1040 Paintings in 5 Months: How I Learned to Make My Art Move

"1040 Paintings in 5 Months: How I Learned to Make My Art Move" is the story of an incredible adventure.

My wife, Carol, is an extraordinary artist. She is an author, composer, singer, comedian, and vocal wellness coach, and I have always admired the depth of her creativity and talent. She spent five years building a musical called "J'oublie souvent qu'il n'est Zametrotar", which translates as "I often forget that it's never too late." It was performed at the Caudan Arts Centre in Mauritius in March 2026. Anyone who has tried to stage a show on this island knows how hard it is, and Carol carried the whole thing forward with a tenacity and a willpower that still amazes me.

Coming on board

I joined the project in August 2025. Carol wanted me to illustrate the thirteen songs she would perform on stage, with video projected behind her onto a screen measuring six by ten meters. Our first idea was simple: project still images taken from paintings I had already made. But the more we talked, the more we felt that motion would carry the emotion further. Still images would sit there on the screen, whereas animated ones could breathe with the music. That is when we found a company called Mopix and an animator named Frédéric Antoinette, who could turn my drawings into short animated films rather than fixed pictures. By then we had six months left before opening night.

Learning a new tool

To collaborate closely with Frédéric and quickly correct my drawings, I decided to work on an iPad. I had never used one before. I also had to rebuild my Zafer style from scratch in a digital form, which was daunting, because so much of that style lives in the hand and the brush. I chose an app called Procreate and took a crash course on Udemy and YouTube. After a great deal of trial and error, I managed to produce digital paintings that genuinely looked like the real ones, with bold outlines, flat fields of colour, and layered patterns I have spent years developing.

Illustrating someone else's thoughts

While I was still learning the software, Carol and I worked side by side on sketches and storyboards. She wanted the videos to reveal the main character's inner thoughts as she stood on stage, and this work was critical to the entire show. It turned out to be the hardest part of all. Illustrating your own ideas is one thing; illustrating someone else's inner world is another entirely, and it took us a long time to find our way. I kept the technical limits in mind at every step, because images made for animation are slow and demanding to produce. Moving from the habits of a traditional painter to the many technical requirements of animation was a real adjustment, and the small imperfections in some of my artwork gave Frédéric genuine challenges and long extra hours at his desk. He rose to every one of them, and the final result is a tribute to his skill and patience. We owe him a great deal.

The scale of it

For this show, I produced more than 1,040 paintings, composed of over 1,500 separate elements, each of which had to be drawn individually. It was an enormous amount of work to compress into five months, on top of learning an entirely new tool and a new way of thinking. It was also an enormous amount of experience gained, the kind you cannot get any other way except by throwing yourself into the deep end and refusing to sink.

Where it leads

The Zametrotar adventure carried me into a realm I had never entered. For the first time, I could see my paintings as moving images rather than fixed ones, alive and shifting with sound and light. I do not yet know exactly where this will take me, but I have a strong feeling it will change how I think about exhibiting my work. There may be a new way to show what I do, one that lets the paintings move, and I intend to find it. If Carol's title says anything, it is that it is never too late to begin.