Caroline Leaf: In conversation

I was recently asked to hold a one to one on stage conversation with the animator Caroline Leaf. This was one of my last formal tasks as a staff member of the Leeds Arts University before I retire and even after all my years of teaching and hosting similar events, I was really terrified of meeting her, as she is one of my heroines of drawing. 

Her animated film, 'The Street' was named the 2nd best film of all time in the world at the Olympiad of Animation in Los Angles in 1984 and how Ben Simpson managed to persuade her to come to Leeds and why he chose me to interview her I'm not sure, but I took the opportunity on gratefully and hopefully didn't come over as too much of a clod. She had even taken the trouble to look at one of my animations, 'Boat at Sea' and was gracious enough to write to me that... 'I’ve seen your migration animation with the little boat of people and the beautiful drawings. I like seeing the paper of each drawing flicker so I know how you made it, I like the variety of the kinds of waves and how they feel real and threatening and at the same time I see they are drawings.'

From someone of her status that was for myself high praise. 

She talked about her time as a student at Harvard and how at that time the way animation was taught was to give students the time and space to find out what could be done, with whatever means they could get their hands on. This led to a focus on the basics, how one frame could lead to another, and that led to some very personal approaches to the process of animating, in Caroline Leaf's case, it led to her discovery of sand animation. The drawing in all her animations is sensitive and very well observed, she could have been a painter rather than an animator and during the evening she showed us her recent work, which is no longer animation and is both abstract and made directly from observation. Her drawing observation skills are clearly evident in both sets of new work and she is a wonderful example of how the skills learnt in drawing can be applied in so many ways. 

So if you haven't seen her work before, below are links to some examples. Her animations embrace reality by dealing with film as if it is sculpture. Each frame feels as if it is travelling around an object, just as much as it is some sort of low relief sculpture. The physical nature of the material, whether it is paint or sand is always central to her vision, which is why these films are so 'human', they seem extruded from her hands and her fingers. 

The Owl who married a Goose

The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa

The Street

So thank you Ben Simpson for giving me the opportunity to meet a drawing heroine of mine and thank you Caroline Leaf for agreeing to come to Leeds and to give both a masterclass and to take time to be in conversation with myself in the university lecture theatre. For those of you who follow this blog and who have never come across her work before, if the links still work, you are in for a treat. 

See also:

Fine Art: Animation now

The fine art of computer animation

Yael Bartana and animated collage

A link to one of my own animations 'Boat at sea'

The drawings of Matthew Barney

I remember first coming across Matthew Barney as a performance artist. He seemed to be pitting his body against the art spaces he found himself in. He was climbing walls, trying to get into inaccessible spaces, jumping, running and variously challenging us in his exhibitions to think about the athleticism of a human body in action, rather than providing static works for the traditional contemplative spaces that art galleries were thought of being. These actions in gallery spaces were titled 'Drawing Restraints' and they followed the implications of something I was writing about recently when thinking about 'curves'. The drawing of a line is when drawn by a hand held implement, a drawing that demonstrates a particular set of restraints. An arm is only so long, a body so flexible, fingers only capable of holding things of a certain size and weight etc. Barney seemed to push at all the boundaries, taking his pervious experience as an athlete who had to test his body to its limits and using this to make us aware that all human made drawings are physical exercises of one sort or another. 

Matthew Barney: Drawing Restraints

However he quickly moved on and the next time I came across his work was as a series of films. The Cremaster Cycle was a series of five feature-length films, together with related sculptures, photographs, drawings, and artist's books.

Film stills from 'The Cremaster Cycle'

Cremaster 1

The Cremaster Cycle had materials such as fat or vaseline as a sort of visual glue that was used to hold things into a sort of gooey suspension. As scenes moved from one to another we were reminded of metamorphosis as a very physical transformation. Some of his drawings for the time were embedded in resin, others suggestive of machines becoming organic or people melting into animals as if arriving from ancient myths.

Matthew Barney

Storyboards are central to Barney's practice, however they are not like the ones we normally associate with artists' plans for films. They are images and objects set out in a sequence and then when exhibited they are presented as vitrines filled with specific objects, drawings, books, and photographs. Rather than drawing two-dimensional sequential images of action, he plans his projects via a strategy of building relationships between things. These storyboards are more like collages of visual relationships. 

Matthew Barney: Storyboard for a film

Matthew Barney is a very useful artist to explore if you are thinking about how a drawing led practice can unfold into performance, video, sculpture and installation work. Drawings driven by the possibilities of the body, material invention and collage are approaches to practice that in Barney's work morph into each other. Drawing is like life, sometimes we get stuck into the physicality of existence, but at other times we escape from reality into a fantasy world. 

See also: 

Drawing and film

Cinematic drawing

Between sculpture and drawing

Performance drawing

Drawing it all together