I am ready to divulge yet another obsession…
It is the art form most generally described as storytelling. Whether said storytelling happens through pictures or words, music or motion, it pretty much doesn’t matter, I am obsessed with it.
I never get tired of thinking about storytelling. I never get tired of talking about it. I never get tired of reading about it or learning about it and I certainly never get tired of experiencing it.
This goes for storytelling done well or even not-so-well, because I am SO obsessed with storytelling that I often sit through the most atrociously-scripted romantic comedies merely for the challenge of deciding how I would ‘fix’ the broken story if I had been the one writing and/ or directing it.
This is why, though I love both Bela Fleck and The Flecktones and Nickel Creek, I believe that the Nickel Creek kids tell a more compelling story than The Flecktones. The Flecktones are not without their storytelling qualities, but their stories are just simply not as engrossing, as lucid as the lyrics to any given Nickel Creek song. In other words, The Flecktones don’t make me cry. Well, sometimes they do, when I realize how unattainably-skilled they are at their instruments. I won’t go into that here, though. That’s for a different post on a different blog.
…and here’s how it all applies to painting: Several years ago, I was in a portfolio review with Frank Gladstone who was then in charge of artistic development at Dreamworks Animation. Frank is an awesome guy and has given me some fantastic advice at various meetings over the past few years. He was flipping quickly through the pages of my portfolio. I had all of these painstakingly-detailed paintings in there and I thought they would surely qualify me as a shoe-in to their art department. Frank was being encouraging, but it was obvious that none of my work was rocking his world.
And then he stopped flipping. He stopped on one of my throw-away ‘sketchbook’ pages at the back of my portfolio and he started raving about this one little sketch of an alligator that looked like she was in love.
If I remember correctly, Frank said something like, ‘Yeah, like this! I love this. This is a great drawing, see? Its a drawing that tells a story…’
All of my other work was upstaged by this one little sketch! And its not even a remarkable drawing! But it has something real, something emotional. I’ve been obsessed with storytelling my entire life. Though stories had found their way into the ideas and concepts behind my paintings, (I had gone to great lengths to follow the Jim Henson/ George Lucas school of thought by developing the back-stories and non-diegetic worlds of the characters in my paintings) the stories had not really found their way into the actual images.
So this is now my pur
suit. Every painting, every drawing has to tell a story. This alligator sketch is okay. Its not heart-stopping like something Glen Keane would do, but it does, in fact, tell a story. The alligator is not just standing there, arms down to her sides, posed in profile or straight-on. No, she is acting.
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