Art of RetroCollage

The previous blog post looked at Charles and Ray Eames's 1957 short film Toccata for Toy Trains, and speculated on our ancestors' attitudes toward technology. This post continues that train of thought:

Today, when part of our technological advancement aims to conceal itself completely, we easily forget how arduous such progress was in its early stages. Machinery did not hide behind cowls and housings so much then as it does now. The many hours of effort spent in the design and construction of a complex machine stood out plainly. Its workings were exposed for all to see and marvel at.

Continued at http://blog.retrocollage.com/collage-toy-trains/

...In a good old toy, there is apt to be nothing self-conscious about the use of materials: what is wood is wood, what is tin is tin, what is cast is beautifully cast. It is possible that somewhere in all this is a clue to what sets the creative climate of any time, including our own. -- from the spoken prologue to Toccata for Toy Trains, by Charles & Ray Eames

Charles & Ray Eames's 1957 short film Toccata for Toy Trains uses stop-motion and real-time animation techniques to set into motion antique toys that are its subject. Set to Elmer Bernstein's eponymous music for wind, percussion, and piano octet, Toccata recreates -- through a glorious, kaleidoscopic collage of movement, color, and light -- the Golden Age of the railroad, as it might have appeared to the eyes of our great-great-grandparents as children. Toccata deliberately sets its horizon line low for this purpose, and nearly everything is seen from below; trains loom up before us; stations and railroad yards tower above us; adult passengers absorbed in their personal business jostle us and push us aside.

Toccata for Toy Trains can be purchased (as part of Volume 2 of the Eames film series) at the Eames Office Online Store: http://eamesgallery.com/

Why is this film so charming?

Read more at http://blog.retrocollage.com/collage-toy-trains-art-obsolete-technology/

Read more about art, inspiration, and collage at The Art of Retrocollage. Click on the picture to go to the website.

The power of collage lies in its ability to "cut to the chase." By relying on readymade images of objects instead of creating them from scratch, the collagist benefits from a complex web of associations already attached to each image by other people. When these "accepted" images are combined in unexpected ways, their respective attached associations combine as well -- colliding, amplifying, distorting each other--and the result can move the viewer's perceptions and emotions profoundly, while giving birth to a new world. I began to love printed paper in late infancy. In my crib, I would spend hours looking through the picture pages of magazines, carefully tearing them out and piling them to one side. I suspect that this activity was a precursor of the collage work I have done since. When I was six years old, I saw wood engravings for the first time, in a Czech fantasy film based on a Jules Verne novel. The director had collaged these fascinating images into animated compositions: fish swam, butterflies flitted from place to place, pistons and gears slid and rotated with clockwork precision. Three years later, I happened upon Max Ernst's collages of nineteenth century engravings, from his pictorial novel A Week of Kindness (Une Semaine de Bonté). These two experiences awakened in me a love of wood engravings and an understanding of their pictorial power when juxtaposed. The collages shown here present unconscious and preconscious themes: dreams, emotional associations, desires, ancestral memory, and the cultural collective unconscious. While combining images, I attempt to allow them to speak to one another, to guide and direct the process of collage-making with as little conscious interference as possible.

I am intrigued by the feedback I get concerning my art, but it is only one influence among many that may affect what I will create. I don't really plan my artwork; more often than not, it develops as I work to stay receptive to many different influences and to the artwork itself, which will tell me how - and in what direction - it wishes to grow at any given time. Read more at http://blog.retrocollage.com/feedback-criticism-judgment-artistic-trifecta