Kremer says she “started on a Mac right away — visually creative people really prefer to be working on the Mac because the interface is so approachable — and there’s been no reason to move away from it.”

Working in Photoshop and Flash, she says, “was very much an invent-as-you-go process, which is not the usual way animation is done. In traditional animation, you use storyboards and you have a plan. I wanted to work in the same way that I paint, which is intuitive and spontaneous.”

Early Experiments

Kremer’s first experiments in digital media involved animating text from poetry she had written. Flash, she says, “gave me the opportunity to show in real time the thought process of writing and editing.”

For another project, Kremer used iMovie to create a simple sequence of related drawings and put music to it. “iMovie is dead easy,” she says, “so it was a good way to start.”

One of Kremer’s drawing animations, “Shtetl,” now at Berkeley’s Judah L. Magnes Museum, explores her family’s relationship with pre- and post-World War II Poland.

Working from Roman Vishniac’s black-and-white photographs of the Polish shtetl in the 1930s, Kremer merged her own contour drawings with the photos to link past and present.

Opening Up

Though she began animating her work in Flash and iMovie, Kremer found that once she started using Motion, “the whole thing opened up,” she says.

“Visually creative people really prefer to be working on the Mac because the interface is so approachable.”

“What I like about working digitally is that it lets me have other kinds of ideas than in painting,” she explains. “You can’t know what a time-based piece is unless you spend the time to watch it. There’s no requirement as to how long it takes to see a painting. It’s a self-regulated journey, and everybody comes to a painting in a slightly different way. So the linearity of time-based work is interesting in contrast to the all-at-once quality of a painting.”

Kremer also likes the scale of digital works: they can cover whole walls.

Staying Fresh

Kremer says working digitally “makes me aware of what painting is. I have a pretty brisk painting practice and working digitally seems to energize it.

“Artists,” she adds, “never like to stick to one medium exclusively, because you can just kind of dry up. Working digitally enhances my work. I notice that I come back to painting feeling much freer because of having seen pieces of paint move around, seeing new possible compositions.

“You always want to be fresh,” she emphasizes. “One of the ways of doing that is by changing medium. Picasso used to do sculpture, ceramics and printmaking; I think if he were alive today he’d be doing things in digital media.”