"The mature Cézanne had no designs on the field of vision except to uncover the designs he saw in it. It is this suspension of will power that gives him admission to the undifferentiated world which precedes knowledge, to Eden as it was before Adam conferred separating names on each form of vegetal and mineral growth." (Yale Review, Spring 1980, by Ronald Hayman)

Connecting with our own unknown seems to be so ever present in the better artwork, yet it is almost totally absent in animation today, absent even though it could be a source of a much-needed renewal in a field where repetitiveness has become endemic: "Part of the reason the animation industry is in trouble is that people [audiences] are just being given the same old things all the time." (Steve Brown from Greg Singer's AWN article "Dream Is Destiny: Waking Life.")

Or read these words from Chris Robinson's article on Pierre Hébert: "Animation, and specifically independent or 'auteur' animation, which is often the feeding ground for any and all new trends in commercial animation, is at a dead end. Stylistic and narrative innovations certainly continue, but all within the same abiding walls; walls that have been pushed as far as they will bend."

These walls are indeed what we will be looking at in the next articles, I can already say that "going back to the visible" as Giacometti did is to me a necessary step if we are to see through/beyond them.

"I want to paint things as I really see them" can trigger laughter, or it can trigger something much worse, even more insidious, more dangerous: the student who wants to paint what he sees will then be told how things look and even how to draw "them" accordingly.

And most people will not see the difference. Hell, they won't even suspect there is a difference, a difference so huge, it is the proverbial one between heaven and hell!

There seem to be two major options here: either one believes "the real" is a known, quantifiable and finite entity and it then is common to render it according to societal models ("photo-realism"), or, as is more often the case with "artists," to "improve upon its assumed-to-be-known appearance by manufacturing a style." ("What can I do with/to that?" which inevitably leads to "manufactured styles.")

Or, one can acknowledge the elusiveness of "the real" and, attempting to connect with it without editing out that elusiveness ("to cater to the appearing as it appears," as Husserl would have it), to uncover an inherent style which is as personal to oneself as is the color of one's eyes.

This inherent style is the intrinsic "flavor" of one's continuous and inevitable failure to succeed at capturing reality.

"What is it?" or better yet, "Who am I?"

Art is too often misused in order to put a Band-Aid on the gaping hole we so tenaciously try not to see (but is it Art then?), yet Art can (needs) be that which we do when we try to look honestly at that hole, without any distraction, in order "to cater to the appearing as it appears."

It is to me very important to realize that all that we do is conditioned by our basic world view (Weltanschauung), and that for most of us, our world view is almost totally constituted and maintained by our reliance on our societal models.

Animation (like any visual art) is highly dependent on the world view of its creators, and if they do not see that "the real" is indeed a mystery, they will therefore, intentionally or not, continue to spread the gospel of the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness."

A "good" example of that is this amazing faith in 3D animation, this completely naive belief that it best approaches "the real as we know it." ("The eye works like a camera and we all see the same thing.")

Despite the fact that our primary connection with "the real" is first and foremost subjective, we surrender that to the false gods of "objectivity" and marvel at the "success" of anal-retentive renderings of monkeys "one hair at a time."

I posit that it is high time we try to change the way we deal with the (our) visible and see (!) if we can, finally, introduce/allow in our work more of what our better painters and philosophers have been telling us for a very long time already: "Things are not what they appear to be, nor are they otherwise!"

As far as creating images is concerned, it looks to me as if most animators today are still buying the official "vision" of the 19th Century Salon painters, "The eye works just like a camera, and we all see the same thing."

Surely, there's got to be more to "it" than that!?

Animation (Art): Prozac, or Kyosaku?

We'll continue to look at this in more detail in a couple of months, trying to see what I meant when I said, upon witnessing the murder of Amélie Poulain: "Oh no, there they go again!"

(A Kyosaku is a small flat stick used in Zen meditation to help practitioners deepen their practice. By hitting the meditator on a certain spot on the shoulders, it can reinvigorate, re-center the sitter, and often be a great source of renewed motivation and energy. And Prozac? I guess it could be considered to be, along with TV, commercial animation, sex, booze and dope, an important part of the cement of our "civilization.")

Jean Detheux is an artist who, after several decades of dedicated work with natural media, had to switch to digital art due to sudden severe allergies to paint fumes. He is now working on ways to create digital 2D animations that are a continuation of his natural media work. He has been teaching art in Canada and the U.S., and has works in many public and private galleries.