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Bruce Bickford

Animates his wildest, and weirdest, dreams

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GREG GILBERT / THE SEATTLE TIMES

To meet The Amazing Mr. Bickford you must enter a wobbling and weird, shrinking and shape-shifting world he calls "versatile reality." Bruce Bickford's world is populated with clay figures rushing around in far-out stories born of laborious detail. In his world, a head can morph into a hungry hamburger, UFOs battle demons, the benign gets creepy and goes benign again.

Bickford, 58, has done stop animation, what we often call "claymation," for 40 years, always in his own way. He achieved cult status in the 1970s and '80s, providing psychedelic — some would say psychotic — animation for Frank Zappa films "Baby Snakes," "The Dub Room Special" and, fittingly, "The Amazing Mr. Bickford." A recent award-winning documentary about his work, called "Monster Road," exposed Bickford's underground genius to a new audience.

He is nearly as distinct as his characters: thin, prominent forehead head poking from a shock of white hair, dark eyes competing with etched eyebrows. He lives and works alone in the SeaTac house where he was raised. The Kent Valley sprawls beneath his window while figurines, half-finished projects and camera equipment sprawl about his messy house. Tales of UFOs, bean-pod aliens and other dreamy snippets fill two boxes. His garage is crammed with clay figures: leaning trees, witch doctors, asymmetrical skulls, faces and hats and arms and legs and eyes, gladiators and skiers and and skeletons and forts.

Decades of creations surround an old animator's still camera to capture motion for the reams of pencil-and-paper stories stacked against one wall. He hopes to release a DVD but is awash in ideas and half-done projects. The nuts and bolts, facts and figures? Forget it. The art, he will spend all day every day with.

"By 12 or 13 I got into clay real heavily. I remember making a spaceship with 50 people sitting in it in rows. Then I would simulate a crash. I'd hurl it to the ground as hard as I could and pry it open to see what happened to the people inside. Within a couple years of that, I was putting details on heads the size of BBs."

To sample what can't be explained in words, see: http://brucebickford.com/media/