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Nutcracker: Rated R

posted: February 28, 2010

This should have appeared on Drawger a while ago; but there’s nothing wrong with some holiday spirit residuals. I spent much of December 2009 at the East Village's Theater for the New City. I was working on the digital sets for Nutcracker: Rated R, an Off-Broadway ballet. Those were basically drawings created on an iPhone, exported as step-by-step animations, and projected over the dancers onstage while Tchaikovsky played. It was my first experience of this kind. I hope I get to do more.

(Click here to see a sampler movie.)

My friends Angela Harriell and David F. Slone, Esq. (above, left) have been putting this show together for 4 years, and got me onboard with them this time. We go way back, them collaborating on my projects, me on theirs. From a production point of view, this minimal set building -- everything but a couple stage props is projected -- made things easier. From my point of view, given how much I've explored iPhone drawing in the past year, the challenge was tempting: why not?The whole production is put together on the tiniest of budgets. Nobody makes a fortune here; it’s a labor of love. It was thrilling to witness the good humor and general unflappability of the entire company. Everybody multi-tasked cheerfully. It was one of the best work environments I've experienced.

Want technical details? Everything was drawn on an iPhone using the Brushes app (the old one, without layers) and exported to my Mac as QuickTime movies, using Brushes Viewer. QuickTime Pro was used to add mp3 files of the music, and also to assemble all movies into a single file, projected from a MacBook Pro connected to a projector. Nothing else was used. I have the utmost admiration for sophisticated technical setups and for those who can use them well. But I tend to enjoy working with a barebones set of tools.

Steve Sprang, the creator of the Brushes app, had his own technical cameo. Having last-minute trouble fitting my movies to the length of the tracks, I sent him an SOS, and he customized for me a Brushes Viewer that allowed me to specify the final length of a movie, down to fractions of a second.

Most people are familiar with the original premise of The Nutcracker. This production's plot has Clara dreaming her way from present day New York city to the early 1980s. All sorts of transpositions occur: a vinyl record from the past stands in for the music box, the soldiers are Department of Health Inspectors fighting very fashionable kitchen rats, the Snow Queen becomes the Blow Queen supplying clouds of coke to a crazed posse of fairies, etc. The R rating is nominal: the show is for the most part wholesome, full of hilarious moments, and acted/danced with energy and precision by a cast of young talents: Jennifer Carlson, Hyosun Choi, Sarah Conrad, Amy Daulton, Gregory Dubin, Glenn Giron, Eddie Gutierrez, Denis Hyland, Valton Jackson, Christina Johnson, Rachael Ma., Michael MacLaren, Joseph Schles, Ryan Schmidt, David F. Slone, Esq., Julie Smith, Clare Tobin. Stage manager Paul Birkelo, whom I worked closely with, managed to stay calm through all tribulations.

An ambitious choreographer, Angela Harriell is also an acute observer of human behavior and interactions. That translates greatly in her directions -- it’s a treat to hear her running commentary during rehearsals, full of empathy and nuance -- but also in the gentle way she handles the human logistics of a cast. The stage is often crowded, yet each background character is rich with subtle acting details. My job was to establish settings but then let the audience concentrate on the story and the dancing. So, after a short buildup, the drawings remained still for the length of the scenes, or even disappeared. It’s hard to compete with beautiful dancers doing a Grand Pas.

The Nutcracker: Rated R’s 1980s New York is a very stylized affair: nobody in the company is old enough to remember it as a grown-up. I would, but I only discovered the city in the nineties....Thus, unlike most of the landscapes I've been doing, my images were created from scratch, or from Google Images researches. So here I am, drawing the New York city of thirty years ago as a fairytale setting. Can’t wait to see what kind of fairytale someone will pull one day out of 2010.

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Night Lights

posted: November 9, 2009

I never imagined myself drawing this fuzzy. Until less than a year ago, all my drawings were more precise, relying on crisp outlines distilled from layers of pencilled tracing paper; and the coloring -- watercolor for a long time, until I got seduced by the brightness of digital -- was just as laborious and precise. Now it's all loose and smudgy.

What has not changed is my passion for the urban landscape. I grew up in Lisbon, Portugal, and only moved to the US at the age of 26. That's twenty years ago last month, and I'm still trying to look at my surroundings as freshly as if I had just arrived. The cities I have lived in (Chicago, San Francisco, New York) are a fascinating visual patchwork. Utopia and disaster, individualism and conformism, predictability and surprise, sophistication and schlock, every possible immigrant contribution: everything clashes in an ever-inspiring kaleidoscope. I don't have much of a nature background, and tend to be bored in the country. But a mismatched window on a warehouse facade is enough of a mystery to trigger in me some kind of story. Plus, the deep accumulation -- in NYC especially -- of historical resonance, pop culture references, art iconography, architectural landmarks, makes every street rich with its own lore.

My Finger Paintings series, running in thenewyorker.com since last June, or published as prints by 20x200.com, has been a road map to plunder icons from the city I've lived in for the past eleven years. They're a bit of likeness portraits: stripped of recognizable indicators, what makes a landscape feel like New York and not like somewhere else? I don't shy away from famous buildings or vistas, but I'm happy when a non-descript stretch of street bears the details, proportions, light, and feel, that clearly brand it as Manhattan. A series I started last Summer in San Francisco worked the same way: what's the shorthand to best convey this city? What does it really look like here?

With iconified subjects, it's always debatable whether their early representations were true in the first place, or if we see them in a certain way because art has led us to see them so. My own New York visual references keep resonating: obvious classics like Berenice Abbott or Edward Hopper, but also choice moments by Raymond Depardon, Wim Wenders, Arthur Getz, and European illustrators like Jacques Tardi or Loustal that were very present in my formative years. Then there are movies: from "Sweet Smell of Success" (1957) or "Taxi Driver" (1976) to "The Bourne Ultimatum" (2007), each doubles for me as a visual variation on the local iconography. I follow a lot of cinematographers' work and I like to see each one's take on the city. For instance, "Made" (2001), a small Mafia farce, gives me a chance to see Christopher Doyle out of Hong Kong and into streets I know so well. And Gordon Willis's four opening minutes for Woody Allen's "Manhattan" (1979) have almost become my mantra.

Some of my landscapes have made it onto the cover of The New Yorker, as it is the case this week. This is thrilling, especially since the totality of the magazine's covers -- 80-plus years' worth of weekly classics -- has been as much of an inspiration to me as anything else. All together, The New Yorker's covers are a visual narrative of how the city -- and the country, to some extent -- has lived and grown for close to a century. Looks and trends and obsessions fade in and out, social classes emerge and disappear before our eyes, visual styles get re-focused. History being rife with echoes of itself, TNY's covers often refer to previous ones, either reassessing issues from a previous era, or simply reviving the approach. After all, many of the city's visual tunes are like jazz standards; all that artists do is to add their, er, cover versions. Case in point: although not my deliberate intention, this week's image, a study in light spots against deep black, is a descendent to a San Toyo cover that ran on April 2, 1927 (and which was actually brought to my attention by Chris Ware, sometime around 1994.)

It has been widely reported that my drawings are now made on an iPhone... Considering all the sketches and watercolors and photographs I have done in the USA for the past twenty years, my output in the Brushes app since I bought a G3 last February is still rather small. It has attracted more attention than anything else I have done: it seems people can't resist a nice tech story. But it's a happy affair. As much as I enjoy and admire other media, drawing on a screen that's always bright even on a dark street, with no paint to carry, no brushes to wash, and countless levels of "undo", seems to agree with me. I always work on location, drawing everything from scratch, with no use of photography whatsoever. (The app churns out Quicktime movies that detail each brushtroke, as seen in The New Yorker's website; it mercifully ignores all the trial-and-errors and failed attempts, making my progression look uncannily flawless. That's so not true.) I could carry a pad or even an easel around. But drawing on a phone is so discreet, so casual.

In the process, something has changed in my drawings. I discovered a brushtroke looseness I could have embraced ages ago, were I not busy with my precise watercolors. It all came from tailoring one's approach to better suit the tool. Sharp line work and controlled coloring are not that easy when you're drawing with your finger on a surface smaller than a credit card. But loose smudges, and bright layered colors, are naturals. So I simply embraced the language suggested by the equipment. My paintings resulted quite 19th-century in their non-computery feel, which probably explains some of the favorable response. This week's cover could just as well be done with chalk on a sidewalk. But it still owes a lot to my new tool. Without staring at a black screen on the corner of Lex and 53rd, I might not have thought of drawing the Chrysler Building without any volumes and just with color spots....

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