Otto Dix

Cat in the Poppy Field (Katze im Mohnfeld), 1968

The messy, loose feel of the pastels is (like Karel Appel's work) playful. You can see the outlines through the poppy petals, the exposed bones of the piece. The colour choice is really interesting. The colours are bright and unblended, but without a harshness. They are quite soft colours used to depict quite a sweet scene of this cat with enlarged, cartoonish eyes, stalking through similarly enlarged flowers. It reminds me of Studio Ghibli movies. Quite a contrast to Dix's dark depictions of war scenes and stark portraits.

Karel Appel

Bedized Pudding Canadian Suite, 1979

What I love about Karel Appel's work is her bright, rich, brilliant colours and disproportionate characters - all big noses and primary colours. Her work seems to have such a carefree spirit to it - collaged and painted imps.

Each painting looks so playful and looking at them gives me a great urge to get out lots of coloured paper and paint and make a big, beautiful, fun mess.

Eva Stalinski - personality through movement

stalinski @ tumblr

There's a brilliant bendiness to these green folks (even their hair has it!) and I love it. The flow of it, extending even to the visible pen marks that make up the colouring, those really pleasing curves. Curving limbs are definitely something I've played with in the past and am somewhat returning to. A few years ago I drew my characters with long, curling limbs just like this, and there's a sort of inherent expressiveness to that which I'm trying to re-introduce to some of my work, in a more subtle capacity. Curling limbs suggest a great, sweeping movement. It's almost as if movement itself is personality.

Toad - Super Mario Bros. 3

Toad is a great example of a very cute character. What drew me to him most of all was his animation (as detailed above). The animation seems very nuanced. He seems to be a little worried, shouting like a kid. He is energetic and excited. He squishes down to a crouching form, a sweet little mushroom boy.

Toad is a colourful, expressive creature. The restrictions of pixel graphics have produced incredibly expressive work and show that simplicity of design does not denote lack of depth. The ideal cartoon form must strike a balance which allows it this depth of character in spite of its simplistic form.

AnnLee

Stills from Anywhere Out of The World, 2000.

"In 1999, the artists Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno bought a manga character from “K” works, a Japanese firm that develops Manga figures. Huyghe and Parreno decided to 'free the image from the animation market', named 'her' Annlee, made their own initial works and invited other artists to use Annlee for new art projects, free of charge. Annlee was given a voice, history and an identity and she popped up in animation videos, paintings, objects, installations, posters and a magazine, soundworks and a book. In the end 28 works were produced by 18 different artists. The project was finalized in 2002 with the artists definitively killing her off (including a coffin) and liberating her from the realm of representation -as they described it- by signing over the copyrights of the image to Annlee herself." (Istha, 2012)

AnnLee is a really interesting use of a character. She was a blank slate - a cookie cutter character with nothing much in the way of distinguishing features. But she became a vessel for a collage of all these different personalities and ideas - she became so full of all this stuff, and yet she was still this blank, robotic character.

1. Istha, M. (2012). Call for new Annlee art works. [online] rhizome.org. Available at: http://rhizome.org/announce/opportunities/58508/view/ [Accessed 24 Jun. 2014].

Disney Colour Palettes

Snow White - 1937
Cinderella - 1950

I saw these screenshots from various Disney films and was struck by their beautiful colour palettes - perfectly dreamy with careful combination of muted and rich tones. These create such a softness, such a delicate, enchanted vibe to the fairy tale lands the films depict with such a vibrancy. The lighter blonde lines in and around Aurora's hair in Sleeping Beauty is a stand out detail which works to make her look ethereal and magical.

Also of note is the stylistic difference - particularly the soft, round look of Snow White compared to the angular design of Sleeping Beauty (look at the difference in their faces!). To some extent this is evidence of aesthetic preferences of the 1930s and 50s respectively, and it's interesting how this affects the worlds the two films portray. Snow White is more foggy and dreamlike in comparison with the sharp, agile fairy look of Sleeping Beauty. Both convey similar stories but have an immensely different style, with lots of subtleties.

Sleeping Beauty - 1959
The Little Mermaid - 1989

Sculptures by Philippa Haines

All photos taken from Philippa Haines on Flickr.

I successfully Googled my high school art teacher. It's fascinating to see her work for the first time - these weird, fantastical figures. They remind me of the film MirrorMask, designed and directed by Dave McKean -  known for his ethereal, spooky, and slightly cartoonish dreamscapes (and his Sandman comic book covers, which reminded me of Anselm Kiefer when I first saw them). McKean and Haines are similar in that their work shares that perfect cartoonish spook feel. This kinda makes me feel like an enchanted little kid being told an elaborate story. It's like a nostalgia for something that doesn't exist - that special kind of excitement when you could almost believe a myth or legend. They also remind me of the BBC TV series adaptation of Gormenghast.

I remember, when I was really young, I had a book about an enchanting woman who lead someone into a forest. I have tried to remember more details about this book so many times in later life and have never succeeded in finding out what it was, and it sounds ridiculous, but I feel like I lost a world. I remember the feeling I would have when I read this book was the most intense feeling of curiosity and imagination and I think my whole body would shiver. I was as enchanted by the book as the character in the book was enchanted by this woman, to the extent that I wanted to jump into the book and become lost in that story's world. I think I actually came close to believing it was real, like my own version of Narnia or Jumanji.

I can begin to emphasise enough just how intense this experience was, but everything else I've discussed in this post evokes a smaller level of that incredibly enchantment, that mysticism and yearning to enter the fictional world, whether the world is directly described or shown, like in MirrorMask or Gormenghast, or merely suggested by a single figure or image, like Haines' sculptures.