Chuck Amuck

Father wanted to get rid of the stationery from a defunct business as soon as possible, and he brought logic to bear in sustaining his viewpoint: “You never know when you’re going to make a good drawing,” he said. And then, stretching credulity to the point of idiocy: “Suppose you were Leonardo da Vinci and you painted the Mona Lisa on one side of your canvas and The Last Supper on the other—how would you ever hang it?” Nevertheless—and perhaps, just perhaps, he knew what he was saying—he brought into focus a most vital rule of creativity: You must, if you ever would pretend to artistry, respect your medium; be it a blank piece of paper or canvas, an untouched bar sheet, an uncarved piece of stone, or an unexposed frame of film.

Ross Holt and debonair friend, Mount Washington, 1926

We also had perhaps the most vital environmental rule of all: parents who gave us the opportunity to draw, free from excessive criticism, and free from excessive praise—Mother, because she felt that children in the exploration of life could do no wrong, and Father, I thought at the time, because he only wanted to get rid of that paper as soon as possible.

To this day, because this rule led us all into the wonderful world of drawing, I believe implicitly in these conditions. I believe that all children will learn the joy of drawing if encouraged by ample materials, and love strong enough from their parents—and it must be very strong—to refrain from the well-intended but deadly use of unqualified criticism or excessive praise during the very early, very critical, very creative years of childhood.

It is a happy experience to draw for the joy of drawing, not as a competitive exercise for parental approval. And so, all of our family became drawing addicts and drew our way through childhood, puberty, and into adulthood, whatever that is, and the paths of all of us can be easily traced by the windrows of spent drawings trailing away into our past.

Therefore, it was no discouraging surprise to me that my first instructor at Chouinard Art Institute, like Nicolaides at the Art Students League, greeted his beginning classes with the following grim edict: “All of you here have one hundred thousand bad drawings in you. The sooner you get rid of them, the better it will be for everyone.”

This was not a discouraging statement to me, because I was already well into my third hundred thousand.

I did not go to Chouinard Art Institute in the hope of seeing naked models. I simply didn’t believe that. It was impossible. Nobody got to see naked women. I had never seen a naked woman, and, in truth, I’d never hoped to see one. Purple cows, yes; naked women, no. For one thing, I could not believe that any woman would ever take off all her clothes. This was too far outside my view of the laws of probability. So, when I attended my first “life class” at Chouinard in a converted stable behind the old Victorian house on West Seventh Street in Los Angeles, I put up my drawing board, got out my charcoal, sandpaper pad, chamois, and arranged them all neatly before me, and looked up at the model stand, and just as I expected, a fully gowned young woman walked out from the dressing room, sat decorously down, took off her slippers, stood up, and let her dressing gown slip down over her white body, and assumed a simple pose. Nothing happened to me! Nothing! There was no doubt about it. She was, as my envious high-school classmate had said, “bare-ass naked.” Indeed she was, including nipples, pubic hair, and all, and she stirred my stunned libido not one whit. My leering high-school associate had told me buttons would pop off my fly at first glimpse of a naked—they knew not the word “nude”—model. But this, to my utmost surprise, was not a naked woman but a nude model; she was there to be drawn. I was there to draw.

Embryonic animator (third from left) at Chouinard Art Institute, 1929

It was only later that I had a chance to contemplate the incongruity of the matter. And this only because, during a rest period in a late-spring semester, a lovely seventeen-year-old student sat down on the grass near me and her dress pulled up slightly over her rolled-up stocking, revealing perhaps an inch of creamy white, naked thigh. My high-school associate’s predictions immediately came true: no buttons were lost, but I had to linger on the grass, thinking pure thoughts, before I could properly reenter the studio—after everyone else had gone in to calmly and unemotionally make a charcoal sketch of a nude model.

Chouinard in Los Angeles offered excellent schooling in the fine arts—painting and drawing in the classic traditions. But the most important and stunning discovery I made at Chouinard, one that has been shared by every artist, cartoonist, painter in history, from Cro-Magnon art to Claes Oldenburg by way of Leonardo, Goya, Frans Hals, Van Gogh, Herblock, and Beatrix Potter, was the ability to live by the single line—that single honest delineation of the artist’s intent. No shading, no multiple lines, no cross-hatching, no subterfuge. Just that line. Was it Feininger or Kandinsky who said, “My little dot goes for a walk”? Just so; every point on a line is of equal importance. That is rule 1 of all great drawing. There is no rule 2.

If a witch, in trying “to worm all her uglifying secrets” out of another witch, drinks “Acme Beautifying Potion” by mistake, horrifying and un-genie-ous things may occur: BROOMSTICK BUNNY (1956)

It could not have been planned, because Chouinard was a going concern long before the flowering of character animation in Southern California, but the curriculum at Chouinard could not have been more pertinently planned to provide the tools necessary for the development of future animators. One of the greatest teachers of figure