Went to the Rodin Exhibition yesterday (10th Oct) at the Tate. Under-25 year olds got 5£ tickets but my student ticket was only a pound off the full price, so it was 17£ for me! Make it make sense.

Anyway the exhibit itself was great. It was fantastic to see all those sculptures up close (my cute friend here for scale) and get a sense of Rodin’s deep knowledge of anatomy, as well as where he chose to exaggerate!

I’ve always loved to draw dancers but stopped doing it recently in order to do more life drawing, and this inspired me to get back into it.

I wandered through the exhibition sketching anything that caught my eye. Particularly striking were these busts of a Japanese lady – Rodin had used her again and again as a model (and she does have a compelling face) and basically stiffed her on payment. Do better, art community! Or rather just do better, white men!

As always, I try to keep things loose and varied in my sketchbook. I tend to do a lot of studies and that can get boring if I’m just using one medium or colour. I’ve always watched a lot of Calarts sketchbook videos too (probably to my detriment) and some sketchbooks are wonderfully bursting with chaotic life. I love the look of those!

For the first assignment, we must pick a film or animator from our home country and give a presentation about their process/the themes in their work. There’s not much animation that comes out of Hong Kong except for McDull, a charming kid’s cartoon about a little kid pig and his life in school and at home. I decided to go for Canadian animation instead, which is how I stumbled across this charming short film from the National Film Board of Canada.

After watching When the Day Breaks several times, I’m starting to notice how the animation style influences the portrayal of life in the city. These characters are disparate individuals, some of them seemingly quite isolated, and there are actually no positive(?) or overtly friendly interactions between characters.

But the camera still chooses to take us on a journey midway through the film. It pans from the protagonist and travels down electrical wires or water systems to other homes and other characters, who are all singing to the same song. It is as if they were all joined by a sense of community otherwise not apparent. It reminds me of Rhapsody in Blue because in that city, too, there are isolated characters that never meet but are joined/unified in the narrative through the animation. More thoughts on this later.

T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land is another thing I’m considering:

“Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.”

Cities as portrayed in Western animations often feature the isolation of individuals, despite extreme proximity to each other. One feels disconnected, part of a crowd but not a community.

Animation seems able to draw these connections out in a way poetry, prose or realistic live-action is unable to. I’ll just have to figure out more sources and look into technical choices to see how this idea works.

Meanwhile…HOCKEY CHICKEN!!!!

I’ve been in London for a month and a bit now, and most of that time was spent flat hunting and getting rejected by estate agents and landlords. I spent a lot of time on the rail system (was shocked that every line was privately owned, what a mess!) and the London underground. Here are some folks I saw.