Bruce Bickford’s unexpected world
Bruce Bickford’s animated worlds are constantly in flux, like he’s playing an indecisive God — perpetually creating, destroying and rebuilding something he’s not quite satisfied with.
“Unexpected things happen,” the 68-year-old says of his work — a massive understatement. His art is an elaborate game of lost and found, most commonly through a technique called “morphing.” Heads bloom and wilt like flowers. Monsters, humans, animals, plants and structures — even entire landscapes — take form and melt like candles, only to transform again into something new.
“I get seduced … because a certain kind of image appeals to me and I want to express that image, and I might try and do it over and over again to try and hit the place I want,” he explains. “There is not much control in some of my animation. The only control is in trying to resolve things — to try and get that image to actually finish. It takes a lot of discipline.”
Bickford’s eccentric talents garnered cult status in the 1970s via collaborations with musician Frank Zappa on projects like the film Baby Snakes, and TV special A Token of His Extreme. Ever since, Bickford has worked in a relative obscurity from his Seattle home — but his output is no less confounding and mesmerizing. His signature clay and line animation will be showcased at the 2015 Ottawa International Animation Festival with a career retrospective and master class session.
But the reclusive artist, who began animating clay at age 17, is far from finished. He’d still love to partner his vibrant imagination with a major Hollywood talent — and one famous Canadian director in particular.
“I’d like to work with James Cameron,” he says. “I think he’d be a great collaborator with some of my projects.”
It’s easy to imagine a meeting of the minds between Cameron and Bickford — and the brave new worlds they could build together. Bickford’s creations such as Prometheus’ Garden are just as visually arresting as Avatar’s Pandora.
What’s Bickford’s secret? When animating, he takes on the feelings of his characters — whether good or evil: “When you are animating these figures you have to live their life, like it or not,” he explains. It’s almost like his clay children follow their own whims — like puppets broken free from their strings.
Still, Bickford remains a storyteller at heart. In the award-winning 2004 documentary on his life, Monster Road, Bickford says, “You can make a story out of anything.” He still believes that. In fact, he has a file of over 200 different stories in various different stages of development — just waiting for a medium to bring them to life.
He draws his inspiration from everywhere and anything — a sentence, a word, a picture, a thought fragment, a late-night walk through mist-shrouded moonbeams. But he unplugged his TV in 1991 and only uses a computer to look up images for inspiration — “I’m not good with computers or machines.” Maybe that’s why his imagery almost feels prehistoric, primordial — like Bickford is tapping into ancient myths and legends.
“I just have a grotesque interest in things,” he says. “I am drawn to unusual things. If I see a variation in nature, I like to expand on it and do further modifications on it.”
The artist keeps coming back to one reoccurring theme: “Often times it’s about good and evil, because the world is just full of it,” he says of humanity’s obsession with misfortune. “In general, the world is dysfunctional and we aren’t making any decent effort to sort things out — governments and society are selfish. Governments don’t know what they’re doing … I would like to be running things.”
Under a Bickford reign, our world might rapidly become unrecognizable. As for Bickford’s miniature clay worlds and their denizens, they live on in storage in his double garage and around his home. Every beast, flower and soldier ever shaped by his hand could be reanimated.
“If I make something I like to keep it and maybe add it to another scene later,” he says. “Clay is very durable and lasts a very long time … you can take some ancient piece — say a plant or a bird — and add it to some other scene that is freshly done … it all blends together.”
A true lesson from a master craftsmen. Speaking of, Bickford says his Sept. 19 master class at the OIAF will likely cover both line and clay animation — and his famous morphing techniques. The teacher-student relationship should go a lot smoother than his partnership with Zappa.
“(He) wanted things people haven’t seen yet, but there wasn’t much organization in those years,” Bickford explains. “There should have been a production manager — things didn’t go that well between this … I was mainly just on my own, (but) he would sometimes lay out a story idea to follow.”
For much of the last 10 years, Bickford has steered clear of animation and focused on creating graphic novels with a simple animation light box — his most-developed work a “crime story about an attempted home invasion (in which) aliens get involved.”
A loner at heart, Bickford isn’t on a lot of Hollywood rolodexes. But he’d like to be — especially Cameron’s. The animator’s father was born in Saskatchewan, so they even share a bit of Canadian heritage.
Bickford admits he doesn’t have the computer-savvy for digital animation and CGI, but feels he could collaborate to bring one of his stories to life: “Most of my stories are aimed at being movies.” Would he leave his refuge to make his bigscreen dream come true? “I would do it in a minute if it was a project I was interested in.”
As for the subject matter for a potential Cameron project, Bickford has many stories to choose from. A Jesus Christ “origin story” he’s been working on comes to mind — given Cameron’s past role as executive producer on the documentary The Last Tomb of Jesus.
From playing God in his own worlds to creating one? “That would be cool.”
The retrospective Bruce Bickford: Wondering Boy Poet takes place Sept. 17, 18 and 19 at the National Gallery. Bickford hosts an animation master class on Sept. 19.
The Ottawa International Animation Festival runs from Sept. 16 to 20. Other special guests and programming highlights include:
Blow Up: Drawings by Michele Cournoyer. An exhibit of the Canadian’s potent drawings about the violation of the mind and body, including subjects like alcoholism and sexual abuse.
Motel of Fools: The films of Kaspar Jancis. A retrospective on the Estonian animator’s absurdist melodramas — featuring everything from nudists and pet crocodiles, to mobsters, murderers and piano players.
For a full lineup for the festival: animationfestival.ca To see a documentary on Bruce Bickford: youtube.com/watch?v=0Q2MI23zS2w