Too Art for TV is at it again, featuring all sorts of fine art made by lovely animation industry peoples.  Opening reception for the 4th Annual Fine Art Exhibit is on Friday September 18th, 6pm-9:30pm.

September 18th through October 17th, 2009
at Erebuni, 158 Roebling St. Williamsburg, NY 11211

Click here to see the full list of contributing artists.

After party at Trophy Bar.

Every year, Too Art for TV brings fine art from NYs renowned animation industry artists to the art gallery public.  It’s always a fun show and well attended every year.  Many lovely ASIFA-East members have exhibited with them in the past.

Too Art for TV 4 opens in September of 2009.
Application Deadline is APRIL 30th 2009.

To apply, visit Too Art for TV online.

Photo courtesy of J.J. Sedelmaier

Photo courtesy of J.J. Sedelmaier

Today we bring you Part Two of Richard Gorey’s review of the It All Started Here exhibition, brought to you by Howard Beckerman and J. J. Sedelmaier.

It All Started Here: Part 2

Review by Richard Gorey.

It All Started Here took up two levels of gallery space. The first floor, dominated by a life-sized cutout of Gertie the Dinosaur, was dedicated to the storyboards and designs of the classic theatrical cartoons. Further back were examples of TV ads from the fifties: work that kept many New York studios in the black during that time, when theatrical shorts became largely extinct. Visitors got a chance to see art and the final spots from the famous “Bert and Harry” Piel’s Beer ads, a sampling of some of the UPA films and television spots from the same era, and the work of artists like Jules Feiffer, whose social satire Munro was represented by the complete rough storyboards, on a wall dedicated to these charming sketches. The gallery’s vault (a novel and distinctive element of the former bank’s aesthetic appeal) opened to a series of projected commercials and short films created on Madison Avenue. Co-curator Sedelmaier’s work, including the series of ribald cartoons created for Saturday Night Live, was featured on the second floor, though when these films were run the more controversial dialogue snippets were bleeped, sadly.

I sometimes wonder as a teacher of animation what people think of these days when they hear the word. “Animation” used to mean creating life (or the illusion of life) one drawing at a time with a pencil on paper. To my generation it most often meant having a personal investment in every frame. Such intimate and confessional works are showcased in the gallery, notably Michael Sporn’s Champagne, a sobering real-life account of a young girl coming to terms with her mother’s incarceration for murder. The curators managed a thorough job of including and championing works from every style and motivation: this was not merely a retrospective of television cartoons or well-known characters, though Mighty Mouse, Heckle and Jekyll, and Casper the Friendly Ghost were prominently on view.

Photo courtesy of J.J. Sedelmaier

Is there a “New York” personality in East-coast animation–one distinct and unique from the West Coast films? Writers like Leslie Cabarga (“The Fleischer Story”) and other film historians agree there is: something brash, irreverent, sometimes obnoxious, and decidedly confrontational that surfaces in many films animated by New Yorkers. Popeye certainly had rough edges in his personality and his animation, and the recent films created by Sedelmaier have a crude, puckish nature that is a delight to many audiences and occasionally off-putting to others.

It All Started Here serves as a reminder that for the first two decades of animation’s existence it was an industry which grew and evolved in the midst of this New York/East-coast sensibility. Early films were ribald, rude, funny, and even shocking. They still are: go to any New York festival and you’ll see stories about as far a field from the childlike wonders of California animation as you’re likely to get. There is something angry, raw, and challenging in this work, but the Westchester Arts show also boasted examples of the physical art taken to stunning extremes. The feature films and shorts produced at Blue Sky (Which until recently was located on Main Street, in White Plains) are sterling examples of “state of the art” in design, execution, writing and direction.

“The thing is, it seems people have forgotten everything,” Beckerman offers. “Not just where the studios were located and who worked there, but the films themselves, many of which have been lost to history. The computer is a great tool, and it’s taken over, but we should remember that the computer merely copied everything we used to do by hand.” In many ways, the computer has streamlined the process: in others it has pushed the limits of what is possible regarding rendering, detail, and surface modeling. But the inspiration that designs and moves the characters is still an internal, human province.

The show features a century’s worth of material but even the most historic pieces felt fresh–if not in physical style than in their humor and accessibility. I saw several patrons laughing out loud at a silent cartoon whose artwork was crude, but whose cavorting puppies retained their power to delight and amuse.

Photo courtesy of J.J. Sedelmaier

Design and flow of the show seems to have been carefully considered. Montages of art and written material featured numbered “key maps” which told in detail what each piece was and when it was created. The gallery space was filled with things to see, but didn’t feel crowded, claustrophobic, or haphazard. Three-dimensional models of characters from Blue Sky’s Robots and the Ice Age films were welcome additions, offering a more tactile sense of the process by which animals and vehicles are realized and rendered in modern feature films. A computer used to create very early 3-D animation looks frighteningly primitive until one realizes it was built (and one suspects abandoned) in the early nineties.

One interesting aspect of the gallery show was a letter written to Nickelodeon by an anonymous Mom, in which the woman berated the network for a logo she swears shows the main character wearing “two condoms” on his feet. “My son pointed it out to me,” the woman wrote, incensed, and a reader wonders how old the boy was, what he saw, what he thought he saw, and how he knew what a condom was…but never mind.

The letter was funny in itself, of course, but it did shine a spotlight on the often-mature nature of the work created by the New York artists and writers. Films like The Ambiguously Gay Duo were designed for adults, and their inclusion in the gallery show may have seemed intimidating to those bringing small children, but the show’s function was to celebrate the diversity, risk-taking, controversy, and personal investment in the New York work, where animators create angry, chancy, rude, and challenging films. Sedelmaier’s irreverent and taboo-shattering style may have dictated his affinity for the more brash and outrageous pieces represented, but the show, which he conceptualized and organized, pays homage to several different methods and demographics.

For those who care about animation as an art form and mode of personal expression, it’s important to recognize that what most people think of as “cartoons” are often a tiny fraction of the work currently being produced-on both coasts. New York has a large independent community, and with the advent of computer technology and affordable software, many artists who might not have had the resources or finances to make films are now able to make intimate statements, some of which are troubling and even confrontational. Celebrating this freedom, that commitment, and the often-unsung contributions of the New York artists is a wonderful idea, and Sedelmaier’s show was a welcome addition to the historic record of the industry on the East Coast.

“I’d like people to come away from this exhibit knowing that that what ‘animation’ is can be much bigger than the popular features audiences see and remember,” Howard Beckerman says. “This was a chance to showcase some outstanding work that hasn’t really been given its’ due.”

In this, he and Sedelmaier have succeeded: the Westchester Arts Gallery reported its biggest audience ever, one Saturday during the show’s run. Looks as if New York animation is once again a big draw.

Photo courtesy of J.J. Sedelmaier

It All Started Here: Part 1

Review by Richard Gorey.

Howard Beckerman, co-curator of the Westchester Arts Center’s animation exhibit, recently told me, “I’ve always said the two best-kept secrets of world War II were the development of the Atom Bomb and that Animation began–and was still being produced–in New York, not just California.” Last month, Beckerman and animation producer J.J. Sedelmaier helped to spread the word about one of these “best kept secrets” in their White Plains gallery show It All Started Here, a retrospective of New York animation over the last century. The show championed the creativity, individuality, and uniquely “East Coast” personality of the work featured, but It All Started Here also served as an instructional tour through the specifics of traditional, hand-drawn animation production. A diverse sampling of commercial and independent New York films were represented, but the Westchester Arts gallery featured everything from tools, cameras, light boxes, projectors, desks, paints and even the computers instrumental in designing, storyboarding and executing these classic works of art. Much of this material came from J.J Sedelmaier, who has been collecting and restoring animation related items for many years, and the gallery offered tangible proof of the incredible amount of labor and skill required to produce animated cartoons. That glorious finished product doesn’t just appear onscreen: the process is compartmentalized, laborious and often physically difficult. It’s an odd contradiction when one considers the easy fun and humor many cartoons are famous for. Visitors to the Arts Center were offered rare glimpses of East-coast films (some not seen in five decades) and found themselves standing next to the tools and equipment that made the shorts possible.

Some years ago, I was asked to introduce a screening of the Fleischer studios’ Mr. Bug Goes to Town. As a part of the evening’s agenda I showed a short made in 1940; a “backstage look” into the workings of the animation process which was a revelation to the audience-many of whom never had been exposed to the specifics of pre-computer-era cartoon production. The images of men and women hand-painting clear plastic cels, shooting the artwork against watercolor backgrounds on an bulky camera stand, even the creation of miniature 3-D models for the Popeye shorts were all surprises to the current generation of cartoon fans. I had a similar feeling of history and education when I toured the Arts Center’s exhibit, and was reminded that these films were created one frame at a time by artists and craftspeople that had a personal relationship with every inch of what eventually wound up onscreen.

The show, which ran until February 28th, featured art and concept work from the Betty Boop and Popeye shorts of the twenties and thirties as well as clips and production materials from more recent creations, such as Blue Sky’s Ice Age. In these days of slick computer-generated imagery, audiences sometimes forget most ideas start on paper–even though they may end up as pixels in a hard drive.

“The Westchester Arts exhibit was inspired by J.J.’s collection, and I got involved because of my research of New York Animation studios. There was a slide presentation I had done over twenty years ago,” Beckerman says. “I realized all this New York history was being lost, that the studios had disappeared, the buildings that housed them were being torn down. I spent a great deal of time walking around Manhattan taking pictures of all these places. Sedelmaier has over the years collected so many incredible artifacts from the early days. He has the original Bray paper punch, for instance, and a desk from the Fleischer studios, when they were at 1600 Broadway. He’s got the moviolas, peg bars, and all kinds of promotional materials, so pulling together the things we wanted to display was relatively easy.”

Beckerman says one of the differences between the New York work and the California animation is that East Coast work was focused more on short subjects, commercial and independent films, whereas the California animators usually dedicated themselves to episodic television and feature films. “Once Disney’s Mickey Mouse became successful, Hollywood beckoned,” Beckerman says, “and well, many guys left New York for LA. But people forget there were a lot of others who stayed behind…and they forget that for years labs and processing plants were still in New York, in Rochester and upstate. In so many ways, the business never left New York, but the features, which did get a lot of attention, were mostly from California.”

Notable exceptions include Ralph Bakshi’s startup production of the successful Fritz the Cat in New York, in 1972, and the 1977 feature Raggedy Ann and Andy, produced in Manhattan Studio space. Raggedy Ann was an elaborate and sumptuously animated widescreen example of Disney-quality draftsmanship, and remains a source of pride for the young New York animators (among them Michael Sporn, Dan Haskett, Tom Sito, and Eric Goldberg) who got their start working on it. That film and others were featured in the gallery, represented by animation drawings and posters.

Stay tuned tomorrow for Part 2.

Welcome back and Happy New Year!!   This looks like a fun event coming up in White Plains, NY.

IT ALL STARTED HERE!
New York’s 103 year relationship with the Animation Industry.

Opening Reception: Saturday, Jan 17, 5-8pm
On View: January 20 – February 28

Curated by Howard Beckerman and J. J. Sedelmaier
Presented by ArtsWestchester in partnership with J. J. Sedelmaier Productions, Inc. and Blue Sky Studios

Robot sculptures by David Lipson

Reported by Katie Cropper.

This past friday Brooklyn bore witness to an onslaught of animators at the third annual Too Art 4 TV gallery show at the Erebuni gallery space in Williamsburg. This year’s show features a wild array of pieces from public art to pixel kitties. The house was packed in tight and the free beer was flowing if you were lucky enough to snag one, compliments of magic hat. The turn out for the event actually made it a challenge to see all the pieces offered by the 36 animation professionals. As I was pushing and squeezing my way through the opening exhibit I could help but think that this was a very uniquely new york event because of the real variety of work. One of the featured artist of the evening agreed saying “Animators man, who knew they were so multi talented? just look at this stuff!” My own favorite pieces from the evening were the two meticulously insane mural sized drawings of Christy Karakas as well as the robot sculptures by David Lipson. Some of the other work was more interactive and seemed to beg me to touch or in one case pick at, namely Stephen Neary’s giant nose. Although these pieces were all pretty different from each other you could really see the influence of animation in most of the work whether it was the children’s book type of color palette, the layout of the image as a scene or story, or the paused character in motion. New York should be proud of the work their professionals produce in their personal lives because it is just a taste of what lies in store for the future of animation.

2 Art 4 T.V. is on display from December 5th through December 15th at Erebuni 158 Roebling St. Brooklyn, NY 11211

HOURS: Mon & Tues 1pm-5pm (ring bell), open doors Wed – Friday 1pm-7pm and Sat & Sun 1pm-5pm.

Here’s another blog with some great pictures of the art work on exhibit:  http://fantazmigoriuh.wordpress.com/2008/12/08/too-art-for-tv-recap/