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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - German composer Richard Wagner called multi-media artwork Gesamtkunstwerk, meaning 'total artwork.' Playwrights, graphic designers and architects toyed with the aesthetic theory throughout the twentieth century.

"It's this idea achieved sometime during the modernist period and basically it's where the artist does everything," explained digital artist and painter Aiden Cartwright.

Cartwright marries classical traditions with contemporary media to create animations and conceptual documentaries that blend oil paint, charcoal, sculpture, live models and audio recordings on video.

"I'm a great believer that the art world is very quickly changing,"he said. "It's never been a better time to be an artist."

In addition to traditional animation, some of Cartwright's videos depict the process of painting by combining live video footage and stop motion animation set to a self-produced soundtrack.

His largest video, titled A Flux of Inflammation Breeds Creation from my Fingertips, took three months to complete. He lifted the title from a poem he wrote, composed music to it and created a seven-foot by five-foot painting. He captured the emerging stages of the canvas on camera.

"I made a painting that ended up having a video as a byproduct. But I couldn't have made the painting without making the video and I couldn't have made the video without making the painting. I like to think that it calls into question what a painting is."

In another video, Cartwright again shot the stages of a painting on canvas starting with the thick application of a primer undercoat. He added streams of colour then finished by white-washing the entire canvas, concealing the earlier stages of the painting except for the bumps and grooves from the oil paint. He projected the video back onto the finished white canvas to reenact the work.

"I love video because with online video sites like YouTube, people can just put whatever they want up at anytime,"he said. "Video art has often been attacked in the past as kind of low-budget amateur film making - and it is. But, I think it is an interesting medium because you can have animation, digital footage, traditional film and you can mix and match documentary, stories, anything."

Cartwright grew up in Fort Good Hope and attended high school in Yellowknife. His art teacher at Sir John Franklin, Betty Wilcox, remembers his bold originality.

"He was always pushing the envelope as much as you can at the high school level and experimenting with different techniques,"she said. "He was really exploring."

Cartwright returned to Calgary last month to continue studies at the Alberta College of Art and Design, where he majors in media arts and digital technologies.

He plans to move back up to Yellowknife following the completion of his degree, in part to collaborate on music videos with musicians in the North.

"No one noticed bands like the White Stripes until they suddenly busted out these amazing music videos like the Lego one and the Seven Nation Army video and there's got to be an artist making that somewhere," he said. "There's great talent in Yellowknife. It just has such a tough time getting out there. With the Internet, you get a great song and put it with a great video and people will notice it."