20 Great Performance or Just a Drawing?

Anatomy of a match and a burnt match.

If you had to draw a burnt match would you say to yourself, “Okay, this is the anatomy of a match.” No, you would say, “This is a match whose anatomy has been burnt and twisted into an agonizing shape.” A shape that hurts deeply if I imagine myself being in that state. If I feel what has happened to that match has happened also to me — then this is the feeling that I have to draw, to portray.

One night we had Lalla posing for us in our gesture class. She is an excellent model who acts out little one-pose dramas. One student was making a beautiful drawing of a pose that was similar to the burnt match, but his drawing looked like a woman in repose, rather than in mental and physical agony. I said, “Yours is a nice drawing but that pose is a Kathe Kollwitz situation.” He said, “Who is Kathe Kollwitz?” She was a Prussian artist who grew up in a period of much conflict. She lived in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power, and depicted the tragedies and sufferings of the period.

This is a well-constructed drawing. It has all the parts and they are put together beautifully, but that is not what you see when you look at the drawing. What you see is fear and hunger and despair, and you feel this, plus pity, revulsion, and anger. All gestures are not quite that dramatic but all gestures are certainly more than their parts.

These may be some of the parts to your favorite music but they mean nothing until they are put together and performed in a manner that brings out their meaning. Likewise the parts of the figure must be put together in a manner that will portray or caricature the meaning of the pose. Otherwise it will be just a drawing. What a horrible fate — to be just a drawing.

Do this experiment — get a wooden match and look at it. That represents your model or character in animation. Then light it and let it burn half way. Now it represents your model or character in gesture. It has been transformed from the anatomical match into a burnt match. The illustration ends here because a match can’t act, but a model on paper or a character in a film can act; that is if you, the artist, will transform them into meaningful gestures. Here are some animation drawings that have transcended the anatomy and model of the characters. They are good drawings but not just drawings.