Art & Ethics

James Cromwell and the sheep pig in Chris Noonan’s magical fable Babe. Has there been a character as courageous and so pure in mind and heart as Babe?

“A society founded on signs is, in its essence, an artificial society in which man’s carnal truth is handled as something artificial.” — Albert Camus

Dare we talk about morals? I think in the times that we live in today, which seems so artificial, we have to. Globally now, we’re all very engaged in commercialism, both mentally and in practice. Physically, it has lead to immense specialization; the advancement of expertise and construction in areas of science, art, media and technology that has contributed to great progress materially, especially for rich developed countries. But the price we pay for this material progression may very well be an immeasurable increase in psychological suffering and moral degeneration not to mention the negative impact on our planet. Something is missing inside and we all know it. Some might even say that we as a species have become soulless. Never in history have we had such a monstrous disparity between the haves and have-nots. Never before have we been so overtly obsessed with the self, which is, as discussed before, already the default setting in human consciousness. Racism and sexism, from both the past and the present, makes the news headlines regularly while the amount of gun violence seems to mount weekly (there’s been 254 mass shootings in the USA alone as of this posting today, less than halfway through the year). Perhaps a culture that conditions us towards constant desire and excess while parading nationalism must inevitably lead to violence. But it all begins on the inside. It makes one ponder Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, the first part of his epic poem Divine Comedy and the Seven Deadly sins. Let’s take a look at them individually:

The Seven Deadly Sins:

· luxuria / Lust: The prevalent and obsessive pursuit of pleasure abound is not only condoned but promoted. The lust for power, money, sex, and superficial beauty permeate the airwaves and the internet through advertising and entertainment. We link success to being able to indulge regularly in mindless and superficial pleasure.

· gula / Gluttony: The promotion of fast food and encouragement of constant and endless consumption has fundamentally lead us to a statistical epidemic in public health. Physical and psychological illness is mounting not only in wealthy countries but stunningly also in developing nations. We’re stuffing ourselves with garbage and do so by the truckload. I have a relative who has 8 cars — talk about uncontrolled excess.

· avaritia / Greed: Always more and never enough is predicated by the constant policy pre-occupation with economic growth. We may have descended to becoming a society that not only endorses endless accumulation but glorifies the act of it. Think of planned obsolescence. We want the right to limitlessly produce as much as we can, own as much as we can, and do it as fast as we can and call it success and freedom. Greed has deep ties to insecurity.

· acedia / Sloth: Fighting entropy has always been a challenge but younger generations today hate work and this includes the work to discover ourselves through deep contemplation and humility. We treat work now as only a means towards something rather than as a joyful and meaningful activity in and of itself. It’s hard when everything is so mechanical and potentially exploitative but we’ve forgotten that the act of doing, building, and creating is not only practical but also noble and spiritually rewarding.

· invidia / Envy: How many of us are envious? How can we not be critical, judgemental and petty when we endorse a socio-economic ideology of competition where winning is the only thing that matters? When we gauge ourselves and society by comparison, it automatically divides us. What happened to love thy neighbour? You can’t when you have to be better than your neighbour. Envy externalizes our own bitterness and unhappiness.

· superbia / Pride: Instead of global unification as a species we are regressing back towards tribalism; families, communities and nations alike are proudly promoting the superiority of their own kind. “Me first” clearly means everyone and everything else comes after. Is not pride the Devil’s favourite sin because we are deceived into to thinking that having pride is actually a good thing? How often do we say that we must be proud to be this, that or the other? Pride stands in direct opposition to humility and detachment from the self.

· ira / Wrath: When we live to conform and adapt to an increasingly mechanized society, conditioned to be anything but our true selves, how can there not be conflict, both inwardly and outwardly? The constant mixed messaging is bound to confound; from the time we’re children we’re told to follow the rules or be shunned by society but at the same time we’re to idolize those celebrated individuals who succeeded by breaking those same rules; eat and drink all the time but look lean and fit; work obediently and tirelessly in the rat race then party wildly on Friday/Saturdays nights for relief/balance; then make up for our questionable selfish behaviour by being good/charitable on Sundays where we can repent our sins and buy spiritual insurance for the afterlife. There’s so much cognitive dissonance. No wonder psychological counselling is a booming field; there’s practically an epidemic of anxiety and depression among people young and old the world-over. Each year 800,000 people commit suicide, a rate of one suicide every 40 seconds. (Actually while writing this essay, my wife texted me that someone had just done so on her ferryboat ride home, a man choosing to perish under the currents in the cold dark sea.) And, of course, with so much internal conflict, it’s also bound to express itself outwardly so hate and physical violence explode. Blaming others always becomes the cheap and easy out when we don’t take personal responsibility. We’ve had over 5000 wars in human history yet have learned nothing from the experience.

“Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.”

― Mark Twain

The art we make.

Now what does this have to do with art and this blog? Well, we are artists and artists are human too. And all this conditioning of self and excess colours our thoughts and heavily affects our rather sensitive souls — and artists must remain sensitive to create. Furthermore, it is our skills and passions that create the symbols that aid in the communication of ideas — thru our art, music, performances and stories — we affect the world and not just reflect it. If the ideas we promote with our talents are either intentionally or unintentionally harmful then we have contributed to the problem. People forget that some of the most powerful and effective tools and symbols ever created were used by the most dastardly corporate, political, and military regimes. This continues today and technology has both strengthened the power and reach of our influence. Everything you do matters.

Most people don’t realize that before becoming the famous luxury brand we all know today, Hugo Boss manufactured these effective and imposing uniforms for the Nazi party during World War II.

The other day I watched a new film that featured characters so morally repulsive it made my stomach churn. The protagonist was one perfectly adapted to a belief and acceptance of a society that was absolutely absent of ethics, respect, or empathy. Although well-acted and decently written, it left an awful taste in my mouth that made me ponder: what kind of world have we created for ourselves? And this was the second such movie I’ve seen of that ilk recently, the other being about a man who cunningly schemed and destroyed another man’s life taking all that he had including literally his home, job, family and, ultimately, his life; the bad guy protagonist was intelligent, opportunistic and victorious in the end. I couldn’t sleep when it was over! The themes of such films, where the unethical triumph, delivers a horrific message. I felt less disturbed by Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange — which revolted audiences when it came out over 50 years ago — than by these new films which seem to accept this kind of amorality and even make it look cool. Kubrick was at least delivering a clear warning about the existence of evil and our society’s ill attempts to deal with it; his films always tackle issues of humanity in unique ways.

Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange was a frightening exposé of the evils that lay within man and society. The fact that Kubrick’s work was so artistic and creative actually invited not praise but condemnation, even as the intention/message was clearly to shock and make us think.

When Oliver Stone made his 1987 satire Wall Street, Michael Douglas’ infamous character Gordon Gecko was publicly viewed as a reprehensible con man. His famous speech “Greed is Good” — if spoken today — would probably serve as a call-to-arms and ringing endorsement of our neoliberal, everything-to-be-commoditized selfishly-indulgent world. When Martin Scorcese’s own attempt at satire, the film Wolf of Wall Street, arrived in theatres in 2013 (nearly 26 years later), it ended up serving as an inspiration rather than a warning; business programs in colleges and universities nationwide — including my own former Faculty of Commerce where I graduated decades ago — witnessed a huge surge of enrolment after audiences saw Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort and his merry band of degenerates have so much sinful fun. Are we now a generation that endorses — through indifferent complicity — amorality as a new norm? This is frightening to ponder.

Martin Scorcese’s well-acted and brilliantly made satire Wolf of Wall Street was almost too fun for some, drawing not disgust but instead lustful excitement from numerous young members of our current society.

Now artists always have a choice: we can use art for psychological coercion or we can use it to inspire good or awaken and educate us on the perilous discourse we’ve taken. Regarding positive action, I often think of Richard Attenborough’s great documentary series Planet Earth which is both breathtakingly gorgeous and immensely educational as a great example. But here I’d like to recommend instead spending time to watch Writer-Director Adam Curtis’ mind-blowing 4 hour BBC mini-series The Century of the Self. Curtis goes deep into the early roots of Propaganda, the title of the book by Edward Bernays (Sigmund Freud’s nephew) that changed human behaviour more than anything else in history. Bernays’ treatise, based off his uncle’s work on psychoanalysis, along with the experiments conducted by Anna Freud (Sigmund’s daughter) together served as the primal seed for modern education and marketing (Bernays cleverly re-labeled propaganda into public relations). It also instrumentally inspired Adolf Hitler to form his own Ministry of Propaganda run by his right-hand Joseph Goebbels in the Nazi Regime during World War II. In Curtis’ The Century of the Self we are richly and artfully shown the history of propaganda in our society and how we ended up as we are today — a global culture of conformist desire and excess, obsessed with consumerism, completely absorbed with the individualized self. Watching it, it seems we as a populace didn’t stand a chance. Not only does the film enlighten, it’s also extremely entertaining, proving once again that art can be both captivating and important at the same time. The film should be mandatory viewing for all.

Here is the direct link to the film.

Adam Curtis’ BBC documentary is imperative viewing for artists and non-artists alike.

“The soul is dyed with the colour of its thoughts.”

— Marcus Aurelius

Arms & Hands

The notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci reveal his deep interest and understanding of the bones and muscles of the arm.

“Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand.” — Jane Addams, Writer/Sociologist

Arms and hands are important. But despite working with their hands all day, most artists are frightened about drawing or animating arms and hands. The reason lies in the artist’s unwillingness to understand them in its entirety.

The arms and hands are — and we’re talking particularly about the human form rather than the animal one which is more genus specific — a microcosm of both the simplicity and complexity of the entire body. One has to see the whole but also understand the parts and how they all go together. And like the body, the upper limbs are both a form and an action, meaning that it’s a solid structure that carries not only weight but also function, and mostly notably by extending psychological expression through gesture.

This Daffy Duck model sheet by the magnificent Chuck Jones demonstrates the power of expression that arms and hands can convey.

Here are a few things to take note of when incorporating arm and hand work in your art or animation:

a) Know the basic anatomy

Every artist should spend some time studying and understanding the basic structure of the limb and all its details. Know what and where those parts are and what they generally look like. Not that we have to able to identify all the scientific names or be able to duplicate it perfectly in rendered form, but we should have a basic yet solid idea of its substance and appearance. At least as much so that we can recognize the forms when we see them, either in life and in video/photo reference. We can’t duplicate or create what we don’t know or can’t see.

The skeletal elements of the shoulder, arm and hands. These are the essential basics. The key is to recognize and understand their form and positioning.

b) Know the mechanics

If we don’t know what the scapula or collar bones do, or how the shoulder muscles such as the trapezius and deltoid muscles work together with the pectoral muscles to move the arms, then we don’t know much about how arms work. For example, study the muscle insertion points and one can see that the one branch of the chest muscles is attached to the humerus bone, and hence we can’t move the arm without effecting the look and shape of the chest. The various joints of the arm, on the other hand, also vary from one connection point to another, from ball joint, to lever and again to ball joint. This leads to the strange way the arms moves as it turns, swings, pushes or pulls. The shoulders in general, are often misunderstood and are both commonly under-animated or animated incorrectly. The shoulder joint is both a translation and rotation axis, the apparatus moves up/down/forward/back and rotates up/down/in/out as it floats on top of the ribcage, while the top of the humerus which lies in its socket rotates in near 180 degree action (half sphere). The largest and strongest muscle is the trapezius, a trapezoidal shape which makes up a group of muscle fibres extending from the top of the neck spine, out towards the tips of the shoulders, and down to the lower middle back. It is the most important group of muscles for shoulder/arm action.

The various movements of the shoulders. The shoulders drive the arms.

c) Understand Pronation and Supination

The arm apparatus has its tendencies and preferences in how it wants to move. But because of the complex adjunction of the various components — scapula to humerus (upper arm), humerus to ulna/radius (lower arm), lower arm to hands etcetera — the arms create torque and power by how it rotates and bends. Pronation — when the arm turns over like when we look at our watch or twist open a jar — is primarily a closing gesture, where the hand turns inwards closer to the centreline of body and the elbow points away from the ribs. Supination — when the arm flips outward like when we ask for change or deal out a deck of cards — is primarily an opening gesture, where the hand turns outwards away from the body and the elbow points into the ribs. Animals such as horses or dogs have their elbows anatomically aligned and constrained close to their rib cages, unlike primate forms whose elbows (and thus arms) are completely free from the body. If you understand the anatomy, you’ll know that the radius bone which is closer to the thumb crosses over the ulna bone in pronation and we see the top of the hand. This is also the position that causes carpel tunnel syndrome which many animators are familiar and one can easily see why (the inbetween space for the artery and the nerves that service the hand become compressed). The point is, the way the hand moves and looks is heavily determined by shoulder and upper arm positioning and action. There is so much more to arm action than mere pendulum motion.

Supination vs Pronation. Notice that the flipping over of the hand corresponds to the flipping over of the elbow joint which protrudes from the humerus bone.

d) Understand the movement as a unit

Arms can move in fantastic fashion from lifting, pulling, punching, slapping, to baseball throws. Arm action can be both bold and powerful or tender and articulate. The animation/artist must be judicious in his vision of how to use/express the hands in motion. But he must first understand how it works as a unit. Arms in passive action can behave like a pendulum. They can twist and turn like driving a car (known as pronation and supination as explained above) and also swing in near full 360 degree vertical motion like a turbine. Certain actions generate move power, others more control. Hence the incredible and powerful diversity of the hand so it’s no wonder they say that the human hand’s uniqueness may have been as important to our evolution as a species as our brain. But the most important aspect of the movement of arms for animators is the concept of “successive breakage of joints” which really follows from the principle of lead and follow. The shoulders drive the upper arms which drive the lower arms, which combine to drive the rotation of the wrists and in turn the thumbs and fingers. The parts of the arm do not operate in isolation. Richard Williams’ excellent book The Animator’s Survival Kit goes into significant detail in this regard. I will not duplicate such information here. If you don’t understand how we build torque or force in the arms, I highly suggest studying those pages seriously as well as observing video at various camera angles.

A page from Richard Williams’ foundational book The Animator’s Survival Kit.

e) Simplify the Forms

In art we make use of symbols — lines, shapes, colours — and how they move to express our ideas. Since realistic anatomy is complex and rarely to be duplicated in detail except in the case of special effects work, artists must simplify the structural parts. Art is, after all, not duplication but creation. Here, we have leeway to exaggerate or caricature the form and its movement. The best thing is to see the parts as a mixture of solids connected to each other, then we understand where the movement begins. It also helps to set standards as to where to push things like squash and stretch that make more sense and have greater believability and appeal. For example, stretching the neck makes a lot more sense than stretching the more solid form of the skull (super cartoony animation notwithstanding).

A simplification of the various structure groups helps keep the mind of the artist organized and his work clear.

f) See the Groupings

When we begin to study anatomy and body mechanics, we begin to see groupings both functionally and artistically. That is, certain things go together. The right and left arms, for instance, influence each other because of the connection to the pectoral (chest) muscles and the trapezius, creating a rubber band-like connection. The same goes with things like hands. The thumbs tend to work with the index finger and the remaining fingers tend to curl and uncurl together in a group. Astute artists throughout history have well understood this and documented it in their work. As animators we must truly understand both the way the hands are constructed and how they move with the rest of the arm. Only then will it look right and feel right. Study of our own hands helps us see how they move and how it looks in any action. Fingers and hands twist, turn, open and close in a very specific fashion. For example, we always close our hands with the shorter fingers first and open our hands leading with the thumbs and index finger. Test it out yourself. Remember: respect for the structure and mechanics is often rewarded with both beauty and believability, especially when given extra flair and exaggeration in the right spots.

Milt Kahl’s beautiful studies of Merlin’s hands done for The Sword in The Stone.

g) Look, Touch and Draw

If we don’t spend anytime to “experience” hand and arms, we’ll never learn about them fully. Without direct observation, tactile exploration and tangible study of the arms and hands, an artist will never develop comfort with them. Weak hand animation is so prominent in animation today it’s hard to witness — we see mechanical, weightless and even rigid spatula or “box” (closed fist) hands everywhere. It’s so unfortunate since arms and hands have been and continue to be a HUGE part of human expression; hands are beautiful. And while a lot of that has to do with more and more animators mindlessly dependent on copying their video reference, even more of it has to do with not being aware of what we are seeing or understanding what’s happening in the action, and ultimately not implementing any sense of design and creativity with the work. And the easiest way to remedy this is by drawing. Drawing teaches attentive observation and creative design. Go and build a fuller understanding and greater respect of this very important limb because it is, after all, what enables us to make art in the first place. Our human hands really are “thinking hands.”

“The hand is the visible part of the brain.”― Immanuel Kant, Philosopher