AUTHOR AT WORK!

From my Peanuts Calendar for today: a classic example of Schultz's Snoopy-as Author-working-on-his-latest-opus cartoon!

 

 

 

 

Does anyone (after all these years) ever look at these dog-and-typewriter gags and think:

 

"Eh? ... Er...? WHAT?"

 

CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER!

Totally astonishing, out-size, exterior house-decoration –– unless, of course, it's the White Rabbit's Incredible Shrinking House –– situated in that American wonderland that is New Orleans, Louisiana...

THE LABOURS OF GERALD SCARFE

 

For many years the work of the concept artist in animated filmmaking (and, indeed, in the of movies movies in general) was untold – or, more accurately, ignored. The focus was on the animators, the cartoon equivalent of the movie actors, and quite often (and pretty much always in the case of the Disney studio) on the Boss. 

 

Walt Disney was canny: early on in his business career he changed the studio name from The Disney Brothers Studio to Walt Disney Productions. He understood the important of personalising the films he produced by providing a single creative focus for all responses to the rapidly developing universe of mice, ducks, pigs and a fantastical pageant of fable and fairy-tale characters whose stories were brought to life in pen and ink.

 

I first became aware of ‘concept art’ in the pages of R. D. Field’s The Art of Walt Disney (1942) and in Bob Thomas’ Walt Disney: The Art of Animation (1958) and, then, again, in Christopher Finch’s The Art of Walt Disney from Mickey Mouse to the Magic Kingdoms (1973) and Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston’s The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation (1981). Since the publication of these progressively revealing volumes we are now able to access any number of books devoted to the masterworks of such prolific concept artists as Gustav Tenggren, Kay Nielsen, David Hall, Mary Blair and Eyvind Earle.

 

Books on the art and design of several of the more recent Disney films have mapped the progress of a film’s look from sketch to screen and now we have a huge and truly astonishing volume, Disney's HERCULES – The Art of Gerald Scarfe, Insight Editions (7 January 2025) £60.

 

The decision to engage perhaps the most savage and unforgiving of Britain’s political caricaturists and hand him the job of setting the style for a movie about an ancient Greek hero-figure can’t have been easily reached. Gerald Scarfe’s routinely brutal – often shocking and, as result, controversial – cartoons might not have been the obvious choice for a studio whose output has almost always favoured the comfortable rather than the challenging, but then one only has to look at Scarfe’s drawings of British and American politicians in the guise of monsters and grotesques to realise how suited he would be to illustrate such beings as Cerberus, Medusa, Hades, the Hydra, the Furies and the Minotaur; or how his keen sense of humour might amusingly interpret the congregation of Gods or Hercules’ sidekick, Philoctetes the satyr; and, again, how his elegant sweeping penmanship might give flight to the  hero's mighty steed, Pegasus.

 

 

 

Scarfe was no no stranger to film or animation: a passionate lover of Disney since childhood, he had created his own award-winning animated film, Long Drawn-Out Trip, in 1973 and, in 1982, he had contributed electrifying animations to Alan Parker’s film Pink Floyd: The Wall that provided some of the most iconic images of ‘80s pop culture which are no less arresting and provocative in a new century.

 

Despite those known credentials, this book is a revelation, not just in revealing how Scarfe developed, modified and, frequently, radically re-defined his various concepts as he worked with Disney’s artists, but also in showing the startling diversity of media in which he worked: pen and ink, full-bloodied watercolour paintings of creatures and landscapes whether Olympian or Underwordly; dramatic moments rendered in chalk or a limited palette of red or white on black.

 

 

 

 

The giant size of this book (a lectern would be a useful aid to reading!) allows Scarfe’s art to make the fullest dramatic impact, giving his winged horses space to fly and permitting his multi-headed creatures and tempestuous Titans to rage unrestrained.

Disney's HERCULES – The Art of Gerald Scarfe is witness to the willingness of the Disney Studio to, as its founder expressed it, ‘dream and diversify’, to experiment with art just as Walt himself had done with FANTASIA and several other visionary concepts that either made it to screen or were lost along the way. 

 

More than that, this book is a glorious testimony to the breadth and depth of Gerald Scarfe’s artistry: inspiring in its imaginative inspiration, dynamically dramatic in its realisation and, repeatedly, featuring a hint of his wicked wit that is as sharp as his often angular characterisations.

 

Anyone interested in Scarfe, Disney, film, the art of animation or the craft of the caricaturist needs to own this book. I can't put more plainly than that!

"O, CLOUDS UNFOLD!"

This glorious, image-laden stained glass window commemorating William Blake – artist, engraver, printer and poet – is found in St. Mary's Church, Battersea Church Road, Wandsworth, London. 

 

The work of John Hayward of Edenbridge, Kent, this is one of four windows installed in  St. Mary's between 1976 and 1982, each representing a famous person associated with the church. The other subjects are landscape painter, J. M. W. Turner; General Benedict Arnold of the American Revolutionary War; and the celebrated Eighteenth-Century botanist, William Curtis.

 

William Blake was married to Catherine Boucher in the church in 1782. Many will be surprised to learn that the wife of one of our greatest poets was illiterate, and could only make her mark with a cross in the wedding register. The wedding is suggested by a wedding ring between two pencil portraits; on the left is William drawn by Catherine and, on the right, Catherine as drawn by William. 

 

The design of the rest of the window attempts to give expression to the diversity of Blake’s talents as an artist and poet. Among his more insistent themes are those concerned with how we perceive both the greatest and the smallest elements in our world and the idea that all things contain a male and female principle.

 

The verse on the lower right-hand side of the window is the opening four lines of Blake’s poem, ‘Auguries of Innocence’, assumed to have been written in 1803, but not published until 1863:

 

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour

 

The figure in the roundel is from Blake’s illustration ‘Albion Rose’, etchings of which carried the artist’s inscription: ‘Albion rose from where he labourd at the Mill with Slaves / Giving himself for the Nations he danc'd the dance of Eternal Death’. The figure of Albion, is a personification of humanity and of Britain and is depicted freeing himself from the shackles of materialism.

 

At the bottom right is a picture of the Houses of Parliament to mark the connection with the late William Hamling, MP, in whose memory the window was given.

 

 

[Photo: Brian Sibley, May 2011]

MR DODGSON'S GIFT!

On this day: 26 November, 1864 – one-hundred-and-sixty years ago –– Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known to us now as 'Lewis Carroll') presented an early Christmas present to his young friend, Alice Pleasance Liddell, daughter of Henry George Liddell, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford.

Mr Dodgson's gift was the hand-lettered and illustrated manuscript of Alice's Adventures Underground, a story he had to told to Alice and two of her sisters during a summer river expedition on the Isis on 4 July 1862. 

 

In 1865, the story, significantly expanded, was re-gifted – this time to the world – when the story was published, with illustrations by John Tenniel, under the title, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

"A VISIT FROM ST. ––– SNOOPY?"

 Eat your heart out Mr. Clement C. Moore!

 

 [illustration: (c) Peanuts]

FACING UP TO 'AI'

 

There is a lot of disquiet about the pros and cons of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and, specifically among artists, about ‘AI-generated art’, including strident protests that even the use of such a term is totally abhorrent! 

   

I am more ambiguous on the topic: partly because I have seen some highly original and inventive AI-imagery and because I think that, for millennia, art has always been subject to the vagaries of frauds and fakers as well as those who have a taken a broad perspective on such identifications as ‘after…’, ‘inspired by…’ and ‘in the style of…’

 

This liberality of accreditation can be seen in the output from the 'workshops' of the Old Masters; among those creating art with collage and photo-montage; and in Andy Warhol’s screen-prints featuring a ‘borrowed’ publicity-image of Marilyn Monroe from the 1953 film, Niagara, or that humdrum household staple, the Campbell’s Soup Can.

 

However, even I balked at finding an internet entry on Lewis Carroll featuring an AI likeness of the author of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass alongside genuine, well-attested photographic images of the man.

 

 

Arguably, it is the best of a less-than-brilliant bunch of imaginings which range from the patently risible to the truly creepy... 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then, again, I tell myself, the National Portrait Gallery in London contains a variety of artworks variously portraying the well-known features of, say, her late majesty Queen Elizabeth II, so what the heck? Does it actually matter?

 

Perhaps, in the end, it just comes down to being able to identify, ‘What’s What and What’s Not’, between artefact and artifice.

 

**********

 

‘So [Alice] got up, and held out her hand. “Good-bye, till we meet again!” she said as cheerfully as she could.

 

‘“I shouldn't know you again if we did meet,” Humpty Dumpty replied in a discontented tone, giving her one of his fingers to shake: “you're so exactly like other people.”

 

‘“The face is what one goes by, generally,” Alice remarked in a thoughtful tone.

 

‘“That's just what I complain of,” said Humpty Dumpty. “Your face is the same as everybody has — the two eyes, so —” (marking their places in the air with his thumb) “nose in the middle, mouth under. It’s always the same. Now if you had the two eyes on the same side of the nose, for instance — or the mouth at the top — that would be some help.”

 

‘“It wouldn't look nice,” Alice objected. But Humpty Dumpty only shut his eyes, and said “Wait till you've tried.”’

 

**********

 

But we’d probably better not start a conversation on Pablo Picasso…

PUMPKIN PANORAMA

 

Now that it's safe to go out into the pumpkin patch once more, I thought I'd share this forbidding piece of graphic art, Nico Delort, celebrating (if that's not an inappropriate word of so 'dark' an artwork) the Great Pumpkin!

 

 

Explore more of Nico Delort's amazing art HERE

THE WITCH-HUNTING SEASON

 

From 61-years-ago today: the cover of The New Yorker with Halloween-themed art by that irreverent spook-meister, the great Charles Addams (1912-1988).

NOVEMBER

 

 

No sun – no moon!
No morn – no noon –
No dawn – no dusk – no proper time of day –
No sky – no earthly view –
No distance looking blue –
No road – no street – no 't'other side the way' –
No end to any Row –
No indications where the Crescents go –
No top to any steeple –
No recognitions of familiar people –
No courtesies for showing 'em –
No knowing 'em –
No travelling at all – no locomotion,
No inkling of the way – no notion –
'No go' – by land or ocean –
No mail – no post –
No news from any foreign coast –
No Park – no Ring – no afternoon gentility –
No company – no nobility –
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member –
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,–
November! 

Thomas Hood (1799-1845)