Conventional animation involves artists creating backgrounds against which characters and objects move. Every move is separately drawn. It's painstaking work.
Such animation has largely been supplanted by computer animation, the best practitioners of which are probably the people at Pixar.
But a project on the life of Vincent Van Gogh, Loving Vincent, is revolutionizing conventional animation. Instead of characters and objects moving against largely unchanging backgrounds, this movie about the painter uses a separately produced painting for each and every frame.
It's an appropriate way to approach Van Gogh's life, the images inspired by his painting style.
And the images shown here are stunning. And since Van Gogh is my favorite painter, I don't think I would be easily stunned.
The project is still in production apparently. I look forward to seeing the finished product.
(And I'm sure that one day, those of you so inclined, will be able to buy selections from among the massive number of individual paintings created for the film.)
Here's a link to more information on Loving Vincent, also containing a slightly longer version of the trailer.
Thanks to the Daily Dot for showcasing this effort over on Facebook. That's how I learned of it.
Showing posts with label Art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Art. Show all posts
Thursday, March 17, 2016
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
Is Ryan Mendoza's 'The White House' a tribute to family connectedness and home...
...or an example of "blight porn"?
Ryan Mendoza, a US artist living in Europe, has moved an entire repossessed and blighted home from Detroit, whitewashed it, and filled it with soft lighting and a projection of pictures of the family that once occupied the home and of his own family of origin. It's now on display as a piece of art in Europe.
According to Mendoza, the purpose of the piece wasn't to make a work of art that trivializes Detroit's struggles. An article from USA Today says: "[Mendoza] hit on the idea of reclaiming a house, a symbol of familial legacy and protection, as a way of embracing his past rather than running away from it."
But some people feel that glossy photographs or exhibitions like Mendoza's are exploitative:
The more basic question for some people might be, "Is this art?" But that's a question that people have been asking ever since the dadaists put things like bicycle wheels on display and called it art.
The thing that intrigues me about this piece, called The White House, is the way Mendoza has woven the sense of home he remembers from his childhood with the life of the Thomases, an African-American family who once owned the house.
Home can be a powerful anchor for us, especially in our growing-up years. One day when my son was in his twenties, he and I took a walk with my father through my childhood neighborhood, the neighborhood where my family and my grandparents both lived. It was a sunny day, a gentle breeze trembling the branches of the trees all along the street, the leaves making that hissing sound, rustling as I remembered them doing so often when I was a boy. I told my father and my son, "When I was coming home from school in the afternoon, walking down this street, I used to think to myself, 'This is the most perfect place on earth.'"
That sense of home, family, and safety, says Mendoza, is what he wanted to evoke, a universal yearning--if not a universal experience--that he surfaces by linking his own family's pictures with those of another clan he never previously knew.
Vincent Thomas, who grew up in the house, for one, doesn't seem to view Mendoza's work of art as an example of "blight porn:
Mendoza claims to be committed to that:
Ryan Mendoza, a US artist living in Europe, has moved an entire repossessed and blighted home from Detroit, whitewashed it, and filled it with soft lighting and a projection of pictures of the family that once occupied the home and of his own family of origin. It's now on display as a piece of art in Europe.
[Ryan Mendoza's The White House on display in Rotterdam.]
According to Mendoza, the purpose of the piece wasn't to make a work of art that trivializes Detroit's struggles. An article from USA Today says: "[Mendoza] hit on the idea of reclaiming a house, a symbol of familial legacy and protection, as a way of embracing his past rather than running away from it."
But some people feel that glossy photographs or exhibitions like Mendoza's are exploitative:
In a story appearing on the the website of the British newspaper the Guardian, Brian Doucet and Drew Philp wrote of the dangers of reducing Detroit to the single image of an abandoned or gutted home, implying that the city is empty and turning the ruins into objets d'art: "Collectively, the glossy photo books, websites and art projects all serve to produce and reinforce a simplistic narrative of Detroit as a blank slate, in need of white, middle-class saviors."That doesn't appear to be part of Mendoza's motivation, but I understand the point.
The more basic question for some people might be, "Is this art?" But that's a question that people have been asking ever since the dadaists put things like bicycle wheels on display and called it art.
The thing that intrigues me about this piece, called The White House, is the way Mendoza has woven the sense of home he remembers from his childhood with the life of the Thomases, an African-American family who once owned the house.
Home can be a powerful anchor for us, especially in our growing-up years. One day when my son was in his twenties, he and I took a walk with my father through my childhood neighborhood, the neighborhood where my family and my grandparents both lived. It was a sunny day, a gentle breeze trembling the branches of the trees all along the street, the leaves making that hissing sound, rustling as I remembered them doing so often when I was a boy. I told my father and my son, "When I was coming home from school in the afternoon, walking down this street, I used to think to myself, 'This is the most perfect place on earth.'"
That sense of home, family, and safety, says Mendoza, is what he wanted to evoke, a universal yearning--if not a universal experience--that he surfaces by linking his own family's pictures with those of another clan he never previously knew.
Vincent Thomas, who grew up in the house, for one, doesn't seem to view Mendoza's work of art as an example of "blight porn:
"Truthfully, I wanted to repair [the house], but there was black mold and I couldn't afford to do it," he said. "I'm glad that somebody is doing something with it. But I hope something positive comes out of it for the city. That still needs to happen."Amen! Detroit needs help and prayers. A once-great city still should have a shot at a great future.
[The way the Thomas house looked before it was dismantled in Detroit and sent to Europe.]
Mendoza claims to be committed to that:
Mendoza hopes to have additional façades of Detroit houses sent to Europe, where he wants to auction them off and send the money back to Detroit for reinvestment in neighborhoods, helping city residents buy or upgrade homes.That would be one wonderful way for Ryan Mendoza to reassure those skeptical about The White House. I hope that he can follow through on his plan.
Saturday, May 09, 2015
Saturday This and That
Things that caught my eye this past week...
People are ticked off at Manny Pacquiao...
...They think they were ripped off because he boxed with a severely injured rotator cuff. And the Nevada Boxing Commission isn't too happy with him either. But I think the promoters are gleefully counting their take.
If you like Chipotle's guacamole...
...the restaurant chain has made your dreams come true, revealing their "secret" recipe this past week.
The secret recipe for getting "millennials" in church?...
...Be the church.
In recent presidential election cycles, less experience...
...has led to victory in November.
If you're passing through Dayton in the next month...
...there's still time to see the Dayton Art Institute's interesting show, on loan from the Reading museum, of American Impressionism works. Saw it a few months ago and it's worth the price of admission.
People are ticked off at Manny Pacquiao...
...They think they were ripped off because he boxed with a severely injured rotator cuff. And the Nevada Boxing Commission isn't too happy with him either. But I think the promoters are gleefully counting their take.
If you like Chipotle's guacamole...
...the restaurant chain has made your dreams come true, revealing their "secret" recipe this past week.
The secret recipe for getting "millennials" in church?...
...Be the church.
In recent presidential election cycles, less experience...
...has led to victory in November.
If you're passing through Dayton in the next month...
...there's still time to see the Dayton Art Institute's interesting show, on loan from the Reading museum, of American Impressionism works. Saw it a few months ago and it's worth the price of admission.
Monday, December 17, 2012
Agatha Christie, Ian McKellen, Michael Jecks, and 'Democratic Art'
Ian McKellen reprises his role of Gandalf from the Lord of the Rings films in The Hobbit, projected to be the first of three films chronicling the prequel time before the Rings adventures.
In an interview with TIME, McKellen pronounced that the one playright in whose plays he's acted that he hates to be Agatha Christie, the noted mystery writer. McKellen claims, "I've done a couple of plays--misery, rubbish. No sense of what human beings are at all."
Coincidentally, in a recent Twitter exchange with contemporary British mystery writer Michael Jecks, we agreed that Christie's characters are somewhat thinly developed. I tweeted Jecks:
You see, the lack of deep character development, at least in the supporting cast of characters--suspects, mainly--in Christie's stories doesn't necessarily denote "no sense of human beings at all."
Clearly, she had a tremendous understanding of the human beings for whom she wrote her novels, stories, and plays.
She understood that in a workaday world of confounding mysteries, there's nothing more appealing to our egos or to our desire for order than a mystery in which we join the hero in resolving matters and setting things right.
The proof of how well she understood these things about us is in the enduring popularity of her work, even though much of it takes place in a Jeeves and Wooster world long gone.
Christie, like Alfred Hitchcock, also understood something primal in all human beings: Our terror that, at any moment, our well-ordered world could come crashing down on us.
So, while Christie's characters may be plastic, her understanding of the characters of those who read or viewed her works was anything but. In this, she remains lastingly insightful.
And this is why her work is more vital, more infused with character, than McKellen's dismissal of Christie would have it.
Years ago, I remember reading an essay by Ralph Gleason in Rolling Stone about the music of Bob Dylan. Much of Dylan's work is filled with Dylan's penchant for, in a phrase by Joan Baez in a song about her relationship with Dylan, "keeping things vague." Cryptic language, the meaning of which is ambiguous, can initially drive a hearer away from Dylan, not to mention the thinness of Dylan's voice and the usual sparseness of his arrangements. But those who stick with listening to Dylan are rewarded richly. Dylan's music, Gleason said, represents a "democratic art," work to which each listener brings her or his experiences, fears, and hopes. Dylan, at his best, doesn't tell you what to feel. He takes you to a place and lets you feel what you feel. That, asserted Gleason, is democratic art.
In a way, this is precisely what Christie did and still does. Actors in Christie plays or in scripts based on her stories, as Jecks pointed out, love the freedom of infusing the characters with whatever meaning or quirks they can. Readers are given the same freedom when they sit down to read a mystery by Christie.
In essence, Christie invites us to become her co-authors, to flesh out the characters she trots before us in our imaginations.
I read other authors to find fully realized characters in more realistic life situations. But that doesn't mean, as McKellen says, that Agatha Christie had no sense of human beings at all.
I find, in fact, that she knows me, anyway, very well.
In an interview with TIME, McKellen pronounced that the one playright in whose plays he's acted that he hates to be Agatha Christie, the noted mystery writer. McKellen claims, "I've done a couple of plays--misery, rubbish. No sense of what human beings are at all."
Coincidentally, in a recent Twitter exchange with contemporary British mystery writer Michael Jecks, we agreed that Christie's characters are somewhat thinly developed. I tweeted Jecks:
...have you read much of Agatha Christie? I just finished one of hers. She writes puzzles...In the meantime, Jecks wrote back:
...People seem more like caricatures. Yet I find her mysteries addictive.
Hah! You beat me to that one! Yes, but they are fun and entertaining. Turn off mind etc...Jecks and I may seem to be saying the same thing as McKellen about Christie's work. But I don't think that's entirely so.
...Yes puzzles: no characterisation really, which is why actors love her. They can stamp their own mark very easily! I enjoy 'em...
You see, the lack of deep character development, at least in the supporting cast of characters--suspects, mainly--in Christie's stories doesn't necessarily denote "no sense of human beings at all."
Clearly, she had a tremendous understanding of the human beings for whom she wrote her novels, stories, and plays.
She understood that in a workaday world of confounding mysteries, there's nothing more appealing to our egos or to our desire for order than a mystery in which we join the hero in resolving matters and setting things right.
The proof of how well she understood these things about us is in the enduring popularity of her work, even though much of it takes place in a Jeeves and Wooster world long gone.
Christie, like Alfred Hitchcock, also understood something primal in all human beings: Our terror that, at any moment, our well-ordered world could come crashing down on us.
So, while Christie's characters may be plastic, her understanding of the characters of those who read or viewed her works was anything but. In this, she remains lastingly insightful.
And this is why her work is more vital, more infused with character, than McKellen's dismissal of Christie would have it.
Years ago, I remember reading an essay by Ralph Gleason in Rolling Stone about the music of Bob Dylan. Much of Dylan's work is filled with Dylan's penchant for, in a phrase by Joan Baez in a song about her relationship with Dylan, "keeping things vague." Cryptic language, the meaning of which is ambiguous, can initially drive a hearer away from Dylan, not to mention the thinness of Dylan's voice and the usual sparseness of his arrangements. But those who stick with listening to Dylan are rewarded richly. Dylan's music, Gleason said, represents a "democratic art," work to which each listener brings her or his experiences, fears, and hopes. Dylan, at his best, doesn't tell you what to feel. He takes you to a place and lets you feel what you feel. That, asserted Gleason, is democratic art.
In a way, this is precisely what Christie did and still does. Actors in Christie plays or in scripts based on her stories, as Jecks pointed out, love the freedom of infusing the characters with whatever meaning or quirks they can. Readers are given the same freedom when they sit down to read a mystery by Christie.
In essence, Christie invites us to become her co-authors, to flesh out the characters she trots before us in our imaginations.
I read other authors to find fully realized characters in more realistic life situations. But that doesn't mean, as McKellen says, that Agatha Christie had no sense of human beings at all.
I find, in fact, that she knows me, anyway, very well.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Our Great Philadelphia Adventure (Part 2)
It wasn't all fun, education, and inspiration on our just-ended trip to Philadelphia.
We also ate. I had to have authentic Philadelphia Cheese Steaks. I got them at two places. The first was in downtown Philly, just blocks from Independence Hall: Sonny's.
There's nothing fancy about Sonny's. It's simple, in your face fare. (The ambiance reminds of me my all-time favorite pizza place, Tommy's, in Columbus.) You can eat inside or, if you can find a spot on beautiful fall day like we enjoyed two days ago, out on the sidewalk. According to Sunny's, authentic Cheese Steak uses Cheese Whiz. I couldn't go there. Provolone suited me fine. You could tell that the cut of meat was high quality. It was great, although there's no indication that Sunny has found a way to remove the cholesterol from the sandwich.
Yesterday, we were in Chadds Ford, a suburb of Philadelphia. A little spot called Hank's Place, which we later learned is frequented by local Andrew Wyeth, appeared from the outside to be a good place for lunch. Little did we know that we'd found a gem. The restaurant was packed. Regulars waiting in line told us that everything on their menu was great. Their Cheese Steak, which used an even better cut of meat, was outstanding.
We were in Chadds Ford to visit the Brandywine River Museum and the home and studio of Andrew Wyeth's father, N.C. Wyeth. The museum had displays that included the works of various illustrator/artists, people who, like the first Wyeth, have done both commercial art for magazines, advertisers, and books and what's called "fine art." Among the artists represented in the display are Maxfield Parrish and Howard Pyle, the latter being Wyeth's mentor. The tour of Wyeth's home and art studio is informative and fun.
In Philadelphia on Friday, in addition to seeing Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, we also took in a display of the portraits by Charles Wilson Peale and other of his late-eighteenth, early-nineteenth century contemporaries of important historical figures of that period. Peale was a showman, part Da Vinci, part Walt Disney, part P.T. Barnum, part scientist and historian. His museum in Philadelphia was a way for ordinary folks to not only see samples of the world's animal and plant life, but also to look at the faces of the celebrities and heroes of their time. Peale's portraits in particular, now in what was the Second National Bank in Philadelpia, appear not only to faithfully render the faces of his subjects, they also seem to convey something of who they were. One of his portraits of John Adams, for example, seems to catch the second president in mid-sentence, about to turn to you with a clinching argument. His Jefferson seems duly aloof, yet ready in an instant, to employ his vaunted charm when necessary.
And if all of this weren't enough for our family obsessed with history, we also went to Valley Forge, where Washington and his battered army wintered in 1777-78, and what's now called Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania, where the miraculous crossing of the Delaware River on Christmas, 1776, took place.
Also worthy of mention and a visit: Washington Memorial Chapel at Valley Forge and Christ Church in Philadelphia.
We also ate. I had to have authentic Philadelphia Cheese Steaks. I got them at two places. The first was in downtown Philly, just blocks from Independence Hall: Sonny's.
There's nothing fancy about Sonny's. It's simple, in your face fare. (The ambiance reminds of me my all-time favorite pizza place, Tommy's, in Columbus.) You can eat inside or, if you can find a spot on beautiful fall day like we enjoyed two days ago, out on the sidewalk. According to Sunny's, authentic Cheese Steak uses Cheese Whiz. I couldn't go there. Provolone suited me fine. You could tell that the cut of meat was high quality. It was great, although there's no indication that Sunny has found a way to remove the cholesterol from the sandwich.
Yesterday, we were in Chadds Ford, a suburb of Philadelphia. A little spot called Hank's Place, which we later learned is frequented by local Andrew Wyeth, appeared from the outside to be a good place for lunch. Little did we know that we'd found a gem. The restaurant was packed. Regulars waiting in line told us that everything on their menu was great. Their Cheese Steak, which used an even better cut of meat, was outstanding.
We were in Chadds Ford to visit the Brandywine River Museum and the home and studio of Andrew Wyeth's father, N.C. Wyeth. The museum had displays that included the works of various illustrator/artists, people who, like the first Wyeth, have done both commercial art for magazines, advertisers, and books and what's called "fine art." Among the artists represented in the display are Maxfield Parrish and Howard Pyle, the latter being Wyeth's mentor. The tour of Wyeth's home and art studio is informative and fun.
In Philadelphia on Friday, in addition to seeing Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, we also took in a display of the portraits by Charles Wilson Peale and other of his late-eighteenth, early-nineteenth century contemporaries of important historical figures of that period. Peale was a showman, part Da Vinci, part Walt Disney, part P.T. Barnum, part scientist and historian. His museum in Philadelphia was a way for ordinary folks to not only see samples of the world's animal and plant life, but also to look at the faces of the celebrities and heroes of their time. Peale's portraits in particular, now in what was the Second National Bank in Philadelpia, appear not only to faithfully render the faces of his subjects, they also seem to convey something of who they were. One of his portraits of John Adams, for example, seems to catch the second president in mid-sentence, about to turn to you with a clinching argument. His Jefferson seems duly aloof, yet ready in an instant, to employ his vaunted charm when necessary.
And if all of this weren't enough for our family obsessed with history, we also went to Valley Forge, where Washington and his battered army wintered in 1777-78, and what's now called Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania, where the miraculous crossing of the Delaware River on Christmas, 1776, took place.
Also worthy of mention and a visit: Washington Memorial Chapel at Valley Forge and Christ Church in Philadelphia.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Weird (and Wonderful) Public Art
Should all art look like something? That is, should it represent something? I don't think so. Whether it's visual art, music, poetry, or statuary, I think that there's enough room in the world for all kinds of art, from the representational variety to "art for art's sake." (I write a bit about that here. Also see here.)Triggering these thoughts is a post by Ann Althouse, who published her own photograph of the big--untitled--Picasso statue that adorns--and defines--Daley Plaza in Chicago. It roused these thoughts and memories from me:
I remember the controversy that surrounded the installation of the Picasso sculpture in 1967. I went to Chicago for a visit with my aunt, uncle, and cousins, who lived in nearby DuPage County, just two years later. It was the weirdest and, to my fifteen year old mind, most wonderful piece of public art I'd ever seen.What do you think, does art always have to represent something? Or is it enough that it either reflects an artist's passion or engenders passion in us?Nine years after the Picasso was installed in Daley Plaza, we had a similar controversy over a piece of public sculpture in my hometown of Columbus. A group of local patrons made it possible for the Columbus Museum of Art to purchase what I believe was then one of two renderings of Henry Moore's 'Large Oval with Points.' (A perfunctory search of the web indicates that there are a few more of them around today.) The site chosen was a parcel of land, once the location of the old Franklin County Court House, then being developed into a small urban green space.
I remember that everybody seemed to have an opinion of the piece. My wife and I loved it, for example. Friends of ours, people I would have expected to have been enthusiastic about the sculpture, hated it. (But on their honeymoon trip to Paris, they sent us a postcard to say that there they had seen a piece that bore a "pointed" resemblance to something in Columbus.)
Today, the Moore sculpture seems nondescript and invisible. Not so the Picasso piece and not just because it's much larger. It's just a great piece of art. Why, I don't know, except that like all exceptional art, it captures you...
Leave your comments.
(By the way, it may be that those Columbus patrons also had a sense of humor. One of the most identifiable landmarks in the city is the Oval, the central campus green at Ohio State.)
[On passion, see here.]
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