Stubborn Artist

Stubborn Artist 

New York City. Winter, 1987. 

What I’ve come to call, with a laugh at fate, my starving artist period. 

Don’t worry, we weren’t actually starving, just pretty hungry for a few days now and then. We managed to survive on the staples of a New York artist’s diet; pizza, street food, and beer. 

So, with our bellies as full as they were going to get, there was time to pause and consider the finer things in life. Manhattan offered ample opportunities for cost effective options, as it has done for generations of out-of-work artists before and since. Exploring the city was a fun occupation in itself and not everything one does need cost money, especially the museums and parks. 

The parks allowed you the chance to remember what green was and to feel something softer than concrete beneath your feet. If it were the weekend and the weather was fair, the parks had a wonderful atmosphere as people rushed to enjoy themselves before the weather changed. 

Often I would take my sketchbook to the park. I'd draw dogs and children off the leash, both of which are good subjects, perhaps because they act so naturally. I also enjoyed drawing squirrels and chipmunks (critters which do not exist in New Zealand), and birds in trees or scratching for worms in the grass. The mounted police, with their beautiful, shiny horses, also made for the chance of a good drawing.

An artist must keep himself in continual practice. Look for stories and draw those! Observe everything! And remember to draw with love in your heart.

Because if you think it's shit... it is shit.

Anyway. We really were hungry and out of work, but it wasn’t so bad, if you kept the fears at bay. It helped to have a partner like Suzie, who could take it and not complain, sharing the bad times and the good, who even brought some sunshine and gaiety into our uncertain lives. Anything you did with Suzie was fun, for she had a way of laughing at the world that got you laughing, too.

So we kept pretty busy, in spite of our meager resources. 

If the weather permitted we bundled up (if Andrew weren’t going out, I could borrow his overcoat and gloves… Suzie had winter clothes of her own, not taken with the stolen suitcase) and headed out. To save money we’d walk downtown instead of using the subway, then catch the Staten Island Ferry. It was just twenty-five cents for the ferry trip and what a view of the bay, my god how do you describe it it's so breathtaking? The Statue of Liberty looked smaller than I expected she would, standing lonely and proud as dozens of boats circled and pestered her, tourists snapping photographs by the thousands. Being on a boat was like being in the park. It gave one a chance to escape the dark valleys of Manhattan’s skyscrapers for a while and enjoy the sun on your face. 

Some of the best museums and galleries on earth were all within walking distance of the apartment. Sometimes we bought a dime bag from one of the dealers in Washington Square, careful not to inadvertently purchase oregano like we once did, and enjoyed a day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Standing on Fifth Avenue, Suzie would take a last toke and we would run up the wide, imposing steps to the entrance, laughing and breathless. 

Only a small donation was suggested, so we could easily afford it. We ambled along the spacious galleries, stoned, soaking up the cultural artifacts, paintings and masterpieces. I loved the African section with its collection of fetish sculptures and masks. It reminded me of when we’d lived in Africa. Suzie went quiet while we were there, and I figured she was thinking of her family, so far away. The quiet and dignified museum interior was a world away from the city outside, a great escape from the noise and bustle of Manhattan.

There was also the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. We loved it and returned there many times. I used to stand across Fifth Avenue against the wall under the leafless, winter trees that lined the park, stamping my feet to keep warm while Suzie bought a hot dog from the corner vender. 

"Over the top, please!" she'd order in her sing-song voice. 

Meaning with everything, or "All the Way" as New Yorkers called it, and we'd laugh. 

She always got it wrong.

I’d light a Marlborough and look across the street to admire the sweep and simplicity of the graceful Guggenheim building. I thought it extremely beautiful in the silver winter light. I enjoyed the elementary mathematical precision touched with whimsey of the design. Suzie would join me and finish my cigarette while I finished her hot dog and we’d cross the street to see what treasures waited within. 

Then there was the Museum of Modern Art.  

I love modern art. It speaks to me more directly than any of the other visual arts. And now to see them in person! Not just pictures in books. I could stand and admire Vincent Van Gogh’s Wheat Field with Crows, and turn to view a sublime Joan Miró Constellation painting without moving from the spot! Dali, Klee, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Matisse and on and on and of course the greatest ever, Picasso. 

I couldn’t stay long in the midst of such greatness, it was overwhelming as a viewer and belittling as an artist.

Why should I even try to be an artist, I thought, when I’d never be as good as they?  

Luckily, I was too stubborn to listen to myself when I talked like that.

What if everybody thought that way? Nothing would be achieved and there would be no cultural progress for our civilization. 

Which is not to say that as an artist I achieved much or advanced civilization even by an inch. 

It is only to say that I can be quite stubborn, sometimes.

Letter to Santa Pt 3

Well Santa, I went off to boarding school.

Which was pretty horrible. 

Being only twelve I was one of the younger boys and with my uselessness at sports and such I didn’t make friends easily. Plus I wasn’t the boarding school type, I guess, so my teachers were generally pretty disappointed in me too.

I felt lonely and dumb.

The one bright spot was art class, where I could draw.

One day after class the art teacher looked at my drawings of Bradbury the axolotl and said he saw promise in me.

I was so happy!

Then he touched me between my legs.

He told me how handsome I was and how he could see that I was a sensitive, loving kind of boy.  

That we could be special friends.

No one had ever spoken to me that way before, Santa.

So I let him kiss me and put my penis in his mouth and I have to say that it felt good.

Although I felt guilty about it later.

He used to make me stay after class so we could be alone. We did many things together which pleased him and I loved him with all my heart. 

He told me I was his special boy, but we have to keep it secret.

Of course it ended badly.

Another boy he was doing things with told his parents and it all came out. 

I had to leave school.

“Ugh! How could you?!” said my stepmother when I arrived home. “Doing it with a man. Little pervert!”

“I didn’t know it was wrong,” I said. “Really he was a nice person.”

“Little sissy,” said my dad and this time I knew he meant it.

We didn’t speak much after that.

But Boris, my stepmom’s brother who took over my room, he looked at me funny and that night he came to me where I was sleeping on the couch and said he wanted me to do the same things with him that I did with the teacher.

I said please no it got me into trouble but he just put all his weight on my chest pinning me down and told me to start doing it.

Then he called me some nasty names while I did what he wanted.

I was so scared my dad would catch us I used all my skill so that Boris would finish quickly.

He moaned and quivered and clutched me tightly.

I kept going till he was done.

Then he pushed me away and told me never to tell or I’d be sorry.

I was sorry already.

Boris visited me every night and even caught me in the bathroom a few times.

I remember the rug on the bathroom floor and Boris looking at himself in the mirror. He wasn’t like the art teacher, who was kind and said nice things. Boris was rough and called me names.

Like he hated me for what I let him do to me.

At least he stopped beating me up.

Luckily, I was soon sent to live with my aunt in Texas.

My father couldn’t stand the sight of me anymore, said my stepmother.

“So long, kid,” she added. “Good luck.”

She handed me $30 and put me on the bus to Amarillo, Texas.

My father didn’t even see me off.

My aunt picked me up at the station in Amarillo.

Her name, believe it or not, was Sissy.

Which made me laugh!

She laughed too. She had kind eyes like I remember my mother had so I gathered my courage and told her my story and how I came to be on her doorstep.

“I know,” she said softly. “Your daddy told me.”

“He thinks I’m a sissy,” I said.

“What do you think you are?” asked my aunt.

So we talked about it and I told her everything that I’d kept locked in my heart until then.

“It’s okay,” she said when I finished and it was the best thing she could have said.

Christmas that first year with aunt Sissy was fun. She had a daughter older than me away at university who came home for the holidays and with aunt Sissy’s husband Roger we all decorated the tree and had a grand time! 

It was the best Christmas I ever remember!

You brought me books that year, Santa, including one that became a favorite, James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl.

I suppose I identified a bit with James.

But then, don’t we all?

After awhile living with my aunt and her family I sort of forgot about Boris and the art teacher and the things I’d done with them.

I became a boy again. 

Aunt Sissy encouraged me in my drawing. She took me to the rodeo where for the first time ever I drew a live horse! She looked at my drawing and said my mother would have been proud of me.

Boy! That was a great day! 

Over the years aunt Sissy and uncle Roger became like my mother and father.

They loved me and treated me with kindness.

And I was a good son to them, making them proud mostly. 

I left Texas when I was nineteen, and went to New York where I hoped to become an artist.

“Don’t go, Rusty,” said aunt Sissy. “Stay with us and go to school here. You can go to New York later if you still want to.”

But I had wandering feet.

“I have to try,” I answered. “The bright lights of the big city beckon. I love you and uncle Roger and I’ll be forever thankful, but something calls me and I have to go.”

To be continued…

Letter to Santa

Dear Santa,

It’s been a long time since I wrote. 

You may not even remember me. 

I was the skinny blonde kid living on Wheeler Ave in Lake View Terrace? In the San Fernando Valley out by Hanson Dam and Laurel Canyon? 

I lived there in the 1960s.

Just me and my mom and dad to begin with. 

It being southern California, we didn’t have much of a chimney, so you probably wouldn’t remember that. 

Maybe Santa you remember kids from the presents you give them? 

The first present you ever gave me was a book.

A gift for which I truly thank you.

It was a how-to book about drawing animals. 

Boy! I must have drawn 10,000 horses from that book before I ever saw a live one! Most of these 10,000 horses were pretty poorly drawn I admit, but after about eight or nine thousand they started to get better.

From this book I learned something about myself I never knew before; that I really liked to draw. I used to show my drawings to my mother when her headaches weren’t too bad. Usually she didn’t feel good and would look at me with big shiny eyes and say, “Please Rusty. Some other time, okay? I’ve got a headache.” 

So I left her alone as much as I could.

Maybe you keep track of this stuff Santa, because everyone says you know naughty from nice and even keep a list, so I suppose you know my mother passed away a little bit before the next Christmas.

Which the grownups said was a blessing. 

I guess that’s true, but she wasn’t their mother.

That was the Christmas you didn’t come.

1960. Remember?

Did you think we’d all been naughty?

I was living with different aunts and uncles that holiday season while my father got better. He was in hospital with the DT’s whatever that is I didn’t know but I overheard aunt Tootsie say it to the milkman while they had a cigarette in the kitchen.

They’d come out of the bedroom, her and the milkman, laughing and playful as children, while he tucked his shirt into his trousers and she straightened her hair.

Then she called my father some terrible names, thinking I couldn’t hear.

The milkman laughed and said too bad, some guys can’t take it.

Yeah she answered, and now I’m stuck with his brat!

Never mind, Santa, I understand you not making it that year. 

It’s difficult to visit a family that isn’t a family anymore.

Besides, what I wanted was impossible. I know that now. 

How could you bring back my mother?

But things got better, like they always do.

You brought me a blue and yellow remote-controlled robot in 1962 that was so wonderful I still remember it to this day! It rolled on treaded wheels and was powered by batteries and out of its head would shoot little spring-loaded missiles!

I shot them at my new stepmother, saying look isn’t it great! but she hardly noticed.

She didn’t care for little children or robots, she said.

I named my robot Asimov, after the writer. 

I used to imagine Asimov talking to me when I was lonely and helping me with my homework when I was dumb.

Sometimes I imagined him blowing-up my stepmother.

Alas! Asimov fell into the pool and short-circuited one day during a battle with the neighbor’s cat.

Then Santa next Christmas you gave me a football and a helmet and a jockstrap and my dad thought they were great presents and he played with me a lot for awhile. That was a wonderful time until my dad saw that I was useless at sports and really I’d rather read a book or draw a bird in a tree than catch a ball or block a linebacker. 

I could see he was disappointed.

He called me a little sissy but I don’t think he really meant it.

I think he was still sad about mom dying, and this made him a bit mean sometimes.

Then the next year Santa you brought me a bicycle. 

I didn’t have it very long because I forgot and left the garage door opened and it got stolen!

In broad daylight!

Plus they took my dad’s golf clubs and some other stuff. 

Boy! was my dad ticked off!

Well, there goes your xmas, stupid, said my stepmother. That’ll teach you to mind your shit better, she added.

Sorry, I said. (Too bad they didn’t take my football helmet and jockstrap was what I was thinking.)

So instead of riding my bike I made a skateboard with a board and a skate and broke my leg falling off it before New Year’s day arrived.

I learned to my amazement that even the smallest pebble can stop a hurtling skateboard dead in its tracks!

I also learned that a body in motion tends to stay in motion, as I flew through the air after my skateboard had been stopped dead in its tracks. 

I was learning a lot until I landed.

Well, there goes your new years, dummy, said my stepmother when I got out of hospital the next day. Maybe that’ll teach you, she added. But she never said teach me what because she’d turned away and started watching her tv shows by then.

Bring me another drink, stupid, she said without looking at me.

So I hobbled into the kitchen and made her a drink.

She’d taught me to make gin and tonics, with lemon.

Not fucking lime, you idiot! she’d yelled at me when I got it wrong. Then she slapped me a few times to help me remember.

Lime’s for fucking tequila, dumbass! she added.

So I remembered. 

Lemon in her G&Ts.

After four operations in the hospital that year, my leg healed pretty good.

I missed a lot of school, but I don’t limp hardly at all now.

Stupid skateboard.

Or was it the pebble?

To be continued…

Artistic Pride

   What is it with my family and horses?

   I might have mentioned my great uncle JB was hung for being a horse thief. That was in Texas back in 1927. He stole from a famous singing cowboy his equally famous horse.

   For some infamous barnyard fun. 

   We don’t speak of it round the Pliers family table. Not in the presence of the young ones anyway. 

   Then my dad, when he was little, fell off a horse and broke both of his arms. 

   I used to love it when he told that story, because he always looked so embarrassed when he told it. Like falling off a horse and breaking both your arms was a silly thing to do. I especially liked to hear how he had to let his mother (Dad was fatherless from an early age) help him go to the bathroom. 

   Ha! Ha! Boy, did that make a funny image in my mind!

   Like Uncle JB, Dad was from Texas, but I suppose unlike JB he wasn’t much of a cowboy. Or a horse lover. Not as a child anyway.

   Then we come to me. Ironically the first time I ever sat on a horse was at the home of a Disney animator. The ranch really, of John Lounsbery (master animator and one of Disney’s original nine old men). This was in the late 1950s. My father (whose name is John Ewing, for you history buffs) had just started working for Disney and Mr Lounsbery was his new boss.

   So our family was visiting his family, to get to know each other. 

   I couldn’t have been more than five or six years old.

   It was a picnic party. After a barbecue lunch I wandered from the picnic tables to where the horses were fenced. I stood and looked at the huge glistening animals shaking their heads and snorting in the sun. 

   They were so big!  

   As I stood there my dad came from behind and lifted me up and sat me down on one of them.

   I cried and cried!

   Dad thought it was funny and took my photograph while Mr Lounsbery stood by in case I should fall. I suppose he didn’t want me to break my arms like father like son. I remember he wore a real cowboy hat and the most beautiful cowboy boots, red and shiny in the fine California dust.

   (I’m sorry to say the photograph was lost during our move years later from California to New Zealand. I was fourteen then, and when I happened upon it quite by accident as we were packing to move… Well, let’s just say that no one has seen that photograph since. But I paid the price for my youthful vanity. My young conscience racked me for years about tearing up and throwing away that single stupid photograph!)

   I sat upon the horse crying. After I’d about cried myself out, my mother came and rescued me, saying to the men they ought to be ashamed making me cry like that. 

   She laughed as she scolded, like she always did.

   But it wasn’t the men that had made me cry.

   It was the horse.

   I had been terrified! 

   They laughed gently together, the men and my mother, so I knew I wasn’t in trouble for crying, which made me feel better so I stopped sniffling and calmed down, then my mother took me and sat me in the dust under a tree with some toy cars.

  

   

   It wasn’t until I started to draw that I began to appreciate horses. Drawing opens your eyes to the world around you and the beauties of nature at every turn. Later when becoming an animator I had to study horses and their amazing poetry of motion so that I might work with them in the movies.

   An animator must exercise close observation of his subject in order to analyze and later artfully reproduce its particular movements. 

   I mean mind-numbingly close observation! Not everyone can do it. You ever met an animator? If you have then you’ll know.

   We’re a special breed.

   Anyway, with my observation of horses came understanding. With understanding came appreciation. With appreciation came admiration. With admiration came love.

   As an artist I’ve learned that it helps your performance if you are in love with your subject.

   You should have seen all the stuff we had to learn about horses for our performance with Khan in Disney’s Mulan (1997). I say we because more than a dozen of us drew and animated Khan for the movie, under the supervision of the great Disney animator Alex Kupershmidt. 

   Khan was a watershed experience for me. It was my first chance to ‘lead’ a character, as we called it, in a Disney feature. That meant that I had more responsibility for my character than I had before, that I could take more ownership. Ha! Ha! That suited me! With other artists, designers and animators I helped bring Khan to life from the germ of an idea in the director’s mind about the Fa family’s old war horse to the final poster of Khan and Mulan that graced the theater marquee at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, where Mulan premiered with great fanfare.

   I attended that premiere. Walked the red carpet. Hobnobbed with the big shots.

   I felt like a god that night!

   After being in the business for twenty-five years and working at Disney for seven, my dream of being a Disney animation artist had finally come true!

   Hey world! That’s my work up there! Me! What do you think? I did that!

   (Me, and well over three hundred other talented, dedicated artists and technicians let’s not forget. I'm bigheaded, but not that bigheaded!) 

   About artist’s reference let me say this. The trick is to learn all you can inside and out about your subject right down to the fingernails… then forget the facts and animate it from the heart!

   We lived and worked with Khan for close to two years while making Mulan.

   It was made the old-fashioned way. 

   Drawn by hand, one frame at a time.

   There are sixteen frames per foot of film.

   There are ninety feet of film per minute.

   An animated feature film is eighty to one-hundred minutes long.

   Do the math and you’ll come to the same conclusion we did.   

   You don’t have to be crazy to be an animator, but it helps.

   

   It ain’t easy, as we used to say with a laugh before we worked all weekend to finish the scene.

   Drawing horses till our hands ached.  

   Mulan was released in June, 1997.

   I’m still very proud of Khan. 

   He is beautifully animated and exquisitely drawn.

   Hard to believe that was nearly twenty years ago.

   I guess it’s true that no one forgets their first great love.

We Stand Upon the Shoulders of Giants

   I had lunch with my friend Rachele the other day. We met at a restaurant by the marina on the lakefront in St. Cloud, not far from where I used to live. They make a pretty good blackened grouper sandwich there, and the beer’s not too expensive. The only gripe I have is the overly friendly approach the staff adopt. Not being originally from the South, in fact having grown up in New Zealand, a place where people are more reserved socially, I always wince whenever my server calls me, “Hon.” 

   I know they don’t mean it that way, but I’m nobody’s hon.

   My second wife and I used to live in St Cloud. 

   She’s not the wife I blog about and fight with all the time. That’s my current wife. My pugnacious muse, you might call her, and, although I often wince when she speaks to me, she never calls me hon.

   No, the wife I used to live with in St Cloud is the wife who went a little cuckoo and started wearing tinfoil on her head, to keep out the voices that she heard. She also threw all her possessions into the street, ripped up every floorboard in the house, and installed video cameras in the attic, looking for the demons who were torturing her. And more nutty things, but why mention them? She did all this, by the way, well after we’d got divorced. So you can’t say, as some might, that I drove her crazy. When I lived with her I had no idea she was destined for such a fate. 

   Nobody knows for sure what their destiny will be, do they?

   She was a sweet-natured person, completely undeserving of the pain and confusion she was given. I feel badly, because towards the end of our marriage I wasn’t much of a husband. Some restless devil seemed to grab hold of me, and I couldn’t be happy with what I had. 

   Maybe I was the one who was cuckoo. 

   If you’re reading this, my dear, please accept my apologies. I’m sorry for the pain I caused you, and I hope your life is good now, and that you are happy.

   Anyway, about my lunch with Rachele. I hardly recognized her, she’d lost so much weight. One of the few of us in America who is reversing the trend. She used to run the training department at Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida, and was a popular ‘mother’ figure to the young interns that came through the place. They were usually nervous in the beginning, these interns, for it’s not an easy thing to be an animation artist for Walt Disney. There’s so much heritage and history, and at the time we were making the best animated movies in the world.

   They had yet to learn what every artist must learn; to trust themselves. 

   Occasionally I was called upon to instruct these interns. Animation cannot be learned from books, but, provided one is diligent, observant, and persistent, from trial and error. One has to make many thousands of terrible drawings, before the good drawings start to flow. And, if you’re lucky, animation is learned by a sort of apprenticeship to a more experienced animator. My original mentor had been my father, whose name, for you historians, is John Ewing*. He had worked for Disney, where his mentor had been John Lounsbery. Lounsbery** was one of Disney’s Nine Old Men, as Walt christened them. These nine men virtually perfected the art of character animation as we know it today. (I met the surviving members of this most exclusive of clubs, Marc Davis, Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston and Ward Kimball, as well as production designer Ken Anderson, layout artist Ken O’Connor and sound effects man Jimmy McDonald,*** shortly after the Florida studio opened in May of 1989. I was one of the Florida studio’s original crew members. I’d met Mr Lounsbery when I was a child. We, that is my family and I, visited his ranch for a picnic, where I rode a horse for the first time. My sister and brother were too young to ride, and I remember my mother was anxious, for I was still her little boy and knew nothing of horses or riding them.) 

   Thus I can trace my animation heritage, winding through the Disney company, all the way back to the 1930s.

   After the Disney execs came out from Burbank and casually laid us all off (closing the Florida studio in 2004), I taught animation at Full Sail University. During my years there, I taught thousands of students. Some of them even worked hard enough to have learned something, and to begin upon their own journey as animators. 

   Now they can trace their heritage back through me, and my father, and John Lounsbery.

   We stand upon the shoulders of the giants who came before.

*His Disney credits include 101 Dalmatians (1961), The Sword and the Stone (1963), and The Jungle Book (1967).

** Whose mentor had been Norm ‘Fergy’ Ferguson, the artist credited among the first to show an animated character ‘thinking’ on screen. That character was Pluto, and he was thinking about flypaper.

 ***Inventive sound effects artist and the voice of Chip from those wonderful Chip and Dale cartoons of the 1950s. He was also the second voice, after Walt, of Mickey Mouse.