My name is Michael Burton and I am a painter and an animator. I make video work which I call Paintamations. I was born in Fall River, Massachusetts and raised in Somerset, MA.
Sometime in the mid 1980's, when I was about eight or nine, I was in my parent's sunroom with the family's Super Eight camera trying to make a stop motion animation of my He-Man figures and Castle Gray Skull. The camera was positioned precariously on a tabletop tripod when it fell over and broke. I didn't make another stop motion animation for twenty-two years.
I didn't get in any trouble. I just became interested in other things. I built forts in the woods, I played in the yard and I got interested in painting. Whether with paint or with camera I wanted to create places like those I had imagined while playing as a child. As I grew these places became an escape from the typical drama of a young teen. However, as I matured, I found painting was still a way for me to live in another place.
The places I paint are imagined or derived from photos, memory, and the Internet. I take this visual information and change it to suit my needs. The process of painting and image collecting is a way to generate narratives. Through this exploration I have rediscovered my love for making short animations.
My narratives continually evolve as a stream of consciousness as they did when I was a child playing. The narratives are loosely storyboarded and develop through a sort of call and response approach. The result unfolds through the process of painting, editing and creating the work over a period of three months to a year.