Stephen Shore, Photographer

In the 1970's he was taking pictures of things that no one else was. He took a trip across country with the goal of documenting everything: including every meal he ate and every toilet he used. 

A formative influence was hanging out at Andy Warhol's Factory. By age 23 he had a show at the Metropolitan Museum.

Portrait of Stephen Shore, photographer, drawn from life by James Gurney

Last night Stephen Shore gave a slide show of his work in Rhinebeck, New York, and I drew his portrait as he spoke. He briefly struck a pose with a hand to his mouth, both pensive and guarded. The lecture gig had somehow slipped his mind, and he drifted in a half hour late after a few nervous phone calls from the bookstore owners.

His wild nimbus of white hair was rim-lit from the fluorescents of the bookstore. The projection screen lit him with soft light from the other side. I chose to portray him in grays, anticipating that he might talk about color vs. black and white. 

He said:

"When I started this work, no art photography was in color. Paul Strand told me, 'Higher emotions couldn't be communicated in color.' Mind boggling! What would Kandinsky think of that? I see the world in color. It's what it's like to see. Color gives cultural information. By 1990 almost all art photography was in color. Then in contrariness I started working in black and white."

Stephen Shore, Columbia South Carolina June 1972

Shore said, "I was interested in the immediacy that some snapshots have. I wanted to use repeated motifs, to capture some aspects of our culture. I was taking what we would now call screenshots of our field of vision."

Stephen Shore's photography is currently being featured in an career-spanning exhibit of 320 photographs at the Fundacion Mapfre in Madrid, Spain. The exhibition will continue in Berlin, Turin, and Amsterdam.
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Stephen Shore's website. Photos ©Stephen Shore
Recommended books:
Stephen Shore: Survey,
Stephen Shore: Uncommon Places

Materials in portrait:

Caran D'ache - Supracolor watercolor pencils: black, white, slate grey, brownish beige, Vandyke brown.

Watercolor sketchbook, 5 x 8 inches. Portrait is about 4 x 5 inches.

Water brushes filled with clear water, dark gray ink, and black ink.

The Acanthus Leaf

The acanthus leaf has been a favorite design element for millenia. The leaf shapes appear on many Roman and Greek capitals.

Here is an acanthus leaf motif on a Corinthian capital in the Doge's Palace in Venice. The leaf shapes are more naturalistic and profuse, wrapping over the shapes and making them organic.

William Morris used the acanthus for this 1875 wallpaper design. The leaves overlap each other in sinuous curves, and are grouped by color to suggest layers of depth.

Here's an example of how the leaf was adapted for a 19th century manual on lettering. The leaf shapes have graceful S-curves that grow in close parallel curves, and then terminate in spiral finials or flare out into lobed leaf shapes. Vestigial fragments of these leaf shapes appear on the back of the US dollar bill.

Here's what the actual leaf looks like. The two main species that inspired the designers are the Acanthus spinosus and the Acanthus mollis (above), and they grow in the Mediterranean region. 

The tips of the leaf are spikier than they appear in the design configuration. Most of the design adaptations have convex lobes. There's a strong single midrib with smaller side veins and secondary leaflets branching off the main midrib. 

William Morris's version retains the structure of the single midrib and side-veins, but he elongates and spirals the leaf shape. The pen-and-ink version deviates from the actual acanthus by replacing the single midrib with a series of parallel rib lines, more like a plantain leaf.

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Read more:
Wikipedia: Acanthus in Ornament
"It's all in the Details -- Acanthus Leaves"

Screenshots from an average day.

These are all watercolor sketches made while waiting. Waiting for my wife to buy vegetables at a farm market, waiting at a Mexican restaurant, and waiting for an oil change.

They're small, about the size of a business card. And the subjects are insignificant, just screenshots taken at random from an average day.

Review: Boxtrolls and Big Hero 6 Art-Of Books

Two recent art-of books have presented fascinating glimpses of the artistry behind a couple of recent animated films.

The Art of The Boxtrolls chronicles the making of Laika's most recent stop motion feature, about a group of quirky creatures who raise a human boy beneath the streets of a city named Cheesebridge.

The text is written by key members of the staff of the film, including Philip Brotherton, art director at Laika, Travis Knight, Laika's president and lead animator, and Anthony Stacchi, director of the film, each of whom describes how the animation studio altered the material of the source novel to work in their unusual stop-motion medium.

The artwork shown in the book includes character designs, architectural plans, and color keys. These digital paintings by Paul Lasaine helped to work out the shot compositions, color, and lighting.

There are a lot of character design sketches, both black-and-white and color, 2D and 3D. Much of the work is hand painted or hand sculpted, something of a rarity in concept art these days. 

Armaturist Nick Smalley-Ramsdale described how difficult it was to make the flexible armature for the character Fish (center), to allow the character to be able to fold up completely inside the box for one scene.

The genesis of each of the characters is followed from sketch to maquette to finished animatronic puppet, featuring many of the handcraft skills, such as hair and costume. 

However, I wish there had been more explanation of the specific processes used in creating the armature, casting the foam body, and 3D-printing (and storing) the thousands of facial expressions used in Laika's unique process. One feels that they're holding back trade secrets in the realm of their most important innovations, but they don't need to since they're always moving forward, and a book like this could have offered a more informative record of how they made the film.

The Art of Big Hero 6 showcases the artistry that the Disney studios brought to the challenge of interpreting a Marvel comic universe in terms of Disney Animation, rather than live action. The movie had to have plenty of fighting action, but also a focus on character and charm.

Almost all of the concept art in this book is painted digitally, including this one by Paul Felix showing Hiro and his inflatable robot companion Baymax. 

In addition to crediting the artists by name, (something overlooked in many previous "art-of" books), the book includes their comments about the specific challenges they faced and the methods they used. 

For example, Adolph Lusinsky, director of Cinematography and Lighting, says, "We knew Baymax was going to have projection inside his vinyl so, to test how it would look, we cut a hole in a beach ball, put in a piece of glass, blew it back up and put a projector behind it. The light bleeds through his legs and arms and feels really believable."  

Jeff Turley created this digital rendering to help imagine the portmanteau urbanscape of San Fransokyo. Everything in the city had to be designed, from signs to vehicles to interiors, and there's a good mix of examples. 

In comparison to other art-of books, this one devotes more attention to the architecture and environments, though character designs are well covered in the second half of the book. 

When planning the home of the main character, a Victorian home over a bakery/cafe, Scott Watanabe said that he "researched extensively how old Victorians were built and would have been remodeled." He had to thoroughly understand how the roof framing worked inside the tower, because the structure would be seen in the interior shots in the final film.

The book does a good job of showing the range of artistry and expertise that goes into making a major animated feature, and it presents the thinking behind the art in a way that's fun and inspiring to read.

Both books are 9.5 x 11 inches, 160 pages, full color, hardback, and they retail for $40.00 each (or between $26-$31 new on Amazon). 

More info:

The Art of The Boxtrolls

The Art of Big Hero 6
All images ©Laika, Disney, or Chronicle Books.

James Bagwell Conducts

Last night, James Bagwell conducted the Bard College Chamber Singers and the Symphonic Chorus in a performance of G. F. Handel's oratorio Esther.

James Bagwell, conductor, Bard College Symphonic Chorus

Bagwell spent most of the time in a resting position (leftmost pose), as the chorus waited for their parts, between the arias and recitatives, which were directed from the keyboard by Alexander Bonus.

Then he flew into action. As he lifted his arms in precisely measured movements, his fitted jacket reflected the pull of his shoulders. When the chorus declared "Pour our vengeance on our foes," he leapt up in great animation, the tails of his coat lifting up like the flounces of a lady's skirt.

I sketched from the third row, and was able to see because of the light spilling out from the stage. I used Caran d' Ache water-soluble colored pencils (#047 Bistre, #037 Brown Ochre, #065 Russet, and #009 Black) and two Niji water brushes (clear water and black) in a Pentalic watercolor sketchbook.
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Previously on GurneyJourney:
Maestro Bagwell
James Bagwell at a Rehearsal

Previous posts on concert sketching:
The "Flash-Glance" Method
Gouache portrait of an Irish whistle player
Sketching a vocal concert  
Violinist in ink wash
Horn Player
Mirko Listening
Club Passim Gig
Shapewelding Sketching 
The Cello and the Pencil
Concertgoer
Mass in C
Handel's Messiah

Getting a Likeness at Madame Tussauds

Madame Tussauds created this video about how they create a wax portrait figure. They had the benefit of having the subject, Benedict Cumberbatch, available for measurements and color matches. (link to video)

One of the readers of this blog is Jethro Crabb, a painter and sculptor who has worked at Madame Tussauds. I asked him a few questions prompted by the video.

James Gurney: Who sculpted the head in the video?

Jethro Crabb: "My friend John Cormican, a lovely fellow and a veteran of Jim Henson's creature shop amongst other places, sculpted the head for the Benedict Cumberbatch figure."

JG: Where is Madame Tussauds based, and what did you do there?

Jethro Crabb: "The studios are based in Acton, West London and produce wax figures for all the worldwide attractions. Each figure normally has two sculptors working on it, one to sculpt the body and one the head. I specialised in head sculpts during my time there."

JG: Do you ever use 3D scanners?

J. Crabb: "Tussauds to me is fascinating because most of the techniques involved in the production of the figures are exactly the same as they were 200 years ago. In the last couple of years 3D scanning and printing has become a part of the process, but the 3D prints are currently only used as another reference tool for sculpting in clay by hand."

JG: Do you always have a living celebrity available to pose?

J. Crabb: "In the case that the celebrity was free and willing to meet us, we would travel to them and take hundreds of photographs and measurements of them. For the head we used an eyebrow pencil to draw a matrix of dots on their faces which became points to measure from. As we built the clay head up using the photographic reference we established these points in the clay using metal pins and carefully measured between them with calipers. We would compare these measurements with our chart of measurements taken in the sitting and adjust them until correct. Two of the photographs we took were a 'front on' and a 'profile' shot in the right facial expression from 5 meters away (to minimize the distortion)."

"These were printed out 2% larger than life size and we used this to directly take measurements in a very specific way. The clay head was built 2% larger to compensate for shrinkage in the wax cast. In the case that the celebrity didn't want to be involved or was unavailable we would work from photographs alone. Each portrait would normally take 5 weeks to sculpt. All these techniques and processes were tinkered with and added to over the years and the results produced could be quite remarkable."

JG: What elements are key to getting a likeness?

J. Crabb: "One of the things I learned as an artist working at Tussauds was that in order to create a convincing likeness of someone it was crucial that all the elements were correct and had the correct relationship with each other. Humans are so expert in recognising faces, or more accurately 'heads' since the shape and silhouette of the cranium, neck and jaw play an important role in this recognition, that any minor mistake or mismatch of forms creates a disproportionately disastrous result."

"I also learned more and more that it is the big simple shapes in a sculpture which are the most important to establish correctly. There is always a tendency to be distracted by an alluring nostril shape or mouth corner, but even if this small stuff is correct it is useless unless it is laying over a correctly sculpted larger form. Perhaps a similar thing can be said of painting."

JG: When it comes to recognizing a particular face, I have always been under the impression that the great portrait painters engage in subtle caricature (see post on "Caricature and Likeness") or at least are selective about downplaying certain features or qualities that are not particularly characteristic. Am I right in understanding that there's none of that going on with Madame Tussauds sculptures? Are you going for a metrically exact mirror image with no attempt to exaggerate characteristic details?

Jethro Crabb: "This subject of 'caricature vs exact copy' that you bring up is one that absolutely fascinates me. Your question and original blog post has hit upon an issue that I have spent a lot of time thinking about and experiencing through my sculpture. Please excuse my lengthy response. It should be an easy question to answer, but it is not."

"At Madame Tussauds, the sculptors are aiming to produce an exact copy of the person. So that you could stand the celebrity next to their sculpture and it would be impossible to spot any differences in size, proportion, form or colour between the two, (By the way this aim is rarely if ever 100% achieved no matter how meticulously the wax figure is made)."

"But in order to get to that point I think it is helpful to have a caricaturist's eye. To have the ability and inclination to notice what specific characteristics are key in making someone look the way they do. This skill is particularly important when we have been unable to meet the celebrity in question and are just working from photographs without the aid of measurements taken from the subject. In this case it is useful to observe which characteristics of their head shape and features and they way they fit together are distinctive and might be exaggerated if we were to make a caricature. By noticing these characteristics we can make sure they are stated clearly enough in the sculpture. Better that they are slightly overstated than understated."

Wax portrait of Beethoven by Jethro Crabb

JG: With movie celebrities or larger-than-life historical figures, our notions of what they look like is influenced by a certain amount of myth-making via film or painting. Sometimes the screen persona of a movie actor is kind of artificial, and different from the real flesh-and-blood human being. How do you factor that in?

J. Crabb: "A good wax figure should look like how people expect that celebrity to look. This can often be subtly different to the reality. Think about having your photo taken and having a feeling that it didn't quite capture how you really look. This could easily be the case with a wax figure as well. We could create a sculpture that measures correctly and adds up with all the photographs from the sitting, but just doesn't look like how we expect Johnny Depp, for instance, to look. So sometimes we have to choose photographic reference which tallies with our expectations. On top of this some of the best portrait sculptors at Tussauds use elements of subtle exaggeration in their modelling to define the characteristics of the forms and shapes in the face. Two of the principal sculptors used to work as caricaturists for the British television political caricature programme "Spitting Image" and I think this has helped with their realistic work."

Thanks so much, Jethro!
Jethro Crabb's sculpture work 
Celebrity Tussaud images are from FanPop

Dinotopia Podcast, Episode 4

It's Tuesday, time for the new episode of the Dinotopia audio podcast adventure. Just click below or follow this link.

Descending the flanks of Volcaneum, Arthur and Will Denison hear Bix's vocal talents, and witness the hadrosaur swamp symphony. For this sequence, producer Tom Lopez drew on his stereo recordings of jungles in India and Bali, and composer Tim Clark created deep rumbling sounds.

As they approach Waterfall City, they hear the roar of the falls.

They fly across the gorge on a glider and make their first entrance to Waterfall City.

Malik, the timekeeper, explains to Arthur how Dinotopians visualize the passage of time, using a combination of circular and linear geometry, resulting in the spiral and the helix. I love the immersive quality of the audio in this whole episode, and it's not surprising that AudioFile Magazine called it “A masterpiece of audio production.”

The Podcast Series
This acoustic adventure was produced by Tom Lopez, mastermind of the ZBS Foundation, with an original music track by composer Tim Clark.

Episode 5 arrives in one week— Tuesday, December 9. Each 10-minute episode will only be live online for one week, and then it will disappear. So tell your friends, and be sure to check in to this blog each week. That way you'll be able to hear the whole production for free.

If you'd like to purchase the full two-hour Dinotopia podcast right now and hear all twelve episodes back to back in a feature-length production, check out Dinotopia at ZBS Foundation website for the MP3 download.

You can also order the original book from my web store and I'll sign it for you. It's the ultimate holiday gift for the imaginative person in your life. (US orders only for the book, please).

Harry Anderson's Photo Reference

When Harry Anderson (1906-1996) set out to illustrate images from his 7th Day Adventist religious faith, he turned to photo reference to give him added realism.

Here are the photos next to the finished paintings. It's interesting to compare the changes he made as he went from the reference to the painting. 

Here, Jesus is lowered from heaven to outreached human hands. The painting invents the sweep of the garment, and the warm reflected light from the back of the figure to the encircling white fabric.

This is one of Anderson's most famous religious paintings. Much of the spontaneous action and accurate eyelines came from posing the whole grouping together and actually having them walk. 

Norman Rockwell didn't shoot reference this way, and would instead generally pose models separately and would set up walking poses somewhat artificially. 

The potential pitfall of shooting photo reference, especially for religious paintings, is that one can get caught up in the commonplace and random details of the photo and lose sight of the mental image of the scene. 

Anderson certainly didn't copy the reference, instead redrawing it, and controlling the values. Note how he downplayed the reflected light on the shadow side of the chest. 

Like many other illustrators of his day, Anderson used black and white photos, not wanting to be influenced by the colors. He spared no expense or effort to get good scrap. According to his biography, a large percentage of his commission went to model expenses and photography fees. 

Most of the photos he used he took and developed himself in a bedroom that he converted into a photo studio and darkroom. He used professional models—who even 50 years ago charged as much as sixty dollars an hour—but he also used neighbors and friends. 

The biography says: "By posing his models in approximately the right costume and photographing them, Harry could obtain what he needed—the proper foreshortening of limbs, inclination of head, relationship of light and shadow."

Additional resources:

Illustrated bio in book form (emphasis on religious work): Harry Anderson: The Man Behind the Paintings

More online about Harry Anderson's religious art.

Previous posts:

Walking Poses

Using Photo Reference

Thanks to Jim Pinkoski and Lars Justinen for the images