Animation is an elastic medium, and sure enough, it tends to appeal to artists who may feel too boxed in by the real world. It is also all about movement, and the exciting challenge of putting drawings into motion.
One artist who eagerly took up this challenge was the Scotland-born Canadian Norman McLaren (1914–1987), who is best known for his film and animation works for Canada's National Film Board (NFB). He founded their animation department in 1942, and went on to make an incredible 70 films with the NFB, including the Oscar-winning Neighbours in 1952.
McLaren is rightfully heralded as a pioneer and innovator in the cinematic arts, particularly for his stunning experiments with hand-drawn and drawn-on-film animation, and the stop-motion technique of pixilation, whereby live actors are posed frame-by-frame. Less known, however, is his extensive output as a printmaker, sketch artist and painter.
McLaren once famously said, 'Animation is not the art of drawings that move but the art of movements that are drawn.' He likely came to this realisation during his time as a student at the Glasgow School of Art, where he studied set design and began experimenting with scratching, drawing, and painting directly on film stock to create the images he desired.
Already, then, he was running up against perceived 'limitations' of the artistic mediums available to him, and he was finding ways to transcend them – to quite literally leave his mark on them.
His drawings – many of which can be seen on Art UK – convey this spirit, as though they are forcing his perspective on movement onto, or into, the audience.
Beginning with the series of screenprints collectively called Interplay, from 1971, which aimed to 'visually represent the relationship between sound and movement,' as he put it. Stress, from this series, is aptly named, as though sounds and physics are colliding and overlapping, a controlled chaos that is immediately felt.
Wings likewise suits its object: in this screenprint, he uses lines to suggest various bird-like sinuous shapes that appear to flutter and chirp in unison. These pieces are simultaneously loose and geometric, carefully structured by distinctly flowing wavy subjects.
In 1975, he created another series called Mutation which seems almost like a challenge he set for himself to up the same ante. These are more complicated assemblages of shapes and waveforms, with added bursts of colour to help frame them.
The blocks of colour appear to box in the potential for movement to come through – and yet it still does. The shapes seem to defy their 'boxed in' nature, as though they are about to spring into motion and escape. There is something unstable about these lines, which makes them appear full of life.
McLaren's pieces are not actually moving, of course, in the same way that his animations and his films so memorably do. Even so, his prints and his drawings, like those animations, tell a story through their evocation of movement. They fit into a wider visual culture that McLaren represents, bridging drawing, animation and filmmaking – a cohesive approach to storytelling through motion.
Similar to his use of pixilation in celebrated films like Neighbours, in which live-action subjects are treated frame-by-frame like a stop-motion or claymation puppet, one can say that the story happens in between the frames, or that, in each case, it is not actual movement but the suggestion of it that keeps the spectator spellbound.
Some earlier drawings from the 1930s, including Hot Dance Music and A Military March (both 1934), are more abstracted forms of this idea.
Both are part of a series where he again attempted to fuse sound and movement in a 'static' medium, here visualising various musical styles. As he put it, 'I'd lie back on the couch. And as I shut my eyes, I saw the play and dance of forms... There's a whole lot of adjectives that you can apply to music and you can apply to movement of shapes and forms in an abstract film.'
The soft-paletted images themselves are perhaps somewhat literal interpretations of this line of thinking, but that doesn't take away from their ability to render the 'dance' he so clearly wanted to translate. He attempted to fuse sound and movement in a static medium, here visualising various musical styles, from Hungarian folk music to a Turkish orchestra. He reportedly completed these pieces before turning 20.
Another couple of later examples, To Biddy (1957) and Two Figures in a Landscape (1964), are actually oil paintings, but the texture is again made to suit McLaren's purposes rather than the other way around. While both consist of a landscape that is not fully discernible, their visual effect is one of moving water, with figures lost within.
Two Figures in a Landscape in particular inspires a sort of dread, as the figures seem to be caught within raging white waters, with vegetation and rocks dangerously jutting out around them as they reach out for help that seems unlikely to arrive.
To Biddy, meanwhile, has a stronger feeling of motion within the raging waves, as the figures seem to stand more stably, but are nevertheless wandering inside rollicking rushes of water.
McLaren clearly spent his career asking himself, how does one draw subjects in motion? How do you design for gesture? How do you capture a subject's physical, corporeal energy? In a sense, the image may seem caught in motion, but should not feel caught at all – it simply conveys motion itself.
In his films, there is something perhaps more intuitive about this process: cinema itself is structured via individual frames flashing by our eyes in such succession that they appear to be in motion. In drawings, paintings and screenprints, the process is different, but what makes McLaren such a unique and pioneering artist is that in every case, the intended effect is the same: what was once static is now moving.
A diptych of prints, Pas de deux (1976), recalls early experiments in the histories of photography and cinema alike to instil this feeling of movement. Here it is achieved through the figures of dancers, repeated in close, layered proximity to each other, as though caught at shutter speed.
These images are taken from the short film, Pas de deux, which is hypnotic in its simplistic black-and-white presentation, and its multiplied figures. Here, though, the figures appear at once human-like and somehow otherworldly – frozen in time – but their evocation of movement grants them their humanity, overcoming the repetitive stillness of the silhouettes and becoming something more like rhythmic elegance in motion.
As ever, there is the suggestion of a powerful kinetic energy. In McLaren's films – particularly those that similarly feature various lines, waves and forms – we are made to feel that movement is not merely physical but is perceptual, and even emotional.
But it's not that we ever feel tricked. In our rational minds, we know there is no actual motion involved. Nevertheless, we experience the choreography of movements that are under his control, no matter the medium.
Jake Pitre, writer and researcher in Film and Moving Image Studies
This content was supported by The Bridget Riley Art Foundation
