If you missed his latest exhibit, "Warren Criswell: Moves" at the Historic Arkansas Museum, then you missed a look at his latest work and current obsession--animation. And we're not talking Looney Tunes, here. Warren's animated themes are similar to his paintings--darkly engaging and mystifying in their portrayal of darkness and shadow. Through "The Crow: A Fragment," an animated short based on a poem by Wilhelm Müller and German art song "Die Kråhe" (The Crow) by Franz Schubert, Warren explores the starkness of nature in its pure and colorless form. He shows me a giant notebook of hundreds of sketches comprising a total of just a few animated minutes. "You can work all day at this and you're lucky to get two seconds," he explains. "At 24 frames per second, that's 48 drawings. I used to be happy with one drawing a day!"

Warren's Arkansas story is pretty interesting. He was an artist in Florida when he became disenchanted with the gallery scene and put down his paintbrushes and picked up a pen. He and his family took to the road, traveling across the country while Warren worked on various writing projects. He was writing a novel about the melting of the polar ice caps and the subsequent environmental effect. Warren says he consulted a map and decided that Little Rock might become a seaside city (or possibly underwater) if global warming ever created a catastrophic flood and wiped out the Gulf Coast region, so for research purposes, he and his family headed south. Along the way, Warren discarded his writing ambitions and began exploring art once more. "I was written out. On the road while I was writing, I began teaching myself watercolor, stealing time from the typewriter to play with watercolor. Gradually the art took over," he says. Arriving in Arkansas in the late 1970s, the Criswell family experienced a little transportation problem-their bus broke down-so they decided to settle in Central Arkansas, purchasing a rural piece of property near Benton.

Once Warren began painting again, he turned 180 degrees away from his earlier style of painting. "My writing had been autobiographical and my painting expressionistic. I was sick of myself and wanted no trace of Criswell to show in my new work, not even a brushstroke. I abandoned Modernism and called myself a realist." Shortly after making Arkansas home, Warren hooked up with Little Rock art pioneers Norman and Helen Scott with Cantrell Gallery. "The first works they showed of mine were photorealistic watercolors." Warren's bright watercolor works were a hit, but by 1983 he began to feel unfulfilled with the content and medium. "The bright sunny watercolors became dark brooding pastels and oils-a whole different thing," he explains. "It was Criswell coming back-like a bad dream. My viewers didn't understand it at all and I lost all my former collectors, but this is what it's all about--change--for me, anyway." Warren began focusing on techniques of the Old Masters, teaching himself how to paint in a realistic manner that has won him notoriety and respect in the art community. "Rembrandt, he was my guide, and I had to teach myself that style," says Warren. "No one paints that way anymore--the glaze and scumble thing--which I'm sure I don't do the way Rembrandt did. I kind of concocted my own technique, but it's based on that old-style pre-Impressionist way of painting." Through lots of practice and research, Warren sharpened his skills and became interested in the way the old masters created paint. "I make most of my own paint, grinding dry pigments into oil, as artists used to do before paint in tubes became commercially available in the 19th century," he explains. "I store my paint in metal tubes, however, not in pig's bladders." Warren's preferred medium is beeswax and oil, but he's certainly not limited to that. "Oil is the most flexible, you can do the most with it. When I get a great idea, that's my ultimate way to express it," he says. "But I love watercolor and drawing in ink and chalk too. Chalk also is a throwback to the materials Rubens and Rembrandt used. But the twist is that I use these old fashion methods to portray our world, not theirs."

It was an exhibit of Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Ruben's drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that drew him to New York City in 2004 where he unexpectedly discovered an artist whose work inspired him, leading to his latest artistic endeavors. "At the same time, at the same museum, there was a show of William Kentridge's animations. I somehow conflated those two shows and saw Reuben's drawings coming to life," he explains. "I became obsessed with the idea of making my drawings move!" Warren enjoys the new medium, saying "Animation is completely different from anything I've ever done before, and it seems like I need this kind of renewal or rejuvenation every now and then to keep myself going." He anticipates highlighting his films in two shows coming up this spring. On Thursday, March 2, Warren's films will be featured (along with other short films) at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Organized by the Art Students Association, the film night takes place the first Thursday of each month in lecture room 161 in UALR's Fine Arts building. His work will also be seen, along with works from 25 other artists, from May 12 to July 9 at the Terry House Community Gallery, as a part of the "Celebrating Excellence: Arkansas Arts Council Fellowship Program 1986-2006" exhibit. (The Arts Council awarded Warren a fellowship in 2003.)

I asked Warren (still in my materialistic mindset) how he planned on marketing and profiting from what is obviously time consuming, tedious work for just a few minutes of art. "I need a producer or something," Warren says, laughing. "In my mind the way I'll do this is, I'll show paintings and drawings associated with the films and I'll have a gallery show the film. What I'll sell are the peripherals. There's no point in selling a digital medium because people can copy and distribute it, but there must be some way to make money at this," he muses.

Warren's work can be seen locally at Cantrell Gallery and at Taylor's Contemporanea Arts in Hot Springs. (You can also visit his website for peeks at his work and a look at his animation, www.warrencriswell.com.) Warren says it took him a while to find his own artistic style and offers this advice to struggling artists: "Don't try to be yourself, just be yourself. In my first period of painting and at the beginning of my second I was trying to be unique, to find something novel in subject matter and technique. It wasn't until I gave that up--I saw it as giving up Modernism--and began emulating the old masters that people began to say my work was unique! I stopped having preconceived ideas about my work and just let it happen spontaneously."