By @JustinWetch

Jake Fried's most recent piece is one minute long. He spent a year on it. Four to five frames per day, every day, for three hundred and sixty-five days. Somewhere in there, in a fraction of a second that nobody will ever consciously register at normal speed, he hand-drew family photos in the background.

He could have left it blank. A square of nothing. Nobody would have noticed.

"I took the time to draw those photos," Jake says. "There's a spirituality there, where it's like I'm putting it in, not for you, the viewer, but for God, for the gods."

This is how Jake Fried makes art. Every frame finished by hand, every detail present whether or not a human eye catches it, every minute of animation earned through a year of drawing and redrawing and scanning and painting out and starting again. He calls the results moving paintings. They look like nothing else because they can't. There's no software that produces them, no tutorial that teaches them, no trick that shortcuts the labor.

"Attention to detail is something that is felt," he says. "No one's gonna look at every line or everything you do in detail. But it comes across anyways."

Jake always knew. It was never a question. He was drawing by six or seven, making caricatures and cartoons of domestic life, and the identity stuck so early it felt more like something placed on him than something he chose. He has a two-year-old daughter now who goes at blank paper with markers for hours, clearly knows when a page is done, and moves on. He watches her and thinks: that was probably me.

He grew up in the Midwest in a culturally engaged  Jewish family, four sisters, movies and books and museums and Seinfeld on Thursday nights. His grandparents were European Jews who emigrated, and he grew up around Holocaust remembrance art, German expressionist painting, the whole lineage of people making images because they had to. Philip Guston was huge. Robert Crumb's underground comics. Escher. Kafka. Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung. "I shamelessly lift motifs and designs from all different cultures," he says, and he means it literally. Ten years working in a museum will do that. He memorized painting dates decade by decade, absorbed everything.

The education started absurdly early. He apprenticed with a cartoonist as a kid, basically hanging around being an assistant and soaking it up. He got into a RISD summer program at fifteen, came home and told his parents he was done with public school. He transferred to an arts boarding school outside Boston with a full studio and ceramics department and oil painting, the kind of access most high schoolers can't imagine. Then art school, then an art history degree (he switched from painting because "what is the point of a painting degree?"), then teaching, then the museum.

But here's the thing that makes Jake unusual in this series: all of that knowledge lives in a completely separate room from his studio practice.

"When I'm in the studio making my own work, it's way more gut," he says. "It's not formalized. I'm trying to reach into my subconscious."

The academic Jake can argue any case, lecture with clarity, trace a motif across millennia. The studio Jake doesn't outline, doesn't plan, doesn't consciously reference anything. 

The process: Jake takes a painting or a drawing, photographs or scans it, then changes it. Paints something out, redraws it, scans it again. Changes it, reworks it, scans it. Over and over, the same physical surface being destroyed and rebuilt, each state captured as a single frame. The frames accumulate into these hypnotic, hallucinatory sequences that loop and pulse, five seconds to a minute long, black and white with occasional washes of color.

Most animators work with key frames, roughing out the major positions first and filling in the movement between them. Jake works straight ahead. He starts at the beginning and moves forward, one frame at a time, never going back to revise. The only editing he does is subtraction: dropping frames to make a movement pop rather than glide. He compares it to stitching a Persian rug, finishing it line by line as you go.

"Every day I go into the studio, I'm always working on the bleeding edge of the film," he says. "The past is laid out. The future is completely unknown. You're alive right now in the present moment."

Because the process is so slow, something strange happens with timing. He'll spend a week moving a shape from one position to another, and halfway through realize the transition itself is more interesting than the destination. "I'm starting to transition without realizing I'm in a transition," he says. The slowness creates room for spontaneity. He takes twists and turns, and the frenetic, unpredictable quality of the finished work comes directly from those weeks of sitting with a single movement and deciding, at the last minute, to send it somewhere else.

The physical-to-digital translation matters to him. Paper absorbs ink and reflects light. A screen emits light. When he got his first good scanner and zoomed in on the grain of the paper, saw the ink bleeding into the fibers, something clicked. He loves the way physical art looks on a glowing screen. He wants you to feel the paper, the pen, the resistance of the surface, even if you're watching it on your phone.

"I'm a painter, but I don't make paintings," Jake says. "I'm an animator, but I don't really make animation. My work is narrative, but I don't really tell stories." He likes not belonging to any category.

"I'm not a craftsman alone," Jake says. "I'm a shaman. I'm trying to conjure something."

He means this. When he puts pen to paper, the world disappears. Body, anxieties, responsibilities, hunger, all of it drops away. The drawing hypnotizes him. He's been developing this skill his whole life, this ability to slip into a state where conscious thought stops and something else takes over. When he makes art that's pre-planned or didactic, he can feel it going dead. The real work happens when he's not thinking.

"I don't trust myself to be a genius in a day," he says, "but I do think if I work really hard on something every day for a year, there's a possibility that I might land on something that  approaches genius."

His entire public body of work on YouTube is twelve one-minute films spanning thirteen years. That's it. His pantheon, he calls it. Twelve films that represent the best of him, with nothing extra, no ephemera, no filler. There's a nice irony here: he'll spend three hours on a little flip book, post it online, and it gets 70,000 likes. Years-long animations get a fraction of that attention. He doesn't care. They're fun, they're experiments, but they don't carry weight. "Anything I do quickly, essentially, it doesn't matter as much to me."

He wishes more people understood that it's all hand-drawn, that it takes a very long time, that there's no secret software or code. He also makes all the music for his work, something he thinks is often overlooked. "In animation, we say sound is like 80% of animation," he says. "The sound design work is as much my expression and my art as the visuals are."

And he's an educator. He's taught kindergartners to graduate students, lectured at colleges, worked at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design for over a decade. He recently got invited back to his old boarding school to speak at an event. He thought about what he'd say and realized the school had been the cantina on his hero's journey, the waystation where he mingled with people from outside his world before heading out on his own.

"I'm the universe experiencing itself," he says, then laughs at himself. "I'm gonna stop there."

Supporters whose belief has mattered: @Vince_Van_Dough, who has been an important collector and champion of his work, alongside the entire team at @AOTMgallery.

Artists inspiring him lately: @bagdelete (Noper), for the quality of movement in their work and something he can only call the vibe. @0xTjo, whose emotional power and allegory he connects with so deeply he wrote them a graduate school recommendation letter. @omentejovem, whose hand-drawn work feels arrived at, found through a journey rather than decided on ahead of time. And @cydr, whose digital distortion he finds genuinely haunting, dealing with classical themes through corrupted texture in ways that feel formally new.

For future Weekly Dose of Art episodes, @jakejfried recommends @ruptureNFT, @hazedlockdown, and @johnkarborn.