Tonite Only

Acrylic on Canvas

Susan Campbell: 1957-2010

Ink and a little acrylic on bristol.

Jamey Aebersold

Ink on bristol.

"Mr. Jazz Education"

Tiki Mask, color corrected

Under normal and black light.

Perspective

What Doesn't Matter:

Staples

Envelopes

Paper shuffling

Traffic

Team Players

Multi Taskers

Jobs

Football

Baseball

Basketball

Sports

Newspapers

News

Pundits

Guns

Style

Celebrities

Television

Movies

Radio

Money

Lawn mowers

Cars

Me

Politics

Countries

Race

Wars

Freeways

Saxophone

Flute

Clarinet

Jazz

Music

Art

Dancing

Technology

Religion

And pretty much any other damn man made construct, institution, material object, philosophy, etc., etc., etc..........

What Does Matter:

Each other

For Susan

The Atomic Prince

Jim "Prince" Hughes of Atomic City in Austin

Ink on bristol

The Arts in America

Do other countries have a bustling business in "sofa size" paintings? What is this American obsession with what I call "art by the yard"? I imagine a scenario in which two employees of the MOMA are discussing what the next show should be. After much discussion one exasperated participant screams out: "My god man! I don't care what it looks like! Just make sure it's SOFA SIZED!!"

Although there is not as much of a business for books these days, there is a similar phenomenon: basing how good a book is by how long it is, as in someone like Mitchner. The Harry Potter books kept getting longer and longer as the series continued. So for books what we have is literature by the pound. Yes, I know, not as many people read, and those that do are starting to go to e-books, but we are not totally to that point yet.

Music. Easy one there. Since the advent of rock it has been: "Let's see how much higher we can crank this up!" Actually the beginnings of this go back a couple of centuries as one orchestra became famous because they actually got louder as they played. Renaissance and baroque era instruments are not known for their dynamic range. Electronics have taken this to an extreme. Even worse, though, is that too many songs no longer have a dynamic range at all; they are as loud as possible all the time. There are discussions in trade magazines for those who produce albums about this very aspect. They talk of the overuse of "compression" which makes everything the same loudness level rather than having loud and soft sections. Anyway, here we have music by the decibel.

Movies have their own version, in "blockbusters" anyway. Big Summer and holiday movies are identified by how many "'splosions" (explosions) there are. You see this somewhat on TV as well in many of the shows that try to capture the audience of a show like Mythbusters. They take out all the science and such but keep the "booms!". For movies, the bigger the bangs, the bigger the bucks. Cinema by the megaton.

Art by the yard, literature by the pound, music by the decibel, cinema by the megaton. God bless America. Fits the American archtype. Go to anyplace that you can see groups of Americans mixed with large groups of other nationalities, somewhere like Disney World or the like. American are easy to spot. Compared to the other nationalities they are not exactly "svelt". Maybe that helps explain the whole Hummer popularity thing. "Don't care if built worth a damn or not, just make it HUGE!"

America: Home of the Monster Arts Rally.

Lost Art?

Thinking about the difference between traditional (i.e. hand drawn) animation and computer animation. Many extremely talented artists were thrown by the wayside as traditional animation has been for the most part phased out. I appreciate that the computer animators of today have their own set of skills, but I think for the most part they are no match for the old style guys.

Computer animators are in a way more like puppeteers. While they do have to analyze and understand movement of humans, animals, water, smoke, whatever just as was the case for traditional animation, they do not have to "recreate" the character (or object) for every frame of the picture. The character already exists, built by someone else. The computer animator controls its movements, gives it life, but is not really required to be able to recreate it from scratch. I could see someone being a perfectly competent computer animator who couldn't even draw. Not that there isn't an art to being a puppeteer; just look at Frank Oz. But I think that probably the traditional animators had an understanding that is not necessarily called for today.

The traditional animators not only had to know anatomy, "squash and stretch", understand movement, be an "actor" with their character but understand the physics behind what was being animated as well. Each new drawing, 24 per second, calls for this total understanding from the animator. Can't leave gravity, wind, environment, whatever to the computer; the animator had to know it. That's why it took years for an artist to become a top animator. And then their talents were thrown away like yesterday's newspaper.

In cases like this I like to use a test to demonstrate who has the better understanding. In this instance: let a traditional animator learn computer animation and let a computer animator try his hand at traditional animation. Do this for a year and see who comes closest to mastering the other's art.

I know Disney (finally) came around and started doing traditional animation again, but they threw a lot of their best artists to the dogs before coming around. An amazing art form was almost lost. I wonder if the new artists will ever get the chance to become as skilled as the masters of the past, or if they will keep getting jerked around. There is a certain quality to animation of this type that nothing else can reproduce. It's like stop motion animation: much more labor intensive but the look is like nothing else; a certain dreamlike quality.

New does not necessarily mean better.

It Ain't the Technique, It's the Content

I recently watched the DVD versions of Monsters vs Aliens and Up one right after the other. Up I had seen before, Monsters I had not. This comparison vividly illustrates why Pixar is the leader in computer based animation, and it has nothing to do with animation itself. For those who have seen Up, there is a short, I'd say two minutes tops, montage of a couple growing old together. Not even any dialog. Yet that little section has more story (and heart) than is contained in the entire running time of Monsters. I've thought for years that John Lasseter is this generation's Walt Disney in that both understand the the single most important part of a movie is the story. Disney was considered in his time to be one of the, if not the, best story men in Hollywood. Lasseter and the whole Pixar team get this. The story shows real polish, not the "let's throw in this cliched plot point here cuz everyone expects it" method used in far too many instances. Characters in Up act the way they do for a reason; the personalities are developed. In Monsters, characters are just, BOOM!, there they are and that's all there is to that.

I'd especially like to thank whoever was the supervising animator on Dug the dog. You can watch the film with the sound off and still tell what Dug is thinking by his actions. And he acts like a real dog, exaggerated a bit, of course, this is animation and that is necessary, but he isn't a cartoon dog. Watch the eyes most of all. Really great work.

Huh?, the Movie

Huh? is a piece I "wrote" (more like assembled) using the program Project 5 from Cakewalk. Project 5 is a loop based composing tool. I only used sounds that came with the program just to see what it could do. The movie was made using the latest version of Movie Maker that goes with Windows 7, again just fooling around to see what it can do.