Bugs Bunny and Art

 I've mentioned before in various artist statements how I believe that 40's and 50's animation from Warner Brothers was a big influence on my art.  I still believe that.  That era is marked by the start of regular color use in cartoons, plus a lot of references to World War II.  But the artists of this time were well schooled in proper drawing and painting techniques, and that includes animated cartoons.  I recently had an email exchange with one of my college friends, where I made the point that Italian Futurists (an early 20th century movement) rejected much of what had been figured out by local artists before and during the Renaissance, but I know from experience that it's hard to escape from that all that history in Italy, and that it affected all art that followed, including animated cartoons.  And the art that came after that as well.  

For example, I do woodcuts, and my two biggest influences there are northern European art, both the early woodcuts of the renaissance and the 20th century expressionists, and the Japanese woodcuts of the 18th and 19th centuries, but due to being an art major, I have had plenty of art history, everything from the stone age to the end of the 20th century (art history textbooks, slide libraries, and my college education all ended there), and have taught art history at the college level a bunch of times- relating to both visual arts and as a subject in itself.  I once had a student in one of the latter classes remark how much the art history overlapped with her class in world culture.  My response to such things is that you can't understand art history without also knowing scientific history, political history, religious history, and military history as they are all related.  I stand by that.

The reason I thought of this today is that I decided to stay home today and to watch and delete stuff I had on the DVR, taking advantage of my parents not being home.  One of those things I watched was some Bugs Bunny recorded over the weekend, including a classic early 1946 short Baseball Bugs.  Like most of the WB cartoons of that era, backgrounds are painted simply, sometimes seeming not to be finished, as we are meant to be concentrating on the main characters.  This was not unique to mid 20th century animation,  but can be found in the optical mixing of Velazquez, Impressionist painting, the woodcuts of Frans Masereel (who was a newspaper cartoonist and illustrator facing frequent immediate deadlines before he took up woodcut), and probably other things I am familiar with.  But I know it best from Bugs Bunny, and that is where I took ideas from.

In the above image, I know I turned to a Bugs Bunny cartoon for artistic guidance.  The narrative came from a book, Butler's Lives of the Saints, and the date from the person who commissioned it, and some of the art from other sources, including me.  And the composition is mine.  But some of it came from cartoons, such as the vague shape of the people in the audience, and the colors came from a circus themed Bugs Bunny short.  Good ideas are good ideas, no matter where they come from.