This Artist Made Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty” Enchanting—and Nearly Impossible to Animate
Layout artist McLaren Stewart, Walt Disney, and Eyvind Earle at The Walt Disney Studios during production for Sleeping Beauty, c. 1959. Courtesy of Eyvind Earle Publishing, LLC.
At 14, Eyvind Earle had his first gallery show. At 23, he sold a watercolor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Yet even with those artistic credentials, it still took him a decade and a half to land a job at the Walt Disney Studios in Hollywood.
He finally sealed the deal in 1951, at age 35, through a friend of a friend. Earle was hired as an assistant background painter and aided in the design and creation of static backdrops—a cottage interior or a wooded glade, for example. At the time, Disney’s animations were achieved by swapping out a series of transparent, painted sheets of celluloid (or “cels” for short) in front of these background images.
Earle’s first project at Disney was Peter Pan (1953). Soon after, he was promoted to full-fledged background painter for the 1953 Goofy short For Whom the Bulls Toil and went on to make concept art for several films, including Lady and the Tramp (1955). But it was with Sleeping Beauty (1959) that Earle truly left his mark.
Eyvind Earle, Concept painting, c. 1950, Sleeping Beauty, 1959. Collection of the Walt Disney Family Foundation. © Disney. Courtesy of the Walt Disney Family Museum.
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From the very beginning, the movie was intertwined with fine art. John Hench, a layout artist at Disney, had visited the Met Cloisters in Upper Manhattan and returned with an idea: Style the film after the medieval unicorn tapestries on display in the museum. These works, he said, “would fit perfectly with the cartoon medium. They have crisp edges, [and] the planes are not defined very well except by a kind of superimposition for distance rather than the linear perspective.”
Hench made a few drawings, which Earle translated into his own style. (“Where his trees might have curved,” he remembered, “I straightened them out.”) During an early planning meeting with Walt Disney, Earle brought in several concept paintings featuring his signature lush landscapes and strong verticals. As Ioan Szasz, CEO of Eyvind Earle Publishing, said, “Walt came in, and he looked at Eyvind’s and said, ‘Okay. That’s it. Everybody will follow Eyvind.’”
Sleeping Beauty was the first time, Szasz noted, that background paintings had determined the direction of a Disney film. During previous projects, the storyboarders and animators had done their work first, and the background painters simply followed their lead. It wasn’t an easy transition, and tensions soon ran high. The animators found it difficult, even impossible, to translate Earle’s detail-laden style into viable character designs.
Eyvind Earle, Concept painting, c. 1959, Sleeping Beauty, 1959. Collection of the Walt Disney Family Foundation. © Disney. Courtesy of the Walt Disney Family Museum.
Earle himself was concerned that his work might be simplified in the final product. So, instead of creating sketches to hand over to his assistants, he churned out hundreds of finished paintings that would actually appear behind the animation cels in the final film. A number of these and other works by Earle are currently on view at the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco, as part of their current exhibition “Awaking Beauty: The Art of Eyvind Earle.” Szasz, the show’s co-curator, said Earle was sometimes working on as many as 30 paintings at once during that time.
Although the battles between Earle and the animation department didn’t help, Sleeping Beauty had been riddled with delays from the start. Disney was thoroughly distracted by a combination of television shows, live-action films, and the ongoing construction of Disneyland. Earle himself was pulled away from the film in the middle of production to paint several murals at the amusement park. As the timeline stretched longer and longer, the production budget also ballooned—eventually reaching a total of $6 million.
Disney fired the director and replaced him with Gerry Geronimi, who soon clashed with Earle. “All that beautiful detail in the trees, the bark, and all that, that’s all well and good, but who the hell’s going to look at all that?” Geronimi later said of Earle’s designs.
The painter enchanting the art world with her thoroughly modern muse
Y ou don’t need to paint Kirsty any more, people told me, now you have won with this painting,” laughed artist Clara Drummond this weekend following her receipt last week of the prestigious BP portrait award, “but that’s not how it is. I will carry on. I plan to paint her soon, full length, in the landscape; something monumental.”
Girl in a Liberty Dress, Drummond’s prize-winning work, is a study of her fellow artist Kirsty Buchanan, and means much more to them both than a bid to net a £30,000 prize purse. It is the latest product of a fruitful friendship that plays with the conventions of portraiture, as well as quietly reshaping ideas about the nature of an artist’s muse.
It was the third painting of Buchanan by Drummond to contend for the prize in recent years, and came from intense discussions between the pair about the purpose and practice of their art. “We were standing together in total disbelief on the night I won. But it was the alchemy of our conversations that had lead to the work,” said Drummond.
Occasionally the 38-year-old artist from Highbury, north London, will ask a stranger to sit for her, and in the past she has painted her friend the actor Ben Whishaw, but Buchanan is still her favoured subject.
“Kirsty and I exchange ideas all the time, so I am able to deepen my understanding of one person, someone with whom I have a shared interest in the history of women in art,” said Drummond. Both artists are challenging the familiar notion of a passive, fragile muse, preyed upon by a voracious artistic talent. This template was laid out by the ill-fated Elisabeth Siddal, model for a series of popular, morbidly romantic paintings, including John Everett Millais’ Ophelia. “We wanted to explore this exploitative Victorian hangover that has kidnapped the idea. A muse can simply be someone who unlocks someone else’s creativity, not a dominant objectification,” said Drummond.
The portrait that won on Wednesday is not her preferred study of Buchanan. “There are loads of paintings of Kirsty back in my studio that were rubbish, so I dumped them and started on something else. It is precisely because Kirsty is not impatient for a portrait to hang in her sitting room that I can pursue my ideas.”
Drummond was influenced, she said, by a series of portraits by Gwen John of a young convalescent girl in her village. Although the composition of the works barely changes during the sittings, John was able “to invent a whole new way of painting, introducing a chalky surface”.
Her own Girl in a Liberty Dress was based on a drawing of Buchanan done last winter that had excited her. Drummond does not rank her studies of her friend, she said, but likes the middle painting of the three she has entered for the BP prize the most. For this one she had painted her over a discarded landscape painting she had made, deliberately letting elements of the work underneath show.
“It is mysterious and looks a lot like Kirsty. It could not be repeated,” she said. “But with this last one, I was not slavishly attached to reality. I let go and so it looks almost like both of us. She said she doesn’t mind.” Freed from the pressure to produce an exact likeness, Drummond said she can paint for its own sake and explore light and composition, concentrating on her brushmarks and palette. “There is so much I still have to learn.”
Her subject, Buchanan, 30, from Loch Lomond, Scotland, works chiefly in video and met Drummond a few years ago through a mutual friend, the performance artist Paul Kindersley. “We would sit in the amazing studio Clara had for a while in Chelsea and talk about work for hours,” Buchanan recalled this weekend.
“It is such a nice thing where you have someone who thinks like you do about so much.
“Everything Clara is reading I am interested in, for example. I don’t really do portraiture, but a lot of my work is born out of conversations with Clara.”
“Kirsty’s work is completely different to mine,” said Drummond. “She is a chameleon-like performer and a talented draughtswoman. Even her videos have the touch of a hand-drawn picture. She is somebody with a lightness to her personality, but then you realise there is a breadth of knowledge about extraordinary artists from history. Kirsty has this ability to pluck figures out of obscurity. She has an eye for things nobody else has noticed and a complete independence of mind.”
While Drummond studied art after graduating from Cambridge University in modern languages, Buchanan went to art college in Dundee and then on to Central St Martins in London, before taking Drummond’s advice and also studying at her alma mater, the Royal Drawing School.
“We had talked so much about drawing,” said Buchanan “and were particularly interested in cave art and the primal, pleasurable impulse to make a mark.” The two artists currently have an exhibition together at the William Morris Society, Hammersmith, which includes Buchanan’s film about Siddal, “a muse not seen as an artist in her own right”.
“Female artists still often remove responsibility for their own work,” said Buchanan. “We all do it, and so when Clara won, she congratulated me too. It is our social conditioning. We don’t have the same kind of ego as male artists, which is fine, although it is bad if we are paid less or don’t get taken seriously.”
Drummond, who is shortly to marry the performance artist Charlie Gouldsborough, now works at a farm in Cambridge, where she invites Buchanan for sittings. “She will arrive in some amazing vintage dress, totally unlike what I was imagining painting, but I go with it because it is her. I am always drawn to strong characters, probably because I am a weakling, quite impressionable and quite a coward in life.”
All the same, Drummond’s attitude to her art is convincingly grounded. She admires the British painters Stanley Spencer, Lucian Freud and David Hockney especially. Freud and Hockney’s repeated studies of friends, allowing them to experiment, are a clear inspiration. She wishes modern portraiture did not revolve so tritely around the status of celebrity sitters, and she dislikes, she said, the reductive obsession with identity and fame in visual culture.
In the past, she says, a painting was to do with narrative or mythology and could be read: artists used a gesture of the hand or the language of flowers to convey meaning. “Portraits should not only be interesting because they are of David Beckham. Generally, the anonymity of subjects, and even of painters, is something we don’t appreciate enough,” she said.
“Freud’s greatest paintings were of Leigh Bowery. Perhaps because he was an artist too, that allowed Freud to make extraordinary discoveries. Hockney’s paintings of his friend Celia Birtwell were so sensitive. With each friendship, he was able to shift his perspective and show so much humanity. Hockney especially reminds me that friendship is a huge part of being creative and, perhaps most importantly, of remaining creative. Friends stop you being overwhelmed or torn in different directions. It is the conversations with other artists that keep you going.”
Clara Drummond and Kirsty Buchanan are mounting a joint show together again in November at the Peter Pears Gallery in Aldeburgh.
