JaMiE BaKeR: fallout

These were drawn while watching a play at the Kabuki Theatre in Tokyo, once upon a time.

On my trip back home to Australia I had many chances to reminisce with old friends and family members about childhood memories. Disturbingly, I discovered on more than one occasion that my memories were inaccurate.

One happy childhood memory concerns my favourite children’s book, THE MAGIC PUDDING. I remember being very young and my Dad reading to me from this book over the course of a few nights just before I went to sleep. In my memory he is sitting on the edge of my bed doing all the voices of the characters as he reads. At the end of each chapter he snaps the book closed, saying that the rest will have to be read NEXT time, and I eagerly look forward to the next instalment. This happy memory is one of the many reasons that I love the book. The only problem is that it didn’t happen.

I found out this past Christmas that my Dad has never even read the Magic Pudding. He was quite adamant about it. I could easily absorb the idea that he may have forgotten reading the book to me, after all he had seven children, but it is harder to ignore the fact that he has no memory of reading the most famous Australian children’s book that there is.

Where did this memory come from? Did someone ELSE read the book to me and I somehow confused them with my own Dad (unlikely) Or did I make the memory up myself? If that is true how many of my other memories are fictions? Not being able to trust your memories of your own life is a very disturbing sensation…

Gordon Clark and the guys at Wild Brain recently made an entertaining in-flight safety-video for Virgin America Airlines. I really like the pencil-testy look of it. Gordon styled the spot and designed most of the characters that made me laugh (I checked) and he also did the voice-over narration. I recently took a flight to LA and decided to fly Virgin just to see this amusing movie in action, but unfortunately the little TV monitors were not working on that particular flight. DOH!

I want to share with you some of the great artwork that I have come by in the past few weeks. My grimy little dump of an apartment is not worthy of these pieces, or the other great stuff I have bought recently. I don’t even have enough wall space to hang it all… and yet it makes me feel so good to own a growing collection of artwork by my pals…

First up is a great picture that my pal Rhode gave me as a Christmas present before I went home to Australia. It was wrapped in Christmas paper but I didn’t want to carry it on the plane and I didn’t want to wait till the new year to open it, so I sneaked a peek at this AWESOME pic just before leaving on my trip… only to behold the power of YODA and RHODE combined on the one piece of paper! TWO masters for the price of one… it was a powerful omen that this would be the best Christmas ever (and it sure was!) Getting a scan of this pic was pretty tricky because this piece BURNED MY FINGERS when I took it out of the frame. Get me an oven-mitt cuz this pic is HAWT!!

Next up are two magnificent pieces that I won at the last Maverix charity art Auction, that raised $9,500 for the Children’s Creative Media Arts Center of Glide Community Church.

This beautiful picture by Patrick Awa is called DRUM THUNDER GIRL. No scan can do this painting justice. It is finished in Gold paint, and it dazzles the human eye. I wanted this picture from the first moment I saw some early sketches on Pat’s blog and I battled fiercely at the live auction to win it.

At this particular auction I resolved to spend the money that I had budgeted for TWO auctions, because I had gone home empty-handed the last time, and so I was empowered to be an aggressive bidder at the live-auction…

Behold this whimsically beautiful pic of Rhode’s. I had bid on his artwork at each auction before, and had always been denied when others pushed the prices beyond my budget, but not this time my friends, Oh no! I was determined to possess one of his artworks (not knowing that I would get another for Christmas) and verily, this time it was I who prevailed, winning this great Rhode pic in yet ANOTHER live-auction battle.

I normally write a detailed account of the Maverix Auctions but this time I was on a plane to Australia within a few days and didn’t have the time to post about it until now. For more about the latest Maverix art auction, read Patrick’s Awa’s account, check out Carlos Baena’s photos and some more photos by Bosco Ng.

Randall Sly has put up a small ONLINE TRIBUTE to the late, great DAN LEE at the always interesting Character Design Blog. Many people here in the Bay Area animation community knew and loved Dan, but for those of you who may not have heard of him, he was one of the main character designers at Pixar, doing some GREAT work on FINDING NEMO and most recently RATATOUILLE. Dan died of cancer in 2005, at the age of 35.

One of the many fun things that I did when back in Australia, was to hook up with my brother Rob, my Uncle John and my old travelling pal Stuart on one sultry hot day in Sydney’s Circular Quay area. Before getting some coffee by the harbour, we all attended an exhibition of artwork by TIM HAWKINSON, that was on show at the Museum of Contemporary Art. (The MCA can be seen on the left of the pic of Sydney Harbour).

The show was called Mapping The Marvellous, and although the subject is often mundane, such as a sculpture of an eyeball (made in part out of discarded green pens) the intricate way they’ve been executed is indeed marvellous. The artist seems obsessed with playful representations of the human body, but his musical mechanical sculptures were what took my fancy. There was something ingenious and wonderful about them.

The piece called DRIP fills a small room and looks like a vaguely sinister deep sea creature. Entering the room, you hear a dripping sound as water spurts out of the cling-wrap tentacles and strikes pie-tins held inside an array of buckets below the gently pulsing alien polyp overhead. Although the sound is initially reminiscent of rain drops, unlike them it is not random but rhythmical and musical, due to an elaborate hand built mechanism that opens and closes switches in the creature according to a musical score. This interplay of simplicity and complication, organic forms and mechanical gizmos, intricate work that somehow seems fresh is what I liked about his work.

Hawkinson is originally from the Bay Area (though now based in LA) but I had not heard about him until I travelled all the way from the Bay Area to Sydney. I will definitely keep track of his upcoming exhibitions, in hopes of seeing the UBERORGAN; musical sculpture on a colossal scale. It recently filled up THE GETTY with its whale-like honking bulk.

Here is a panoramic photo taken at Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains just west of Sydney. I spent a very pleasant few days catching up with two of my dearest childhood friends, Peter Lawlor and John Dillon, as we all stayed at a beautiful property just a few minutes walk from where this picture was taken.

A five week trip to Australia seemed like more than enough time at the planning stage, but it was not nearly enough to do all that I had wanted. I had a very full social schedule in my home town; catching up with my family, comparing bald-patches and love-handles with old school-friends, attending family weddings and birthdays, a trip to the coast with all my siblings and of course all the stuff associated with a home-town Christmas and New Years.

All of that meant that I didn’t have much time left when I went to Sydney, where I also have many friends to see… There was a threatened Airline strike that would have delayed my outbound flight and I found myself hoping that it WOULD happen so I could get a few more days. But that was not the case, my flight left on time and I wasn’t able to visit some Sydney animation Studios, and do a bit of touristy travel stuff as I had originally intended.

My trips back to Australia are always primarily to see my friends and family, and consequently take me back to my old haunts. NEXT time I go to Australia I want to set aside some time to visit parts of the country that I have not yet seen. I am very well-travelled when it comes to other countries but my experience of Australia is mostly limited to the area between Sydney and my home-town.

Anyway, it was a great holiday, where I didn’t think of anything other than what was going on each day. I wasn’t able to access the internet for long periods, hence the lack of blog-posts over the last few months. Those will pick-up in frequency presently, though I don’t have any sketches of my trip to share. I didn’t do a lick of drawing the whole time I was away.

Happy New Year everyone. Let’s hope that 2008 is a good one.

My blog-posting will be a bit spotty while I am travelling; I am not always able to get to the internet and when I do I am not always able to use my own laptop to upload new images.

This is a portrait of PLINY THE ELDER, used to illustrate a quote from his famous Naturalis Historia, which was part of the introduction to my Dad’s Elephant limerick book. (The pencil sketch for this illustration was posted earlier, HERE.) Nobody knows for sure what Pliny the Elder actually looked like, so my version of him was modelled on another classical scholar; my own Dad, who was, of course, the author of the limericks in our collaboration.

I gave my Dad’s new wife, WENDY, a framed 11×14 Giclee print of this image as a Christmas present. It went over very well with her because, unlike Dad, she understood that it was a caricature of him immediately. She wasn’t the only person that I gave artwork to; using my new Epson printer, I printed out a LOT of Giclee prints of my artwork and brought them home to Australia as easy-to-carry Christmas presents to give to my Family this year…

My family doesn’t get many opportunities to gather, now that we live at all points on the compass, but when we do manage to wrangle a family get-together, it is always a lot of fun, and this year’s Christmas was no exception. I had a wonderful time.

I hope that that all of you had a Happy Christmas, as well!

This is an illustration from my Dad’s Elephant book, for a limerick about a dual Elephant Wedding held at a Thai Elephant preserve.

My Father got married today in my home town, and I was his Best Man. For a laugh, I gave my speech entirely in Limerick. When HE finds the time to illustrate MY limericks, we’ll have our second collaboration ready to go. Despite the stresses of public speaking and the behind-the-scenes logistics of Wedding planning, it was a very happy day with lots of family and friends that I had not seen in years.