Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- The painter, Rufino Tamayo, has been an imprtant source of inspiration for me over the years, and I thought I’d share some of his later paintings.

He was a Zapotecan Indian born in Oaxaca, Mexico in 1899. After his mother died, in 1911, he moved to México City where he attended the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas. Tamayo was exposed to pre-Colombian Méxican art while working at the Museo Nacional de Arqueologia.
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His contemporaries Siqueiros, Rivera and Orozco advocated a political art form whereas Tamayo’s work focussed on plastic forms integrated with a masterful use of colors and textures. Tamayo in Life Magazine, 1953
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He is one of the best known Latin American
artists with exhibitions in major museums such as the Palacio Nacional de Bellas Artes, México, The Philips Collection in Washington, The Guggenheim Museum in New York and The Museum of Modern Art as well as principal art galleries throughout the world.
He died in 1991.

His work reminds me, in some ways, of Matisse’s Moroccan phase in its color choice and strong forms. His work has been compared to de Kooning and Debuffet. I’d certainly agree with the later. I find his artwork abstract yet bodering on the representational. The opposite of someone like Arp, Miro or Mondrian.

Here, for no good reason, are a few of his paintings.

Man Before the Infinite – 1950
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The Great Galaxy – 1978
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Arid Landscape – 1974
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Portrait of the Devil – 1974
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Showdog – 1974
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Woman Behind Glass – 1974
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Empty Fruit Bowl – 1976
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Dancer – 1977
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Ghost At The Door – 1978
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Man (Hombre) – 1980
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Man with Sabre – 1980

-One of the aspects I love enormously about living in NY is the appreciation of art in our daily lives. It’s everywhere. I enjoy displaying images of some of the sculpture I pass frequently.

I’m not just talking, of course, of the many many recognizable personalities standing in bronze around all our parks and crossings but of many of the other non-representational pieces as well.

“Give My Regards to Broadway” composer, George M. Cohan (think James Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy” graces Times Square at Broadway & 46th Street. (This is actually called Duffy Square – a small triangle between 46th & 47th St named for Father Duffy, a noted military chaplain during WW I.) He greets all the visitors to Tin Pan Alley wherein he made his living.

Actually theaters moved to this area after the turn of the 20th Century. Prior to that the theatrical area was downtown some 10 blocks at Herald Square. (Both Squares were named for newspapers – Herald Sq. for the NYHerald, Times Sq. for the NYTimes.)

Regardless, this statue is a staple for all New Yorkers who usually take it for granted. ——————————————-.(Click any image to enlarge.)
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Let’s move downtown to Union Square – 14th Street. The summer art program has deposited three large new sculptures. Dennis Oppenheim’s Tumbling Mirage.

A somewhat dented sign gives us a small bit of information about the large pieces.

From the park at Union Square, you can look over to
the small traffic triangle to see the three pieces.

Crossing the street, you can walk in, through and around them.

Looking uptown you get a more picturesque view of Park Ave.

Moving closer to my studio, there’s a very small children’s playground at Sixth Ave.
and Houston St. Within it is a small, child-sized sculpture of a seal.

I see this piece daily, and I wonder how many others notice it. The stone
is worn down a bit for all the children who’ve touched it and ridden it.
No info seems to be there about the sculptor.

When I started photographing it, rain began to fall.
It made for interesting patterns on the stone.

By the third and last photo, the rain was falling harder, and
the seal took on a different appearance.

- Last week, I wrote about the start of an art installation in Madison Square Park of some “Treehuts” (though I think of them as “Treehouses.” (See post here.)
The artist is Tadashi Kawamata, and you can see a blog about this work here.

At first, when you enter the park from the main entrance, you don’t notice them, but you’re soon caught up looking into all the trees to see if there’s a construction there. The natural wood makes me wonder what’s going to happend to these “huts” after the weather’s been at them for a while.

The rear entrance to the park on Madison Ave. & 26th Street leads you to this treehouse just behind the statue of Chester K. Arthur. It was a surprise to see it since this wasn’t here last Monday.
You’ll see a closer shot of this treehouse, from another angle, pictured below.

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I tried to get more than one shot of some of these treehouses so that you can see what their environment is like and then get a closer look at how they’ve been built.

When the workers were constructing they had lots of lumber and seemed to have cut it and constructed these things from the ground up (literally, I guess.)

This is looking out on the main entrance (23rd Street & B’way) of the park.

Lots of other people have photographed these “Treehuts.” (I guess they’re popular.) Check out some of these Flickr pieces.

Tadashi Kawamata, the artist, has a number of other installations you can check out on the internet. This one is impressive. As is this one in Versailles.

- Following up the Rico LeBrun post from yesterday, here are some stills from an exhibition at the natural history museum in Basel, Switzerland. It imagines what the bone structure of some cartoon characters may look like.

The show is called Animatus. South Korean artist Hyungkoo Lee uses the techniques of paleontologists to create the skeletons of familiar comic figures such.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

Bugs Bunny in all three above images.

Drawings of Bugs and Felix

Two views of Felix

Road runner and Wil E. Coyote

Donald Duck

Huey, Dewey & Louie and Donald Duck

The sculptures are constructed of resin, aluminum sticks, stainless steel wires,
springs, brass bean and oil paint. They’re on wooden pedestals.

Tom & Jerry

A drawing of Mickey.

Hyungkoo Lee and other sculptors at work on the skeletons.

I’d formerly featured this sculptor’s work when the show opened in a Korean art gallery.

You should also take a look at Michael Paulus’ work, which I’ve featured several times. He has done this very thing years ago, and his work is quite humorous.

Paulus’ drawing of Linus.

- When I posted several of Norman McClaren‘s drawings, recently, it got a bit of attention. I received a number of comments and emails about the post, and I realized that fewer people have seen these drawings than I thought. Obviously, it means, to me, that I should post more of them.

McClaren was certainly a brilliant artist, and his experimentation and developments brought about a real maturation of the art form. I wonder how he would have dealt with the technology we’re using today. Remember, he realized that the soundtrack could be drawn and did his own exploration of this part of the process.

The book was published in 1975 by Tundra Books.

Because the one illustration which graces the book’s cover, was of such interest to those reading my piece, I’ll start with the rest of that page. It’s a series of sketches done for the film, “Là-haut sur ces montagnes” and was drawn in 1945.

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The two illustrations above are connected on the same page. I separated them .
The entire page is labelled: Sketches for the film, “Là-haut sur ces montagnes.”

“Interlocking faces”

“Untitled”

“Tesseractine House”
I’m fascinated that a number of his illustrations look not too unlike Steinberg’s work. It’s obvious he was an influence for a lot of animators in the late ’40′s.

“Four Dimensional Cars and Bicycles”

“Memory of A Mexican Beach”

“St. George and the Porcupine”

- Some of you may remember that I gave some attention to some steel sculptured trees that were placed in Madison Square Park last year. They stood there for almost a year and became part of my daily trek through this city park.

This past week some objects started to appear on the large, Oval Lawn, and I started to photograph the setup.

It turns out to be a number
___________ (Click any image to enlarge.) ________________of ceramic works by
____________________________________________________Richard Deacon, a British sculptor. He has his own website. Oddly, his artwork doesn’t seem to be reproduced large in any of the photos on his site or others I visited.

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A tent was set up to protect the materials from the rain, and the
not-very-large sculptures were drawn out of wooden boxes.

There was the one tent on the side of the great lawn, and another tent
was set up over on a sandy side bar (about 100 yards away.)
The tents obviously protected the sculpture from the rain, and
it was raining while I shot some of these stills.

This was done off on the side. I’m not sure how the actual sculptures
were moved to the Oval Lawn. I don’t even know if they’re heavy,
though one assumes they must be to survive the weather.

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Things came together quickly. At the end, there were a couple of
vehicles left standing about. There’s a truck in the background
of the photo on the left, and another is almost hidden
in the background of the photo on the right.

Finally everything seemed to be in place, and
the sculptures were all centrally located on the big lawn.

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Here you can see the children’s playground in the background.
The sculptures almost seem to be part of it.

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At the moment, the lawn is closed to pedestrians.
Once the public performance events begin to happen, it’ll be curious to see
how the public intermingles with these sculptures.

The art pieces do blend well with each other, though.
Something new to view on my walks.

After all the construction vehicles had disappeared, I noticed
a tool box off to the side. At least, I think it was a toolbox.

Just today, I noticed that they’ve added little markers in front of each piece to identify and give information about the art. The Oval Lawn is shut off to the public, so it’s not possible, at the moment, to read the markers.

I didn’t have my camera with me this morning. I’ll get photos of the final setups and post them on another day.

- I don’t intend to give an introduction to Norman McLaren or his work here, but he obviously was one of the solidly great film makers on the “Art” side of animation. His films are worth studying for their timing, if not for their sheer genius. As a matter of fact, his exercise films on timing are incredible (though I have no idea how you’d get to see them today.)

I do have a book of some drawings by him, and given the stories about China in the news today, I thought I’d post some of his drawings done in China. These aren’t printed on the best of papers, so the quality isn’t all it could be. However, I thought it might _____________(Click any image to enlarge.)
be worth showing this other side to his art.

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Moving away from China, there are two other drawings I thought compelling and
would like to share here.

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- The artist Raul Vincent Enriquez has developed a site for flipbook portraits. He’s created a series of multiple screen portraits using several Quicktime images anchored together.

Digital self-portraits taken by photo booth visitors and then animated by the artist to resemble flipbook images will be broadcast onto the Times Square Lumacom screen. This began yesterday, March 4th, and will run for two months.

The photo booth quality of the portraits makes for unusal imagery. It reminds me of some early multiple screen works by the likes of Nam June Paik

You can get an idea of these pieces on line by going here. You’re also given the opportunity to participate in these photo booth animations by contacting the artist at this site.

The title artist, Saul Bass, gets a lot of attention at the site Erin Laing: Film and Process which features a lot of YouTube movies of the title sequences for The Man With The Golden Arm, Around the World in 80 Days, Psycho, Seconds, Alien, and Scorcese’s Cape Fear. ( Great scores as well Elmer Bernstein, Bernard Herrman and Jerry Goldsmith.)

She also gives links to: Anatomy of a Murder, North by Northwest, Walk on the Wild Side, It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World and Casino.

Bass was something of an inspiration for me in my early days. I was particularly excited when I got the job of designing titles for a number of films. I took great pleasure in reworking the type for all the films I did and even designing a typeface for one of the films. I always felt the connection to animation in all the work and artwork I did for these titles even though it wasn’t always apparent.

On my first title design, which was for Prince of the City, I did a number of sequences of identification for many of the actors who were unfamiliar to audiences. We wanted to make sure the audience always knew who was who. When it came time for my credit, Sidney Lumet didn’t want my company, Michael Sporn Animation, to get credit. He thought audiences would question what was animated. I had to just use my name and that of Phillip Schopper, who photographed all the ID’s and shared a lot of the work. Someday ‘ll write more about this film.

My interest in title sequences, of course, continues. I hope to post a bit more about Saul Bass, and the brilliant but quietly executed work of Dan Perri. He hasn’t gotten the attention he certainly deserves. His most recent work for In The Valley of Elah is just as good as Gangs of New York or Raging Bull or any of his older titles. I guess animators wouldn’t get a charge out of his work, but designers certainly should.

- With all the screenings I’ve attended in the last few weeks, I seem to continually end up at the Fifth Ave. subway station at 59th Street and Fifth Ave. On display at the station are a
number of polar bears tiled into the walls. These are set far enough away from each other so that the white tiled polar bears set on the white tile backdrops don’t bother each other. You also have to walk the length of the station to see them.

These are glass mosaic murals by artist, Ann Schaumberger done in 1996 in collaboration with Miotto Mosaics. I was able to locate _________________(Click any image to enlarge.)
another work by her but not much other information.

Apparently there are other animals displayed in the 60th Street exit of this station, but I didn’t get to see them. I was primarily interested in the tile artwork downstairs where you wait for the trains.

In the past, I’ve posted features on the tile art displayed at the 23rd St. and the Prince St. subway stations. These are both on the BMT train line. (NY has three lines: the IND, the IRT and the BMT. Originally these were different guage tracks; now there’s no real difference.)

There are fewer bear setups than there were hats or working people – as appeared in other station art. Yesterday, after going to one of the last screenings I had in the area, I decided to photograph these tile bears and present them here.

You’re greeted by these penguins at either side (Uptown or Downtown) of the station.

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Farther down the station, you come upon these polar bears with an excellent orange ornamentation about them.

Close up you can see the detail on the tiling, but the bears as a whole look better a bit back from them.

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As I mentioned, penguins greet you at the entrances/exits of the station. You can see them on both sides of the platforms.

Above ground, the Plaza Hotel (no longer a hotel) stands. Lots of horse-drawn carriages stand in the cold waiting to take tourists for a ride through Central Park.

- After my post last Sunday about the William Steig exhibit at the Jewish Museum, I was contacted by them to ask if I wanted images of art from the show for my blog, and of course I jumped at the chance.

They sent quite a bit of material as well as the captions that go with the art, and this gives me a good excuse to post more of Steig’s art. Because these images are photos (not scans) of the original art, they show the texture of the paper and the edges including some Steig’s writing, so I feel like there’s a good reason to post it. (The photos of the art, by the way, are all by Richard Goodbody.)_________Photo of Steig circa 1930′s.

I’ll probably display these image in a couple of posts so you can see a good sampling of this man’s work. I don’t have to say that I am a fan; I think by now it’s obvious.

You might want to check out the book, The Art of William Steig, which is a catalogue of the show. It’s available through the Museum as well as through other resources.

Ann Scher left a comment on my last post that the Steig exhibition is on view at The Jewish Museum in NYC until March 16, 2008. It will then travel to San Francisco, to be shown at The Contemporary Jewish Museum from June 8 – September 7, 2008.
If you have the time take a visit.

Here’s some of the earlier work that this artist did.

What a Woman!
preliminary drawing for The Rejected Lovers (1951)
pen and ink on paper
© 1951 William Steig, renewed 1979, 2007
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In the Nick of Time
from “Dreams of Glory” series, published in The New Yorker, May 26, 1951
pen and ink and wash on paper.
© 1951 William Steig, renewed 1979, 2007
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“Are we early?”
Delivered to Look magazine, May 17, 1956
pen and ink and wash on paper
© 1956 William Steig, renewed 1984

“What did I do?”
published in The New Yorker, June 30, 1962, pen and ink and wash on paper
© 1962 William Steig, renewed 1990
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“I got my first haircut at Ditchick’s Barbershop”
final illustration for When Everybody Wore a Hat (2003)
pen and ink and watercolor on paper
original version, in pen and ink and wash, c. 1959
© 2003 William Steig