Gerold Scarfe
.On this page I will research show my research into one of my chosen artists, Gerald Scarfe. I chose to research Scarfe because he has worked in both animation and traditional art which is what I would love to do in the future.
Gerold Scarfe
Gerald Anthony Scarfe, is an English cartoonist and illustrator. He has worked as editorial cartoonist for The Sunday Times and illustrator for The New Yorker. However he has had a hand in animated movies such as Pink Floyd's 'The Wall', as well as the artwork, Scarfe contributed 15 minutes' worth of elaborate animation to the film, including a sequence depicting the German bombing campaign over England during World War II, set to the song "Goodbye Blue Sky", as shown below.
The animation in the music video, in my opinion, is beautiful. Scarfe creates a melancholy atmosphere throughout the entire video, he achieves this by using a blend of real footage (which portrays the dark realism of the bombing) and surrealistic animation (to artistically show the horror of the before and after of the bombings). An example of this is the humanoid-looking people of dystopian-England and how they all cower for shelter as the bombs start dropping. These humanoid people's faces have a lot of similarities with a gas mask that would have been worn during the war, perhaps Scarfe done this intentionally to show a new generation that bombings occurred that much, that people might as well have had gas masks fused to their faces. The image below shows the notes I have made on these humanoid creatures and what I think they symbolize.
At the beginning of the music video we see live footage of a black cat chasing a white dove, the dove then flies away from the cat and suddenly becomes animated in the dystopian England, it then transforms into a much larger black bird (almost like a demonic-looking raven), it then opens it's big wings revealing a number of German planes that proceed to bomb England below them. It's easy to tell that the white dove symbolizes peace at the beginning but when it flies into animated, dystopian England it transforms into the large raven-looking bird, ravens are normally associated with death and evil in many religions. The music video reminds me of Frida Kahlo's, 1940 'Self portrait with thorn necklace and hummingbird' because, like Kahlo, Scarfe uses the dove and raven as props to symbolize something greater rather than have them as the focus of his piece.
An example of this would be in the Bible, In the story of Noah (Genesis Chapter 8:7,) Noah lets a raven free after the rain stopped to see what it would do, however the raven didn’t do anything. This raven is easily a metaphor for Satan, namely, because of its movements consisting of it aimlessly travelling “to and fro” continually as Satan does . After the Raven, Noah then sent a white dove to see what it would do. The dove very faithfully made two trips; the first of which yielded no tangible results, but the second trip carried an olive branch, which was brought by the dove to Noah. I believe that the dove is a metaphor for the Holy Spirit, because it served a direct purpose and finished its work.
'Goodbye Blue Sky' uses a dove turning into a demonic-looking raven to symbolize how the horror of war can corrupt peace which results in death and destruction, the white dove does come back towards the end of the video, it flies through a burial were a number of British soldiers have died, symbolizing that peace is back again because of those who sacrificed themselves in the war. It visually show an audience the effect humans can have on the environment around them, the music video has the theme of 'change'; what I mean by this is perhaps the videos purpose is to shock the audience and to make them understand that awful events (such as war) shouldn't be happening.
Moving on from his animation work, I looked at the concept art that Scarfe produced for Disney's Hercules. . Some of his concept art for Hercules is shown below.
When looking at Scarfe's work in Hercules, I am able to see it has a more 'illustrator' look to it than his animation. I really like his line work in these artworks, Scarfe uses a very clean and curved line making the form of these characters seem very organic and sinewy. I decided to create a 'cat-snake-eagle hybid' I made in Photoshop and to use that as my reference for creating a piece inspired by Scarfe's style. I really like this hybrid because it's three completely different animals from different habitats. Before making my piece, I decided to practice some curved line-work using the french curve tool on Sketchbook.
My line-work practice on Sketchbook
My reference photo I created on Photoshop
For my Scarfe inspired piece, I used water colours with black fine line pen on top. I used these materails because looking at Scarfe's own concept art, they seem to be the materials he used. In Scarfe's piece, you can see how he preserves the whiteness of the canvas when using his watercolors, I decided to not do that as much as him so I could have more room to blend colours together.
I decided to alter some of the colours and textures from my reference photo to make the hybrid character look more mythical and unique.
I think by using water colours as my main media it made my piece look more like an illustration, which is a style that I haven't tried drawing in before. If I were to change anything about this piece, it would be to not make the tail as stiff, I should've looked at my french curve practice more as reference, when drawing the tail.