“Once I saw my drawings move, it was a big magical connection,’’ she told the Globe in 1994. “It is a really addicting experience, to see the things moving. For all the things we come to hate about it, like the process being so tedious and how long it takes to do it and how hard it is to get your stuff shown, it seems impossible to do anything else.’’
Ms. Aqua, whose work was shown in festivals and museums worldwide in places as distant as Hawaii and Iran and who created 22 animated sequences for the popular children’s television show “Sesame Street,’’ died Monday in Brigham and Women’s Hospital, about a decade after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
She was 57 and lived in Cambridge.
“Karen did animation for a reason,’’ said her husband, the musician Ken Field. “She really had a very clear vision of what she wanted her art to look like, and animation is an art where you can have pretty much total control of what gets created, within your own technical limitations.’’
The creative process, though arduous, “suited my personality,’’ Ms. Aqua told the Globe in 1994. “I could lock myself in a room and have complete control over my work, and not have to depend on anyone else.’’
She even came to like the different phases of creativity, some of which were controlled by those who might never set foot in her studio.
“You go through changes, just like the film,’’ she told the Globe in 1981. “There’s the verbal stage when you’re applying for a grant. Then you make a storyboard, and your idea changes. Single drawings are next, and then you film. The finished film is a very different animal. I like that feeling of change.’’
Viewers liked what emerged from her hands.
In 1982, Globe film critic Michael Blowen called Ms. Aqua “clearly one of the finest animation artists in the country’’ in a review of “Vis-á-Vis,’’ a film in which she mused visually about her own creative process.
