Quentin Jones: Naked with Paint

Quentin Jones: Naked with Paint on Nowness.com.

The Coquettish Artist Becomes the Canvas in Her Latest Animated Short

Illustrator, animator and fashion filmmaker Quentin Jones paints a daring self-portrait in an inky new film for NOWNESS. The London-based model and Cambridge philosophy graduate, whose mélange of hand-drawn and digital animations have appeared in fashion films for Vogue, AnOther and The Hunger, ditched the usual scripts, storyboards and wardrobe to star in a freewheeling two-tone romp. A personal project developed during scarce downtime between projects for Chanel, Victoria Beckham and Kenzo, Jones toyed with the idea of painting directly onto her subject, in this case herself, side-stepping the interruptions of shooting stop-motion. Overlayed with cut-outs and illustrations, Jones’s films are a cheeky wink to Dadaism. “We developed this technique of dropping the ink onto bits of porcelain and blowing it around with a straw, then filming it move and superimposing that onto video,” reveals the autodidact. Regularly raiding art libraries for imagery, Jones can be faced with up to 25,000 jpegs to choose from, requiring an entirely different set of skills. “It's a really geeky stage, but editing could be the most creative part of the process, because you need to have a type of intuition.”