Legendary animator at Spaceworks Gallery
By Alec Clayton
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| Faces cut into leaves by Bruce Bickford, photo courtesy Spaceworks Tacoma. |
Tacoma’s own Bruce Bickford, the legendary animator famous for his work
on the Frank Zappa movie Baby Snakes,
has his first Tacoma art exhibit at Spaceworks Gallery, and it’s a doozie. The
show includes two animated videos, still frames from many of his animated
films, sculptures of clay and of cardboard and paper, drawings executed
directly on the gallery walls, and even faces cut into leaves.
To back up a bit: born in Seattle, Bickford started experimenting with
clay at the age of 12 or 13 and began making his first animated films at 17.
His animation sequences in Baby Snakes
won first
prize at a French animated film competition. And, as they say, the rest is
history.
There are two
continuously running films in this exhibition. Prometheus Garden is done in clay animation, and Comic That Frenches Your Mind is done
with intricate line drawings made with a fine-point mechanical pencil. Both are
surrealistic and comical, with rapidly morphing figures.
His line drawings
employ broken lines that are connected in the mind’s eye of the viewer. In some
of these drawings the lines break apart so severely that they look like flames
blown by wind as the figures appear to vanish in air. His human and animal
figures and houses and vehicles (especially sleds; he seems almost obsessed with sleds) are
stylistically a lot like the underground comics of the 1960s, and some of his
faces remind me of Beavis and Butthead.
The first wall of
still frames is a series picturing a man and woman embracing, her legs wrapped
around his waist. As they embrace, she reaches for his hip pocket and steals
his wallet (or cell phone, it’s hard to tell which). Typical of animation
frames, the changes from frame to frame are so minute that at first glance the
32 drawings look identical. Viewing this presents a good lesson in the patience
and precision required of cell animation.
Inside the main
gallery space are many glass or Plexiglas display cases, and inside of them a
series of shelves made of cardboard. On these shelves are hundreds of figures, houses,
castles, and fantasy environments, all cartoonish in style, all wildly
inventive, and all sculpted in clay or cardboard and paper. Among these is a
set of figures of the same man lying on his back with each figure a tiny bit
smaller than the one before until the last one is an almost microscopic dot. At
this point I should point out that some of his Bickford’s line drawings and clay
sculptures were used in animated films and others were not. If this diminishing
man was used in a film, we can see how as he gets smaller and smaller he would
appear, on film, to be getting farther and farther away.
“Spring Evening a Comic Strip by Edvard Munch” is a line drawing
depicting the character from Munch’s “The Scream” on a bridge where street
artists are at work and a loving couple walks by arm-in-arm. A town is seen in
the background, including a church
with a giant steeple that looks like a dunce cap. The sky above is a take-off
on van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”
Next to this one is
an untitled drawing of a training camp for mercenary soldiers with print that describes the mercenaries
as “rich, pampered, arrogant ignorant brutes.”
On the wall behind
the monitor playing Comic That Frenches
Your Mind is a set of 24 frame drawings from the film, and filling two entire
walls are frames from a not-yet-produced film called Vampire Picnic.
This is one of the
more astonishing art exhibitions you’re likely to see this year. The artist
will be in the gallery on closing night, Third Thursday Art Wall, June 15.
Uplandos, 1-5 p.m., Monday-Friday and 1-9 p.m. Third
Thursday, through June 15, Spaceworks Gallery, 950 Pacific Ave., Tacoma.
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