Animated Paint

about Lauren Gregory

Lauren is a third-generation southern painter from Tennessee, so she’s a painter too, and since we are in the animation era, you can see her artworks animating in places as music videos, stop-motions or funny gifs.

She began by following in her mother’s and grandmother’s footsteps, often painting friends and family in quick one-sitting sessions. In 2013, she helmed the music video for Toro y Moi’s Rose Quarts: “I have known these guys for a long time. Patrick and Jordan, the guitarist and the bassist, we all went to college together, art school at the University of South Carolina. We were buddies”.

“And then I met Chaz, a little bit later on. He had already seen my stuff, which was weird because I hadn’t been painting for that long at that point. He said he had always kind of been a fan“.

“I paint portraits of people, so I sit them down and put them in front of a movie and pretty much knock out a painting in a couple of hours. That’s been my thing for like a decade. When I was in grad school in Chicago, I wanted — the paintings — to move somehow. I didn’t really mean to animate them, but I started taking all these pictures and stringing them together. And then I was like, ‘Wait a second, I’m animating’. So I kind of threw myself into that world and just slowly taught myself how to do it.“

Her work was featured in the Aboveground Animation exhibit that displayed at the New Museum in New York and MOCA in Los Angeles.