5 minute read
Animated Aesthetic: Bridging Disciplines
By Allison Nichol Longtin
Marc Beurteaux is an artist who lives, works, and creates in Hastings County. His current online presence features his work in animation and film, but he’s starting to become known for his sculptures, in addition to his earlier work.
Marc and his partner traded the hustle and bustle of city life in Toronto 15 years ago for the quiet of the country. They moved to an 80-acre farm North of Marmora, which had woodland and several outbuildings to explore. The landscape he calls home informs his work as an artist, “It’s a huge supermarket of stuff…I wanted to live in nature, just to see what it was like. It definitely watered down my ego…this is what the world really is: nature. It broadened my horizons and my outlook.” It also provided the source material for his sculptures.
“The farm had a lot of junk…when I see anything, I see the potential for it to be art,” says Marc of how his new home provided inspiration for his more recent foray into sculpture. “It’s like it was meant to be - I just started making stuff.” Many of the materials Marc uses in his sculptures are found objects that he sources from around his property, including old and rusted bits of scrap metal, as well as salvaged cleaning, cooking, and farming tools. Through his sculpting of discarded materials, Marc gives objects new life, “I see anything, I look at anything and I think, that could be useful.”
There is a tipping point, though, when the amount of materials salvaged can become more overwhelming than inspiring. Marc recently did a purge of his studio because he’d been adding to the pile of materials over several years and found that he’d stopped working for a while; he felt bogged down. He remembers his earlier days working in film when he didn’t have many materials, “It felt like I was more imaginative. It’s almost like the less you have, the more [room] you have to think. When I have too much stuff…it gets to be too much. I’ve done a great purge, and I feel like a new man.”
Marc’s raw, unvarnished, industrial aesthetic translates across mediums. There’s a common language that extends from his work in film and animation toward his sculptures. There’s a clear signature at play, with film and animation informing and inspiring sculptures and vice versa. When he sculpts something new and he likes it, he thinks, ‘wow, that would be so cool animated.’ “That’s why I like making my own short films - you also get to build the props, characters, backgrounds… that’s what led me to doing more sculpture, because I loved doing the set decoration so much, that it was natural for me to start sculpting.”
Marc’s creative roots are in film and animation. Last year he made a short film for the Small Town Shorts Film Festival. The film was screened in Campbellford. Marmora & Lake Public Library and Trent Hills Public Library created a collaborative event for their communities to highlight the deep well of creative talent in small towns. “There are way more filmmakers in this area than you think,” says Marc.
In a post on Canadian Animation Blog, Marc spoke about his inspiration to create animated films, “It was the realization that you could create worlds within your own animated films. It's incredibly addictive to see what comes out of your imagination.” For Marc, it’s much the same with his sculptures, “With sculpture, it’s almost more fun in a way, because it’s a bit more instantaneous.
You just get a couple pieces and then suddenly they fit together and there it is. There’s the face. There’s the sculpture. Just the joy of watching pieces come together and form something. It’s just totally addictive. I’ll never get sick of that.”
Of art-making and creative work, it’s said that you should find and do the thing that makes you lose all sense of time. Many of us can relate to this singular experience, “When you’re animating, time means nothing…same with sculpture…I could be working for hours and hear the dog bark and then [think], ‘oh yeah, I should have fed them an hour ago’…time bends and stretches and just becomes a new reality. Mostly time flies.”
And if making animated films and sculptures isn’t enough, Marc is trying his hand at writing, with the ultimate goal of writing a book. “Writing’s hard, though. It’s harder than sculpting. I’d like to delve into that a bit more…I’m always doing stuff…Hopefully I always will [be].”
While his sculptures don’t have an online presence yet, you can learn more about Marc’s work as a filmmaker and an animator, as well as see his films here. Keep an eye out for a website coming soon.
