Abigail Portner's drawings and paintings focus primarily around the themes of children, masks, skeletons and animals. Her images are at once both filled with positive light and dark feelings. As one of the chief visual collaborators with Animal Collective—her drawings have become tour posters and t-shirts, while more recently she has evolved the work to stop motion animation for the "In The Flowers" video and designed large scale stage sets for the band's NYC shows last summer—and sister of the band's Dave Portner, her art has become an inseparable part of the band's uncompromising visual identity. But she is also forging a career in her own right. Although she studied fine art at Parsons, her work sheds the constraints of formal education and is reminiscent of outsider art with its contorted innocence and warped fairytale style. It is both accessible and difficult, simultaneously sweet and disturbing. Portner is currently consumed with extending the illustration she contributed to the The FADER's special Animal Collective-curated issue to an infinite series of panels, and in this audio slideshow talks about producing work which has come to define the band's visual image but also stands outside this context in its own right.
