A once in a lifetime exhibition is being presented at the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco. NINE OLD MEN will be open to the public on May 17, it will run into January of next year. The curator is Don Hahn, who got in touch with family members of the nine, and was able to secure rare items, such as personal art, student work and pieces associated with their hobbies. Below are a few examples. The majority of art will of course be animation related. Hundreds of rough drawings, flip books and a new documentary film.
Early Milt Kahl
Frank Thomas student work
Les Clark
A great caricature by John Musker of himself with Eric Larson.
There will be an exhibition catalogue for sale. And Glen Kean's own fabulous exhibit is up simultaneously. If you ever wanted to visit the WDFM...now is the time!!!
...by Wilhelm M. Busch for a bookcover. An ordinary pose, drawn in an extraordinary fashion. This approach applies to animation as well. Often you get to do a scene in which the character does something ordinary. How can this scene come out looking interesting. Of course the first thought should be around the character's personality. Is there a way to be unique and specific in your acting choices. The same goes for drawing and staging. A woman is sitting on a chair. What is she thinking? Who is she? Once you know that, then the drawing challenge follows. How can I portray this woman in the most beautiful and insightful way, so people want to look at her. Well, I do want to know more about this woman. I guess I will have to read the novel.
In his latest series Solitude at the Endless Wall, photographer Andres Gallardo Albajar captures the eerie atmosphere of a deserted and fog-covered walk on the Great Wall of China. With the intense fog and lack of other tourists, he was able to experience the Wall in a truly unique and unforgettable way. More dreamy, surreal and mysterious images below, and follow his website and Instagram for more of his work.
"Thoughts, silent thoughts, of Time and Space and Death…"
When thirty-six-year-old Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass in the summer of 1855, having poured the whole of his being into this unusual and daring labor of love, it fell upon unreceptive and downright hostile ears — a rejection that devastated the young poet. But over the coming decades, largely thanks to Emerson's extraordinary letter of endorsement and encouragement, it became one of the most beloved books in America — a proto-viral masterpiece that forever changed the face and spirit of literature, bold and fresh and replete with "incomparable things said incomparably," creaturely yet cosmic, bridging the earthly and the eternal yet larger than both.
Twenty-one years after Whitman's death, Everyman's Library series creator J.M. Dent published what remains the most beautiful edition of the Whitman classic — a large, lavish tome bound in green cloth, with the title emblazoned in gilt. But the crowning curio of this rare, spectacular 1913 edition — a surviving copy of which I was fortunate to acquire at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair — are twenty-four color plates by the English artist Margaret C. Cook.
"Two fishes swimming in the sea not more lawless than we"
Cook's stunning illustrations, shockingly sensual against the backdrop of Puritanism against which Whitman staged his rebellion in verse, bear something of William Blake — particularly his engravings for Paradise Lost; something of Maurice Sendak (who was, of course, shaped by Blake) — particularly his forgotten sensual illustrations for Pierre by Whitman's contemporary Herman Melville.
"You sea!… I behold… your crooked inviting fingers…, I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phase""We found our own, O my Soul, in the calm and cool of the daybreak""Whose happiest days were far and away through fields, … he and another wandering""How calm, how solemn it grows to ascend the atmosphere of lovers""Living beings, identities now doubtless near us in the air that we know not of"
Radiating from Cook's drawings is Whitman's insurgent insistence, as a queer man and a lover of all life, that romantic and erotic love transcends the tight parameters of the heteronormative — that the heart, too, contains multitudes.
"I will sing the song of companionship""The sun and stars that float in the open air, The apple-shaped earth and we upon it, surely the drift of them is something grand, I do not know what it is except that it is grand, and that it is happiness"
Most spectacular are Cook's nocturnal scenes, fusing the sultry with the celestial — a consonant complement to Whitman's lifelong fascination with astronomy, which would prompt him to write in Specimen Days a quarter century later:
To soothe and spiritualize, and, as far as may be, solve the mysteries of death and genius, consider them under the stars at midnight.
"Thoughts, silent thoughts, of Time and Space and Death""Give me nights perfectly quiet… and I looking up at the stars""The tender and growing night""The night follows along, with millions of suns, and sleep, and restoring darkness""We have voided all but freedom and all but our own joy""I see… great cloud-masses… With at times half-dimm'd sadden'd far-off star"
"The sleepers are very beautiful as they lie unclothed, They flow hand in hand over the whole earth from East to West""I will confront these shows of the day and night; I will know if I am to be less than they, I will see if I am not as majestic as they""They are calm, clear, well possess'd of themselves""I see my soul reflected in Nature, As I see through a mist, One with inexpressible completeness, sanity, beauty, See the bent head and arms folded over the breast, the Female I see""The soul has that measureless pride which revolts from every lesson but its own""I too with my soul and body, We, a curious trio, wandering on our way, Through these shores amid the shadows, with the apparitions pressing""I musing late in the autumn day""The merriment of the two babes that crawl over the grass in the sun, the mother never turning her vigilant eyes from them""The yellow half-moon enlarged, sagging down, drooping, the face of the sea almost touching, The boy ecstatic""I have taken my stand on the basest of peninsulas and on the high embedded rocks, to cry thence: 'Salut au monde!'"
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Rob and Nick Carter, a husband and wife artistic duo, portray a range of traditional Sanskrit yoga postures in their series Yoga Photograms. The model's weight and pose are imprinted onto a large photographic paper via their movement across the light in a darkroom. And the results are as stunning as the process (a series of eight life-size portraits that are compelling, imaginative and unforgettable) just like the rest of Rob and Nick's projects and artistic vision. Discover more of their work here and on Instagram.
