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BARRELHOUSE BOP
PLAY FLIPBOOK BY SCRUBBING |
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| 1. When I was growing up in Tennessee in the 50s, I used to lie awake at night listening to a syndicated radio program hosted by Nat Hentoff, who played and talked about jazz. This half-dreamed experience was a window into an exotic world of energy, emotion, and intelligence — quite different from my real world of suburban decorum. My drawings from this period illustrated a fabulous demimonde of jazzmen hunched ecstatically over their instruments and goateed hepcats with cigarettes dangling nonchalantly from their lips, beads of sweat quivering on their knitted brows.
2. For the past 12 years I've been making animated cartoons, an activity which, like jazz, is a bit less than repectable, due in part to its recent, popular, American origins. Like jazz, animation has experienced esthetic upheavals, in its development from a naive entertainment, through the well-oiled collective productions of the 30s and 40s, to the rise of soloists and a wide diversity of styles. Their brief histories reflect racism within our society: the stereotyping of early cartoon characters and the color bar in big bands. 3. Sequence drawing is now my chief means of articulating a fantasy world. When approaching this tedious process I try to choose the appropriate flow of lines, dots and smears in the spirits of a Charlie Parker riff: nimble-fingered, free of convention and true. 1981 |
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