Sheila Graber and the Art of Documation

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A section of the animation opus of former Art teacher Sheila Graber is concerned with showing how artists worked and thought through the medium of animation. This paper shows the different ways that Graber has tackled the use of animation as an art teaching tool. Four Views of Landscape (1976) constructs familiar paintings of Constable, Monet, Turner and Van Gogh using a caricature of each painter as the generator. Michael Angelo (also 1976) uses a similar character technique in a more biographical way. William Blake (1978) moves the concept into a much more dynamic arena: created to accompany an exhibition of Blake’s paintings and etchings, the film robustly animates his private temporal and spiritual mythology without a voiceover explanation, in an explosion of images that is both aesthetic and disturbing. The Face in Art (1979) is a time machine that clearly demonstrates the strength of metamorphosis in animation, not only a chronicle of the endeavour to capture the endless variations of the human face in art but also an amalgam of the way that visual memory works. Expressionism (1981) works in some ways like a verbal pun. It not only expresses the core of the Expressionists’ angst, but also illustrates the facial expressions of the the film’s human subject matter. The work that most directly sums up Sheila’s desire to draw people into the study of art and the artist is Mondrian (1978). To the music of the Boogie‐woogie that the artist took such great joy in, the film presents a wonderfully chronological graphology of his abstract geometries.
This paper explores the above‐noted section of Sheila Graber’s overall opus as a strong evocation of the unique properties of animation

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