Cajun Love Song

ANIMATION CELL STUDIES

This gallery of images displays my visual research in developing animation cells based on AI images, and hand-painted watercolors.  

Live Oaks and Spanish Moss | Bayou Lafourche, Donalsdonville, Louisiana ca.1836

[AI-created visual research]   My great great grandparents in Donaldsonville, LA. ca. 1850

1836, Jacob Lemann, finds passage to New Orleans possibly as a butcher aboard the SS. MClellan.  He is depicted here having arrived at the Docks at Le Havre, France after traveling from Darmstadt in the State of Hesse what is now Germany. [AI in a watercolor style]

Horse and Buggy alongside Bayou Teche. [AI visual research]

Miriam (neè Marie) Estelle Berthelot, as a young woman. [digital painting]

Jacob Lemann, 1870

Jacob Lemann, [digital portrait]

MARIE ADRIEN PERSAC

Marie Adriene Persac  [watercolor on paper]The painter Marie Adrien Persac is a highly educated French man and a fine artist, who cartographically mapped the Mississippi River and the adjacent large plantation homes as well as paint portraits of the houses in exchange for room and board. The animation will be narrated by Marie Adrien Persac  often considered as “Louisiana’s painter.”

These paintings below  also show my great great grandfather’s establishment of a mercantile business and later his son’s creation of a general merchandising store, B. Lemann and Bros in Donaldsonville, Louisiana on the Mississippi.  The intention is to show the industrious contributions of the outsider to the newly formed United States through the tumult and devastation of a civil war and the values and ethics that his faith had instilled in him.

A watercolor from the AI source image [below] of Jacob making a deal in New Orleans

An AI image, created in the style of Edgar Degas’s painting  The Cotton Merchants depicting Jacob Lemann in his role of a “handelmann” (someone who survives by his connections and networks).

Jacob at 45 inspecting a wheelwright’s operation.

Jacob Lemann, middle aged, traveling transatlantic on the SS McLellan, bound for New Orleans from Le Havre, France. His networks  were both in the U.S. and Abroad.

Air Aquarium at Parco outside of Tokyo, Japan

PINK URCHIN [DETAIL]                 Parco outside of Tokyo, Japan

As tourism and overdevelopment collides with Climate Change a sustainable culture is transformed on the island of Bali, Indonesia, as traditional rice farming is under assault because of water shortages diverted to villas, hotels and and other strains on the infrastructure. As water becomes the next battleground in resources, is the only outlook for the farmer to sell his land? This is a microcosm of impacts of economic strains on vital resources worldwide and a glimpse into how the most consumed grain feeding one fifth of the world as a staple is changing.

In 2016 we lived on what the local Balinese called the “SAWAH” or rice terrace. The entire life cycle of the rice as an integral part of daily activities of the villagers unfolded before our eyes. It raised the questions of how the water table or the changes in climate had affected the rice field workers who depend on the harvest to feed their families. Between touristic development, and changes in traditional culture, much is at stake.
 

Rice terrace before a storm

swim was a collaborative production with Chip Moore chronicling the journey of a childhood summer swim for an African American Marine Biologist, Ambrose Jearld, as he would head from his tobacco plantation in North Carolina to South Carolina’s segregated “Atlantic Beach”.

Recently, I have been experimenting with animating abstract paintings.  These “Kinetic Paintings” are aided in their movements by AI.

I developed a little character, Eggbot, from my sketchbook into a short animation.

An AI animation of My great Great grandfather shopping for a wheelwright.

Another view of my great greadfather ca.1858, Louisiana

Everyone has some explaining to do.