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I am very pleased to have been named as a finalist in the 2026 Bindi Digital Art Prize with my work “Coming Round the Mountain”.

Medium/materials used:

Digital motion picture incorporating 3D modelling and animation, machine learning, digital audo composition, digitally-processed analog images and audio, and digital non-linear video editing.

Description/Artist Statement:

The backbone of my submission for the Bindi Digital Art Prize is a 3D digital animation of a train travelling through a landscape.
I used Houdini software to model and animate the train, create the landscape, lay the tracks and add the cactii and vegetation.
I then processed this original animation through comfyUI machine learning software, to maximise the hallucinatory effect.

The original soundtrack has it’s genesis in two ambient pieces I created using modular synthesizer modules I built, running into the Bitwig digital audio workstation (DAW).

I loaded the animation as one clip into DaVinci Resolve non-linear digital video editor, which is incidentally awesome Australian software.
The insert frames are all digitally manipulated photos of my original artwork. All the visual processing was done in DaVinci Resolve’s Edit page, using tracking, zooming, colour changes and compositing.

The soundtrack was also designed and built inside DaVinci Resolve, in the Fairlight page.
I added the two ambient Bitwig pieces in separate tracks, and then laid down a couple of tracks of me singing “She’ll be Coming Round the Mountain”, an old folk song that is free of copyright restrictions.
The last addition to the soundtrack was several passes of my old friend Rouse playing some sweet slide on his old acoustic guitar.

Then I got to work with the digital processing of the audio, using everything from Chorus, Pitch Shifting and Delay to Multiband Compression, and reversing some of Rouse’ haunting slide guitar.

The final mix went through another Multiband Compressor.

I rendered the project to 2160 x 3840 UHD in DaVinci Resolve’s Deliver page using the YouTube MP4 preset, and uploaded the project to Google Drive.

I began planning my submission for the Bindi Digital Art Prize in July 2026, and finished most of the work in three or four days just before the submission was due.

Welcome to the art of Norval Watson in 2026: a brand new website update is now live 🙂

Photo: What’s not to like about lighthouses? Edward Hopper is one of my favourite artists, and the book is a big, heavy catalog of an exhibition of his work at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts.
The painting on the wall is “Goatstock”, featuring the goats that used to frequent the Byron Bay lighthouse precinct, and of course the immortal Jimi Hendrix. I painted it in 2011. Can’t remember if it’s oil or acrylic because I like painting with both.
Big thanks to the Seattle Watsons for gifting me this wonderful book, which will be on my book stand for another couple of weeks at least, and I think I’ve had a good long look at it several times before.