themselves in offering produce grown from heirloom seeds, foods unlikely to be found in chain supermarkets, even Whole Foods.

For my first posting on CSA, click here.

Heirloom tomatoes at a farmers’ market in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Sunday, October 2, 2005, Jamaica Plains, Massachusetts, I take a walk with animation artist Karen Aqua and jazz vocalist/media maven Ruthie Ristich through the eerie beauty of Forest Hills Cemetery. More than just a place to entomb the deceased, Forest Hills functions as a picnic, walking and bike riding wonderland, arboretum, performance venue for music and poetry in particular (since such luminaries as e. e. cummings and Anne Sexton are buried there), indoor art gallery, and outdoor museum for both 19th century and modern sculpture. The Forest Hills Trust commissions artists to create works that blend into the elegant and mysterious atmosphere of the 250 acre landscape that was originally designed in 1848 as Boston’s first public park.

Mitch Ryerson’s sculptures in particular draw us. On the Sunday we are walking, world musician Ricardo Frota brings a huge collection of percussion instruments for children and adults to play along with Ryerson’s permanently installed “marimba benches,” a set of wooden xylophones so strong one can sit on them.

A couple sits in Ryerson’s “poetry chairs” and admires the geese paddling upon Lake Hibiscus.

Ruthie gathers inspiration from within Ryerson’s poetry shrine.

Children play in a hundred-year-old weeping beech tree.

A sunlit winged goddess in a sacred grove.

Ghostly garments sewn of metal screening adorn a grove of trees.

I commune with a friend from the Other Side.

Ken Field, raises the spirits of the dead and the living through the magic of his saxophone and flute.

I first met Ken in January 1994 when I was visiting Kalani Honua Oceanside Retreat as they were hosting avant garde ensemble Birdsongs of the Mesozoic as artists in residence. Ken brings a jazz sensibility to the group, which includes rock guitarist Michael Bierylo, classical pianist Erik Lindgren, and pop keyboardist Rick Scott. The four composers divided a trap drum set amonst them, and all four played percussion in addition to their melodic instruments. I worked as ticket taker for the standing ovation/standing room only performance, and, mind you, Kalani Honua is fifteen miles from the nearest small town.

I stayed in touch with Ken and his animation artist wife and sometime collaborator Karen Aqua (to be the subject of an upcoming blog!) from then on, and, in August 2000, visited them while I was in Boston to do a show and sign books at the local Barnes and Noble. On that trip, I got to experience Ken’s improvisational funk band Board of Education at the Middle East Cafe in Cambridge. The rhythm section would start a groove, the melodic instrumentalists would take turns soloing over it, and everyone else would dance. Everyone! No actual songs, and no two shows alike, ever. Fresh!

When I visited them next, in September 2005, Ken had just returned from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where he had been playing an original composition, “Under the Skin,” for Bridgman/Packer Dance, a dance ensemble from New York.  Last night, April 22, 2006, Ken and the dance group repeated the performance in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  “Under the Skin” will be released on Innova Recordings later this year.

Ken hosts The New Edge, a two-hour weekly radio program broadcasting and webcasting Tuesday afternoons from 2-4pm Boston time on WMBR, 88.1FM in Cambridge. The show features innovative and creative mostly instrumental music at the boundaries of classical, jazz, and world styles.

Ken’s latest project, a 21st century New Orleans style brass band, The Revolutionary Snake Ensemble, has marched and played in the New Orleans Mardi Gras, and made a fantastic CD, Year of the Snake, guaranteed to get your party off the couch. They will have a new CD out by the end of 2006.

“Genius is focus,” a precept I first heard from the Abraham Tapes, helps me understand the accomplishments of people I admire. They practice daily. The effect of any one day’s practice may be practically negligible, but the effect of a year’s daily practice will be profound.

Daily practice creates a space in which new ideas can birth.

Sometimes, when I don’t practice a skill for a while, I forget that I have it. I take great comfort in remembering that I actually do, once I get back to practicing again.

Each day I aim to sing a forty-five minute set of vocal warmups. I copied the vocal warmup CD into my computer so I can scan my email while practicing, and I have another copy in my car, so I can sing them while driving, probably a droll vision when I am stopped at a traffic light.

On a good day, I also play an hour of guitar, walk an hour, make visual art and/or write, and work at my business as artist/entrepreneur.

I absolutely love those moments when I notice the effects of repetition piling up. Today was one of those days. After nine months of working steadily at producing my jazz and blues CD, What Living’s All About, I am ready to send it off to press!