Archive for the ‘art’ Category

Monday, June 20th, 2022

Theory: Robert Hughes’ "The Mona Lisa Curse"

The Mona Lisa Curse

Time magazine art critic, Robert Hughes is one of my heroes. His landmark TV series, “Shock of the New” blew my mind when I was in college, and his documentary Goya: Crazy Like a Genius is the best film on the subject of art I have ever seen. He returned to the subject of modern art late in his life with a documentary on the deconstruction and destruction of art in our commercially driven age. It’s scathing, it’s depressing, and it’s undeniably true. Here is a streaming copy of the complete program.

Note: One of the subjects of this documentary wasn’t pleased with the way he was presented and filed a lawsuit against the filmmakers for slander. “Mona Lisa Curse” is unlikely to be released in the United States anytime soon. It’s been pulled from YouTube several times already. See it on watchdocumentaries.com while you can.

Robert Hughes: Mona Lisa Curse

Stephen Worth
Director
Animation Resources

TheoryTheory

This posting is part of a series of articles comprising an online exhibit entitled Theory.

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Friday, January 7th, 2022

Illustration: Monks By Eduard von Grutzner

Monks by Eduard von Grutzner

Here is another interesting item from the collection of Carlo Vinci. These photographs were among his most prized posessions. They are turn of the century reproductions of the paintings of Eduard von Grutzner. Grutzner was born in 1846 and received classical art training at the Munich Academie under the noted realist painter, Karl von Piloty. Grutzner specialized in genre paintings, which formed the basis for the style of many classic book illustrators who followed. He was famous for his paintings of jolly gatherings in alehouses, hunting scenes, and humorous images of monastic life, which these particular images represent. Grutzner was successful and popular in his day, and died in 1925.

The family isn’t quite sure where Vinci obtained these photographs, but my guess is that they date back to his earliest years as a professional artist. After graduating from the National Academy of Design, Vinci was hired to do reproductions of classic paintings. It’s entirely possible that these were used by him as reference for reproductions of one or more Grutzner paintings. It’s easy to see why Vinci treasured these pictures. The compositions are classically perfect, the caricatures are well observed, the lighting is beautifully rendered, and a Falstaffian sense of humor makes the images a lot of fun.

Monks by Eduard von Grutzner
Monks by Eduard von Grutzner
Monks by Eduard von Grutzner
Monks by Eduard von Grutzner
Monks by Eduard von Grutzner
Monks by Eduard von Grutzner
Monks by Eduard von Grutzner
Monks by Eduard von Grutzner
Monks by Eduard von Grutzner
Monks by Eduard von Grutzner

Stephen Worth
Director
Animation Resources

IllustrationIllustration

This posting is part of a series of articles comprising an online exhibit spotlighting Illustration.

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Monday, March 29th, 2021

REFPACK038: Advice, Art and Animation

LAST CALL! This Reference Pack will be removed from the server on Friday. If you haven’t downloaded it yet, do it now before it’s gone!

Reference Pack

Every other month, Animation Resources shares a new Reference Pack with its members. They consist of an e-book packed with high resolution scans and video downloads set up for still frame study. Make sure you download the Reference Packs before they’re updated. When it’s gone, it’s gone!


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Animated Discussions Podcast

Animation Resources has just posted its 38th RefPack! This time our Reference Pack is jam packed with advice, art and animation. First up is a brand new podcast in the Animated Discussions series titled "Different Artists, Different Paths". Director of Programs Davey Jarrell and Animation Resources President Stephen Worth talk about how a young artist can go about charting a course to find his own way in the artistic world?

The topics include: Studio Artists And Independent Artists, Versatility and Functionality Vs Personal Style And Creativity, Finding Your Place in the Business, How Independents Can Compete With Big Studios, and How To Team Up With Other Artists To Split The Workload.


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Picasso

In 1956, the great French film director Henri-Georges Clouzot (Wages of Fear, Les Diabolique) produced a very remarkable film. The concept was simple: point a camera to look over the shoulder of the greatest artist of the 20th century while he worked. The result was much more than just another art documentary. It was a probing study into the way an artist sees and how he goes about the act of creation.

The millions and millions of little choices an artist makes are the thought process behind the magic. This film allows you to look through the eyes of a great artist and understand how he went about creating. Animation Resources hopes this will help you refine the way you make your own daily artistic decisions.

Picasso

Picasso


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Rooty Toot Toot

In every medium, there are innovations that change the course of the entire art form. Beethoven’s symphonies broke the established symphonic form and ushered in the Romantic movement. Marcel Duchamp painted “Nude Descending a Staircase” and opened the door for abstraction. Isadora Duncan shattered the stuffy conventions of ballet and inspired a whole generation of dancers to express themselves in a totally new way. In animation, there was UPA’s “Rooty Toot Toot”.

The artists at UPA incorporated elements of modern art and sophisticated magazine cartoons, like those in the New Yorker, to create more abstract and expressive cartoons. They began with the Fox & the Crow, but soon abandoned funny animals in favor of human characters. Each cartoon was a step or two more modern than the one that came before it, culminating in the Academy Award winning short, “Gerald McBoing Boing”. But the format of the “funny cartoon short” remained unchanged until “Rooty Toot Toot” came along in the Fall of the 1951.

Many thanks to Animation Resources’ Advisory Board Member Steve Stanchfield and Thunderbean Animation for sharing this beautiful high definition transfer with our members.

Rooty Toot Toot
Rooty Toot Toot


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Louis Raemaekers

With every Reference Pack, we’ll be including a bonus video or e-book from one of our past Reference Packs. This time we are sharing a wonderful e-book full of influential political cartoons by Louis Raemaekers.

Raemaekers was incensed by the stories of atrocities during WWI and began to produce intensely personal anti-German cartoons which led the Germans to push leaders in his home country to charge him with the crime of “endangering Dutch neutrality”. When those charges were dropped, Kaiser Wilhelm II put a bounty of 12,000 marks on his head. Raemaekers fled with his family to Britain, where he was celebrated as a hero and put to work producing propaganda pamphlets for the British government. These cartoons became world famous, and soon Raemaekers was making a tour of the United States, encouraging America to support the European fight. Theodore Roosevelt was quoted as saying the Raemaekers did more to win the Great War than any other civilian.

Louis Raemaekers


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At Animation Resources, our Advisory Board includes great artists and animators like Ralph Bakshi, Will Finn, J.J. Sedelmaier and Sherm Cohen. They’ve let us know the things that they use in their own self study so we can share them with you. That’s experience you just can’t find anywhere else. The most important information isn’t what you already know… It’s the information you should know about, but don’t know yet. We bring that to you every other month.

Picasso
Picasso
Picasso


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Haven’t Joined Yet?

Check out this SAMPLE REFERENCE PACK! It will give you a taste of what Animation Resources members get to download every other month!

Sample RefPack

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Animation Resources is a 501(c)(3) non-profit arts organization dedicated to providing self study material to the worldwide animation community. If you are a creative person working in animation, cartooning or illustration, you owe it to yourself to be a member of Animation Resources.

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