Los Angeles Zoo, painting with Deborah Ross.

Today was a fortune. I painted with Deborah Ross, one of America's leading wildlife artist. Ross is a faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York and also teaches workshops in animal drawing and movement at Dreamworks, Pixar, and Walt Disney Feature Animations. 

“I work in watercolor because of the speed, mobility and emotional richness of the medium. My technique derives from the oriental school of painting. A broad sweep of color applied with the full body of the brush lays down the overall gesture. I then use the fine tip of the brush for a telling detail – the arch of a wrist or angle of brow line - to set and ground .the pose. All of this must be done quickly, for I only work from life. Once the moment is past, I stop.  My ambition is a portrayal of the essence of a subject distilled during the moments of observation. This “genii loci” (spirit of the place) is severely depleted and often lost when an animal is displaced from it true habitat.” - Deborah Ross 

One Boy's Horse and Meeting Norstein.

Found this old sketch of mine while looking for inspiration. This was an early stage of development for "Tomorrow", my short film from 2009, where I had an attempt to show a child's sense of beauty amid devastation of war. 


A year and a half after the production was over, I met a person to whom I am grateful for the biggest inspiration starting from my early age. Yuriy Borisovitch Norstein, an author of "Tale of Tales" and "Hedgehog in the Fog" - my favorite films of all times. On the last day of our meeting I looked through my art with a hope to find something that has a soul, that has no touch of digital, something that I drew with a free mind, and stopped at this sketch. Next, it was framed with brown tape at the back and soon traveled to Moscow! 

Animation.

Full-time film work! Oah & Harlam Episodes, my friends. 

At first glance the stories about two weirdoes Oah and Harlam may appear as senseless. But when there is an overflow of senselessness, then appears deep philosophy.

These stories are not just shorts that I wrote, they are a worldview, answers to some questions of reality, grotesque simplicity of which seems to be surreal. In this project bits of life situations, thoughts, and actions are applied to animation, music, and a spoken word. There is a need to write fairytales for grownups, to write almost impossible stories, because when we seriously begin to talk about important and intimate things in live, most of us cannot take it. 


The image above is an animation pencil test from "Of Care", the new episode I am working on right now. And so, Harlam is walking. 

Searching.

People who say they don't need inspiration, are inspired all the time without knowing it... Just thought of it, while searching, searching... 

A Thought.

“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and somthing else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”

-Chuck Close