Animation Artifacts 07 Jun 2007 07:23 am
Odds & Ends
- Here are some bits and pieces of memorabilia I have in collection. (Boy do I own a bunch of crap!) However, maybe altogether it makes for an interesting post.
- First up in this UPA week is a piece of stationery from the UPA studio. The oddity of it is that the paper is not 8½ x 11 but 8½ x 14. To make it a bit more interesting, that’s a UPA ballpoint pen atop the paper. (Yellow!)
- John Hubley was an extraordinary artist. Every drawing he made, had three dimensions (no matter how flat the image was supposed to be.) His simplest sketch had such depth. Naturally, he was an amazing painter as well. His oil paintings were a bit impressionist/a bit surrealist/all original. He seemed somewhat inspired by Chagall.
John and Faith would both go to their respective studios every day to oil paint before they came into work. They usually arrived in the animation studio between 9:30-10:00 am. That means they were in there painting early. They took art seriously.
Here’s an invitation to an art exhibit held at Yale, where John & Faith taught. (The original was B&W; the painting was in color.)
- Finally, another invitation, this one for the “World Preview” of Ragggedy Ann & Andy. The character drawing was done by Dan Haskett and was the poster image for the feature film. Perhaps I’ll post some Raggedy art later this week.
There was some question as to who owned the rights to this film when, a year or so ago, Greg Ford was putting together a program of musical animated films for Lincoln Center. Greg couldn’t track down who would give proper permission for screening of a 35mm scope print. I wish someone would get it together.
Richard Horner was one of the producers representing Bobbs Merrill. He was originally a theatrical producer with an extensive and prestigious background who moved onto this film to produce.
He and I had a couple of meetings a few years before he died. He was producing some videos (pre-dvd) showing artists at work. His first was a video of Philip Pearlstein in his tudio painting a canvas. Horner, at the time, couldn’t find a distributor for the tapes, although they were already in all of the museums on the east coast. I tried to help but we didn’t get anywhere. Unfortunately, he died in 2002. He’s the last person I would’ve been able to contact for information about the film.
on 07 Jun 2007 at 8:23 pm 1.Will Finn said …
Michael
Thanks for sharing these artifacts and information, and for stopping by my site (we are now mutually linked). This blogging thing is wonderful–i’ve been skulking around anonymously for years now and finally took the plunge. Posting rarities, ephemera and other stuff we all have in our collections is particularly fun.
I am a lifelong fan of William Stieg’s art and writing and fondly remember seeing DR. DE SOTO when it was first running in theaters here in LA. I have to credit my parents for always having THE NEW YORKER at hand, even though we lived in “the sticks.” They brought us all up on Thurber and Saul Stienberg and all the great print guys I still love.