Rebecca Bird is a Brooklyn artist and animator whose handmade watercolor animations explore time, memory, and perception in galleries and public spaces.
It’s early August, a Saturday morning. The bustling New York City subway starts to thin out as my train gets closer to the Rockaway Ave stop on the C. The thirty-minute ride from Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station, all chaos and commotion, is finally starting to feel lighter. And for good reason. I’m on my way to the studio of Rebecca Bird in Ocean Hill, Brooklyn.
Ocean Hill is the name she uses when she’s on camera. In practice, when she wants someone to find her, she tells them east of Bed-Stuy, because the real name of the neighborhood is hard for most people to place.
Rebecca is primarily a watercolor painter who also works in animation. I’ve been rewatching her animations on my way over. They’re extraordinary works, some short, some longer, where she paints each frame of the motion piece. You can see the shift between each tiny detail. The movement remains visibly handmade.
I approach the front door of her studio. It’s clear she’s been existing in this space for a while. You can feel her energy and artistry in most every corner of this gallery/studio space. I’m greeted at the front door and follow her inside. Immediately on the floor, in the shape of a large welcome mat, is a mosaic floor installation of a mouse sitting on a tomato. I ask if she did this and she nods, says yes. We’ll add that to her repertoire of art mediums.
Looking around Rebecca’s studio, it isn’t super large. It’s comfortable. She mentions she just took apart a camera obscura she built. It had been sitting in the middle of the room as a big box until she looked at it one day and decided it had to go away. She lives upstairs and calls this place her homestead, the studio she will never leave.
A pattern starts to emerge here. A fascination with capturing a moment in time, but the need to recreate it in an artificial way.
The animation in a file box
I ask her to show me what she’s working on, and she thinks about the question a little differently than I expected. She tells me she actually just finished a three-year-long animation project. I ask to see it.
“In a physical sense, the animation is like file boxes full of watercolors.”
I had assumed there was some digital shortcut in there. A painted background, a figure moved across it, some clever repetition doing the heavy lifting. There isn’t. Every frame is its own watercolor painting. The long piece she just finished is a number she hasn’t sat down and counted yet. Her guess is somewhere around two thousand.
“Many of them are, like, not exactly a piece. It’s just a piece of something. You could paper the walls of an enormous hall with all of these.”
They live in labeled boxes, in order, and she’s clear that the labeling is not housekeeping. It’s part of the work. “Keeping track of where you are is really a big part of the animation.”
Rebecca opens one of the folders that make up her animation. Each sheet is a single frame, painted by hand.
“I just wanted it to look handmade”
I ask why she’d take on that kind of labor. Had she practiced with faster ways to make something move? Was it something that just started one day and here we are?
“It’s a time-consuming process,” she says. “I just wanted it to look handmade. I feel like there’s so much that looks generated, and there’s some lack of human connection to it. So I just wanted, even if it was clumsy, to make something handmade.”
She isn’t chasing a perfectly smooth frame rate. A little wobble across the page is fine with her, as long as it reads as motion. The evidence of a human hand.
She got curious about animation early, back when Flash came out and animation software became more accessible to everyday people. “I was like, oh my God, this is so exciting, I can make animation.” She ran some experiments. But the reason it stuck was already present in her painting practice.
“I wanted to make a movie that looked like the way my paintings looked. I just wanted to make my paintings move.”
The opening came through an open call. Triple Canopy was just starting up, she applied, and she got in without knowing how to make a GIF.
“It was so technically challenging just to make those little loopy animations. But it was really exciting to me, to make twelve paintings and put them together. And then when you see them start to move, it’s kind of magical.”
That piece is Danny Boy. Twelve paintings, a loop, and by her own account the start of everything that followed. “That was kind of how I started.”
Taking time apart and putting it back together
The reason she got to animation, besides wanting to make a movie that looked like her work, was because she’d been painting from still lifes that were constantly changing. The flowers wilt, the fruit goes soft, and the painter has to pick one moment out of a moving stream and commit to it.
“If you’re painting from life, you’re trying to take the flow of time and turn it into one still image.”
“Animating it means that you can catch that motion happening rather than just representing something that says these things are changing.” “It’s kind of like taking time apart and putting it back together.”
Three years, twenty-two minutes, one airport
That long piece already has somewhere to go. It was commissioned by Seattle-Tacoma International Airport for the newly remodeled Terminal C, which is opening with a group of new public art projects.
“It wasn’t like the only thing I did in three years, but it was almost.”
She describes the work as completely absorbing. “You sit down in the morning to work and all of a sudden it’s night and you forgot to eat or take a shower.” She’s also honest that the commission gave her something she hadn’t really allowed herself before, which is permission to stay with one idea. “I’d never spent three years on one piece ever before.”
Seattle is where Rebecca is from. “When I was a kid, I would go to that airport and I would see weird art.”
That’s what I love about this story, and it proves the investment in art in a commercial space like an airport is much more than monetary. As a child walking through the airport, noticing the artwork and thinking about it, only for years later to be the one actually commissioned to create the next work for a new generation of viewers, artists, and dreamers.
Airports have been thinking about this lately. Travel keeps climbing and folks are spending longer inside terminals. The experience of travel has become something airports can own. An art program is one way to offer this. Although most travelers may not stop and look, the art is offering a softer corridor, or a better seating area for those long layovers. It makes the terminal a place people don’t mind being stuck in, which raises the likability of the overall space.
At ATP we place work into commercial environments, so I asked how she thinks about her work living somewhere people didn’t come to look at art.
“To me it’s really exciting to be able to put work in a public space. People are not going there for an aesthetic experience necessarily. So what can art do within the context of their daily life? If it’s in the airport, can it make their trip less stressful? Can it distract them, or give them something to think about, or ground them?”
“It kind of takes it out of that precious context of being like, it’s in a museum, or it’s in a gallery. To let it be just like it’s part of your life.”
On Purview
Rebecca has three pieces currently on view at Gallery 85 in our latest exhibition, Purview, curated by Sarah Mohrman.
The show brings together six contemporary artists, primarily New York-based, whose practices look at perception. Part of why Rebecca fits is the range she moves across. “Rebecca works across an incredible range of scales, from paintings like these to major public commissions,” Sarah told me, “so there is always a strong awareness of how the artwork relates to the viewer and the space around it.”
Two of the works in Purview are Cohort 1 and Cohort 2. They hang near the beginning of the exhibition, which Sarah placed on purpose. “Childhood is where we first begin forming our understanding of the world, and as we grow, those perspectives continue to shift and develop.”
What she likes about them is what happens when you stop looking at one of them. “Each child feels very specific, but when you see them together, they begin to read as a group. You start thinking less about the individual and more about how we understand people collectively.”
Installation view, Purview, Gallery 85.
Rebecca Bird, Cohort 2, oil and acrylic on canvas, 36″ × 36″ (top)
Rebecca Bird, Cohort 1, oil and acrylic on canvas, 36″ × 36″ (bottom)
The other is Rearview, which takes the same question somewhere else. The image is recognizable, but reflection, atmosphere, and movement have gotten to it. Sarah put it in conversation with the Cohort works deliberately.
“It introduces the idea of looking back. As adults, our memories of childhood are inevitably shaped by everything that has happened since. We may remember an experience very differently from the way we understood it when we were actually living through it.”
Installation view, Purview, Gallery 85.
Rebecca Bird, Rearview, 2024, oil on wood panel, 36″ × 48″
When I asked Rebecca what the word purview means to her, she approached it as a sense of responsibility that she then refined as your area of knowledge and what you can speak on.
“Something interesting about the concept of purview is that it’s a concept that’s in question right now. What is an artist’s area of expertise? What can we speak of with authority?”
She connects it to a habit that runs through her work: using mirrors and lenses to question who is doing the looking.
“Who’s the author, who’s looking, whose eyes are we talking about in this image?”
Sometimes she puts herself in the frame as a shadow, or some other trace, “proving to myself that I’m there.”
Which, when you line it up next to a camera obscura in the corner and two thousand watercolors in a file box, starts to look like one continuous project rather than several. Capture a moment. Question who captured it. Take the time apart. Put it back together and see what happened in the gaps.
Where to see it
Before we packed up, I asked Rebecca what’s next, now that she’s finished this big animation project. “That’s really hot off the press. Now I’m thinking about what’s next.”
I mention she must really love the project to dedicate that much time to it. “The truth is, it’s really fun. It really is.”
Cohort 1, Cohort 2, and Rearview are on view now at Gallery 85 as part of Purview, curated by Sarah Mohrman.
And keep an eye out in Seattle. When the new Terminal C opens at Seattle-Tacoma International, twenty-two minutes of hand-painted watercolor will be running in it, made by an artist who first learned what art could do to a room by walking through that same building on the way to a gate.
See more of Rebecca Bird’s paintings and animations at https://rebeccabird.info/.
Purview is on view at Gallery 85 now. See more on that here.
Written by David Dempsey, Director, Media Services & Content
